Build Custom AI Skills with Now Assist Skill Kit: Step-by-Step Demo w/ Eliza Orchard

[Earl Duque]

✨ Unlocking the Power of Custom AI with ServiceNow's Now Assist Skill Kit

ServiceNow continues to innovate in the AI space with its new Now Assist Skill Kit, a powerful tool that allows developers and administrators to create custom generative AI skills tailored to their specific business needs. In a recent Creator Toolbox demo, ServiceNow product manager Eliza Orchard walked through the capabilities and setup process for this exciting new feature.

What is Now Assist Skill Kit?

Now Assist Skill Kit, released in the Xanadu update, enables users to build custom generative AI skills that go beyond the out-of-box functionality provided by ServiceNow. While standard Now Assist features cover common use cases like incident resolution and knowledge article summarization, Skill Kit opens up possibilities for industry-specific and highly customized AI-powered workflows.

The key components of building a custom skill include:

1. Gathering and preparing input data
2. Creating a prompt to instruct the AI model
3. Leveraging a large language model (LLM) to generate the output
4. Deploying and activating the skill within your instance

A Real-World Example: Automated Knowledge Article Categorization

To demonstrate Skill Kit's capabilities, Eliza walked through creating a custom skill to automatically categorize knowledge articles. This use case showcases how AI can streamline content management and improve findability of information.

The demo involved several key steps:

1. Using Flow Designer to retrieve existing knowledge base categories
2. Crafting a prompt in Skill Kit to instruct the AI on categorization
3. Configuring inputs to pass article content and category options to the model
4. Creating a UI action to trigger the skill from the knowledge article form
5. Testing and refining the skill's performance

Benefits and Use Cases

Now Assist Skill Kit empowers organizations to:

- Create AI-powered workflows for niche or industry-specific processes
- Automate repetitive tasks that require human-like comprehension
- Enhance existing ServiceNow modules with custom AI capabilities
- Experiment with generative AI in a controlled, enterprise-grade environment

Getting Started with Now Assist Skill Kit

For those interested in exploring Now Assist Skill Kit, Eliza highlighted several resources:

- The AI Academy session on YouTube for a deep dive into Skill Kit
- The Now Assist Skill Kit FAQ on the ServiceNow Community
- A use case library with step-by-step guides for building common skills

Looking Ahead

ServiceNow continues to expand the capabilities of Now Assist Skill Kit. Future updates may include easier integration with Virtual Agent for more conversational AI experiences and enhanced tools for managing AI model inputs and outputs.

Conclusion

Now Assist Skill Kit represents a significant step forward in bringing the power of generative AI to ServiceNow platforms. By enabling custom AI skills, ServiceNow empowers organizations to tackle unique challenges and drive innovation using the latest in language AI technology. As the tool evolves, we can expect to see even more creative and impactful use cases emerge from the ServiceNow developer community.