Build an AI-Powered Incident Logger in Minutes with Now Assist Agents

[andytillo1]

Your Help Desk Team Is Spending 15 Minutes Per Ticket on Documentation Nobody Reads

Here's something I see repeatedly in customer conversations: help desk teams close a ticket, then spend another 10-15 minutes writing up what happened. The notes go into a system. Maybe someone reads them during an audit. Mostly they just... exist.

Meanwhile, your agents are handling 30-40 tickets a day. Do the math. That's 5-7 hours per agent per week just documenting stuff after the real work is done. And honestly? Half those notes are copy-pasted from the last similar ticket anyway.

Welcome back to our series from the AI Center of Excellence (CoE) team at ServiceNow. Through countless advisory and hands-on engagements, we've gathered valuable insights and practical guidance that we're excited to share with the broader ServiceNow community. My role on the team is helping customers find the quick wins that build momentum—the stuff that works in week one, not quarter three.

🎬 Watch the Video

Watch on YouTube

The Problem: Documentation Theater

Let's be honest about what's happening. Your agent just spent 20 minutes solving someone's problem. They talked through it, they fixed it, they confirmed it works. Then they have to context-switch back to "documentation mode" and recreate the whole conversation in incident notes.

It's not that documentation doesn't matter. It does. But this manual recreation process is:

• Slow: 10-15 minutes per ticket adds up fast
• Inconsistent: Quality varies wildly between agents
• Boring: Nobody got into IT to write incident summaries
• Delayed: Notes get written hours after the interaction, memory gets fuzzy

The dirty secret? Most organizations have accepted this as "just how it works." It's overhead. Cost of doing business.

Except it doesn't have to be.

The Quick Win: Auto-Generated Incident Documentation

Here's what we built in about 10 minutes: an AI agent that watches your help desk interactions and automatically creates properly formatted incident tickets with complete documentation. No manual note-taking. No context-switching. Just automatic capture of what actually happened.

The agent:

• Captures the full interaction context
• Generates structured incident notes
• Creates the ticket automatically
• Includes sentiment analysis
• Populates all the fields your process requires

Your agents literally don't touch it. They finish helping someone, and the documentation is already done.

How It Works: Three Moving Parts

This isn't complicated. You need three things:

1. The AI Agent (Now Assist Agent)

This is your ServiceNow AI agent that's already handling help desk interactions. If you're using Now Assist for help desk work, you've already got this part.

2. The Action Tool

This is the new piece. You add an action tool to your agent that says "when an interaction completes, create an incident ticket with full documentation." You control whether it's automatic or requires human approval. We set it to automatic because the whole point is removing manual work.

3. The Template

You tell the agent what information to capture and how to format it. This matches your existing incident documentation standards—categories, severity, description format, whatever your process requires.

That's it. The agent does the rest.

The Security Piece

You've got the same security controls you always had. Human approval gates if you want them. Audit trails. The agent operates within your existing permissions model. We're automating documentation, not bypassing your governance.

Watch The Demo

The video above shows Dustin Gannon and Andy Tillo walking through this exact setup. You'll see:

• The test bench view (customer perspective, agent actions, technical breakdown)
• A real interaction playing out
• The automatic incident creation
• The completed ticket with full documentation

The whole thing takes about a minute to run. Watch how the agent captures context, generates the notes, and creates a ticket that would've taken 15 minutes of manual work.

Your Quick Win This Week

If you're already using Now Assist for help desk work, you can build this today. Here's your action plan:

Option 1: Build it yourself (1-2 hours)

• Open your existing help desk agent
• Add the incident creation action tool
• Configure your documentation template
• Test with a few interactions
• Set it to automatic once you trust it

Option 2: Pilot with one team (this week)

• Pick your most documentation-heavy team
• Set up the agent with human approval gates
• Run it for a week
• Measure time saved per ticket
• Expand based on results

Option 3: Calculate the business case first (30 minutes)

• Count your daily ticket volume
• Estimate current documentation time per ticket
• Multiply by agent hourly cost
• That's your weekly savings opportunity
• Use this to justify the 2 hours to build it

What you'll need:

• Now Assist Agent capability (you probably have this)
• Access to create/modify agent actions
• 30 minutes to test and validate output quality

What you won't need:

• Custom development
• Integration work
• Weeks of planning
• A big budget

What's Next: More Automation Opportunities

Once you've got automatic incident documentation working, you start seeing other opportunities:

Next quick wins:

• Auto-categorization based on interaction content
• Automatic routing to specialized teams
• Pattern detection across similar incidents
• Knowledge article suggestions based on resolution patterns
• Proactive notifications to affected users

The pattern is the same: find the manual work that happens after the real work, and automate it. Your agents should be solving problems, not documenting that they solved problems.

We'll cover these follow-on automations in future articles. For now, get the incident documentation working. It's the foundation.

Get Started

This is a quick win. Like, actually quick—not "quick" meaning three months of planning.

If you've got Now Assist agents running, you can build this today. The video shows you exactly how it works. The action tool is straightforward. The template is just telling the agent what fields to populate.

Start with one team. Measure the time savings. Then scale it.

Your first step: Open your Now Assist agent configuration and look for the action tools section. If you can see that, you can build this.

Contact your ServiceNow representative to learn more about Now Assist Agent capabilities and how they might fit your help desk operations.

Resources

• Video demo: See the full walkthrough above
• Now Assist documentation: ServiceNow Now Assist
• Agent builder guides: Available in your instance under Now Assist resources

If you have questions or thoughts about implementation, drop them in the comments—we'll respond or update the article as needed. Especially interested in hearing what documentation standards you're working with and whether this approach fits your process.

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Views expressed are my own and do not represent ServiceNow, my team, partners, or customers.

[TammiR]

Good afternoon, When will the video be available? 

[andytillo1]

@TammiR --I just added it in the article!  Good idea/update.  Planning on creating a better mechanism here --thanks for the info!

[TammiR]

Thank you very much! I will take a look very exciting