Today we’re excited to be launching Kingston!  With Kingston now generally available, let’s walk through some highlights within each of the three major themes for the release.

Machine learning for everyday work

We’re introducing Agent Intelligence, our new supervised machine learning application.

Agent Intelligence uses supervised machine learning to accurately categorize, prioritize, and assign incidents and cases reducing resolution times, minimizing human error, and improving customer satisfaction.  It uses an organization’s own data to create finely tuned predictive models.  The accuracy of these models continually increases over time, with more data to train with. We’re initially applying Agent Intelligence to improve the speed and quality of IT Service Management and Customer Service Management processes.  Agent Intelligence can also be used in custom applications that have a significant amount of historical data – typically around 50,000 records.

What’s really exciting about Agent Intelligence is you don’t need your own team of highly trained data scientists to use it.  We’ve made the supervised machine learning capabilities easily accessible, built right into the Now Platform.  It’s ready for work – today.  Dave Wright wrote about it extensively on Service Matters back in October.

No code process automation

 Our second theme is really important because application developers are in such high demand inside organizations. With Kingston, everyone can now use the power of the Now Platform in a way that previously wasn’t possible.  It further advances ServiceNow founder Fred Luddy’s vision to help regular people route work throughout the enterprise – in other words, get technology to work for them.

So how are we doing this?  First, non-coders can use Flow Designer to create process flows for projects and work – such as sending a notification.  It resides in parallel with our current Workflow offering.  Developers should use the existing visual workflow tool when you need to support workflows for Service Catalog and advanced features like Timers, SubFlows, and Repeat Loops.   What’s also important is that while Flow Designer works within and across ServiceNow products and applications, orchestrating with 3^rd party applications, of course, is also very important for our customers.

Because of that, in Kingston we are introducing IntegrationHub, which is our next generation Orchestration solution.  It extends Flow Designer with integration support to write codeless flows with 3^rd party systems.  In September, we announced plans for integrations with Microsoft Teams and Slack.  These will be available in IntegrationHub, out-of-the box, with Kingston — along with one for Hipchat.  In addition to these out-of-box integrations, IntegrationHub can work with any third-party system via REST actions.

User Experience Innovations

 People sometimes think that user experience equates to user interface or visual look -and -feel improvements and leave it at that.  No, we’re talking about a lot more than that.  It’s about how we’re making the overall experience better –  simpler, faster, smarter.  We have a lot of areas where customers will experience these innovations.  Here are a few to illustrate how it translates to every day improvements in customers’ work lives.

The new Major Incident Management capability provides an end-to-end process workflow for rapid resolution of high-impact IT incidents via better integration of Incident, Incident Alert and Outage.  The bottom line is that you will have a systematic way to deal with incidents before they significantly impair your business.

Text Analytics provides insight into unstructured data in user-entered text fields via word cloud visualizations that surface frequently used words.  You can drill down on specific words to identify trends and associations and take action by clicking into related records.

For our Customer Service Management product, there’s Escalation Management which puts focus on problematic cases and accounts to reduce customer frustration.  And, Response Templates for HR Service Delivery, enables HR admin to create personalized email templates for quick, accurate, and consistent responses to employees.

For our Security Operations product, we’ve added new End-to-End Phishing Response capabilities which allows security teams to quickly take corrective actions against user-reported email attacks.

This is only a fraction of the new advances in Kingston.  Please see the full fact sheet to review all that’s new.  And to go deeper on how Kingston will help make getting work done better for you and your employees, register for our Kingston Event Broadcast, which I’ll be hosting, taking place on February 8th.  And of course, don’t forget to request your upgrade to Kingston in HI.  Get started now!