The Hub Services Virtual Assistant, named Hub Assistant, is a digital chatbot you can deploy to offer employee self-service tools. The Hub Assistant chatbot provides employees with an engaging, conversational experience to complete common workflows and to get answers to frequently asked company questions. When Hub Assistant is enabled in the Hub Services console, users can access the virtual assistant from the Intelligent Hub app and from a web browser.

Users can interact with Hub Assistant to open and track ServiceNow Help tickets and to get answers to their questions about benefits and company policies. You can use Hub Assistant as provided out of the box, or you can train Hub Assistant and build out your own internal workflows.

Hub Assistant is powered by IBM Watson for natural language processing (NLP). Watson Assistant uses artificial intelligence (AI) to understand the meaning behind a user's request so you can provide an engaging problem-solving chatbot experience. Workspace ONE provides a pre-trained configured Watson Assistant dialog skill that you import into your own Watson Assistant instance. This dialog skill is trained to understand a user's intent to create and view Help tickets.

Hub Assistant uses Workspace ONE mobile flows® so users can perform actions across multiple business back-end systems. When mobile flows is enabled and configure with the ServiceNow chatbot connector, you can manage the Help ticket work flow through mobile flows. Virtual Assistant sends user requests to ServiceNow and relays the response from Service Now back to the user.

To use the virtual assistant to answer employee questions, you configure a search skill in Watson Assistant. This search skill is configured to retrieve answers from your proprietary content such as knowledge-based articles; other internal documents, and repositories that you upload using the IBM Watson Discovery service.

Figure 1. Hub Assistant Chatbot Flow Diagram
Table 1.
Component Description
Intelligent Hub End-user client interface on mobile, web, and desktop apps.
Chatbot Service Workspace ONE Hub service that orchestrates interactions between clients, NLP (Watson), and mobile flows.
Mobile Flows Workspace ONE mobile flows service to validate, broker, and route requests to various back-end business systems through connectors. Example business systems - ServiceNow, Jira, or Salesforce.
Watson Assistant IBM Watson Assistant service that uses NLP to provide conversational experiences. This includes Dialog skill to provide explicit answers to users requests and a Search skill that queries the Watson Discovery service to find relevant answers.
Watson Discovery IBM Watson Discovery Service that uses machine learning and NLP to help search complex knowledge bases.