ALEXANDRIA, Va., Dec. 16 -- United States Patent no. 12,498,945, issued on Dec. 16, was assigned to ServiceNow Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.).

"Automation discovery platform" was invented by Patrick Ryan (Oklahoma City), Aparna Mahalingam (Fremont, Calif.), Rammohan Narendula (San Jose, Calif.) and Phani Nivarthi (Mountain House, Calif.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "In various embodiments, a process for providing an automation discovery platform includes obtaining training data indicating conversation utterances and labels that are associated with the conversation utterances, where each of the labels of at least a subset of the labels corresponds to a virtual agent automation topic. The process ...