Instead of starting our journey with "Now Assist for Creator", I decided to try my hands on Now Assist for Admin - after all this is the one stop shop where we can find missing plugins, skills and monitor whats going behind the scenes.
What is the actual plugin name - Now Assist Admin Console
Who can install Now Assist for admin plugin - Obviously "admins" and ServiceNow Support.
Deep Dive:
Navigate to Now Assist Admin --> Overview and explore the home page of Now Admin
So lets go through explaining each numbered section:
1. Install Product plugins - In this section, you could go ahead and see various plugins for different workflows - Technology, employee. Don't be fooled around by assuming that if you have access to Now Assist Admin center then you could go ahead and install all the plugins - No Never! You need to have admin role in system to install the plugin.
One of strange things I found in this section was that I was able to view only few products and not all of them. However when i click "Browse plugins" on any one of them, only then and then i can view all the workflows. Voila!
2. Turn ON Now Assist Panel - This section has a highlight saying "Learn more" When I click that button it displays a page to turn on this feature along with other relevant details.
Now when you turn this ON - everyone on the platform (who has now_assist_panel_user role)will be able to chat with Now Assist with their work. However Now Assist is smart 💡 and replies to the user in the context user needs and answer and the items to which they have access to.
After turning it ON i instantly see a sparkle icon at the header of my ServiceNow screen
You can chat with Now Assist by putting in the right prompts.
Now time for more trouble. When i try to chat with Now Assist - t keeps throwing the same error "Hmm, actually, it looks like Now Assist isn't set up to help you with anything right now"
So lets fix this - i activated Now Assist for creator and logged out and log back in. Looks like this was working then.
To test it out I tried random prompts but looked like its not working as per my expectation and can only "Explain Change risk" - so i gave up!
I activated ITSM plugins and skills too (which I will cover in later articles) as i wanted to test out the incident summarization skill. Looks like it worked this time!
I tried testing the same prompt in spanish and see below what Now Assist did:
It gave the response in English - so may be I will have to enable spanish as a language or Now Assist has to understand the context better next time! Post in comment what needs to be done for it.
3. Manage Now Assist Context Menu - You can play around with it by navigating to Now Assist Experiences --> Now Assist Context menu as below👇:
Tip: You can get better explanations in the FAQ section at the right most of every screen.
4. Now Assist Summary (Plugin status):
This section does a good job of displaying which plugins are installed and which are not.
5. Now Assist Summary (Skills status) :
However my most favorite section is the skill status where i can quickly jump to all the draft ones (my personal favourite 🤩)
6. Skills Usage
This is a good overview of the actions that were performed using Now Assist skills and the unique users who triggered actions for Now Assist Skill
I also love the way how you can provide a custom date range in a pop-up (unlike the annoying old interface date filters)
7. Section - Needs attention
I like this section a little annoying but useful which shows the complete list of plugins and skills which are not activated (even if you don't want to use them).
8. Now Assist journey checklist
This one has to be in top of the charts as it provide step by step (just like a guided setup).
However not all actions are interactive - but it does quite a good job in reminding you to follow the steps - in case something is missing out.
9. Helpful resources
This is another useful section which mostly nobody bothers about unless they are stuck somewhere. However it redirects you to a good bit of documentation which are maintained for each release
This section might be an overkill to the UI occupying the breathing space of Now Assist overview page.
10. FAQ's
I see this section being a duplicate of Helpful resources (as above) . My 2 cents - Either of one has to go or they will be dead in future.
Conclusion:
Now Assist Admin is useful, however the only features I see Now Assist admin leveraging mostly is activating plugins, skills (which are one-time tasks) and monitoring skills and actions in it.
Please share your feedback/comments on how to improve this article.
Cheers!
Anu
