I'm Forrest Falk, a ServiceNow Certified Master Architect (CMA). In this post, I'll share practical insights from a CMA’s perspective and show how to build a custom skill that suggests a category based on an incident's short description and description. This post is part of a series, and I will be posting updates as I go along. Each post we will be adding more and more to our skill. Everything from creating it to triggering it with an UI Action on a form to automating it with a flow.
To begin, open NASK by searching "skill kit" in the All menu: All -> Now Assist Skill Kit -> Home.
Now that we are on Now Assist Skill Kit’s home, we can select “Create skill” on the bottom right to start creation of a new skill.
Next, fill out the skill details. Name the skill "Set Incident Category" and provide a description like: "This skill updates the incident category based on its short description and description." Select "Now LLM Service" as the default provider and "Now LLM Generic" under Provider API to use the OOTB model with Now Assist. If you have a third-party LLM provider (such as AWS, Azure, Google, IBM, OpenAI, Plexplexity, etc.), choose it here.
At the bottom, you can either write your own prompt from scratch, pick one from a library, or opt for an AI-generated prompt. I'll use the AI-generated option to get started more quickly. I recommend this approach, it shifts your role to that of an editor instead of starting with a blank slate. If you're not satisfied with the result, try updating your skill name and description since the AI relies on them to create the initial prompt; the more detailed these are, the better your outcome will be. Once the prompt is created, click "Use prompt" and then "Next" to proceed to the skill inputs and outputs. For tips on crafting better prompts, see OpenAI’s guide here: https://help.openai.com/en/articles/6654000-best-practices-for-prompt-engineering-with-the-openai-ap...
Now you will want to configure your inputs for your skill. Click on the “+ Add” button to create your first input.
For our use case, we are going to input the short description and description of the incident to select the category. I am going to take in the short description and description as strings. Note at this point you may be thinking, don’t we want the categories as inputs. The answer is yes, but not here. We will use a tool node later to lookup the current categories for incidents. We are only going to put in the inputs from the record here for our skill. To do so I will setup each one with the following:
Once you have the skill inputs created you can click the, “Skill outputs” tab at the top. In our use case we will be just using the response that is returned, but here you could add additional outputs if your use case requires it. Go ahead and click “Go to Summary” button at the bottom to view the summary of your skill.
Review your summary of your skill and click “Finish” at the bottom.
Now you should be directed to the skill you just created in skill kit. Here you can configure all the different settings of your skill, including the prompt. The first thing you may notice is that the inputs are red within our prompt. That is because it is throwing an error that it cannot find the inputs. This is due to the AI-generated prompt generating what it thinks it needs versus our actual inputs.
Let’s delete the placeholder inputs after the colon “:” It should look something like this right now:
Join me in part 2 below to continue working on our custom skill. We will be continuing updating our skill inputs and work on adding a tool node to our skill.
Continue to part 2 here: Creating a Custom Skill with Now Assist Skill Kit - Part 2
