Introducing AI Response Assist in Smart Assessment Engine

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Risk and compliance assessments are foundational to enterprise governance — but for the people completing them, they’re often repetitive, time-consuming, and frustrating. Annual refreshes, new regulations, and evolving templates frequently require responders to re-enter the same information repeatedly.

That’s exactly the problem AI Response Assist in Smart Assessment Engine (SAE) is designed to solve. We are looking for Risk customers interested in trying out this new capability and giving us feedback on this AI-enabled SAE experience.  (More on participating below.)

What is SAE?

For those new to it, SAE is a capability within Integrated Risk Management that enables risk and compliance teams to design, distribute, analyse, and report on assessments — without needing developer support. SAE puts assessment ownership directly in the hands of practitioners, improving agility, reducing costs, and accelerating time to value.

What is AI Response Assist?

AI Response Assist helps responders move faster by suggesting answers automatically — while keeping humans firmly in control. Instead of starting from scratch every time, responders can generate AI-powered suggestions based on similar questions answered in past assessments.

Demo: AI Response Assist in Action

In this demo, a responder is completing a Privacy Impact Assessment for an application. Rather than answering each question from scratch, they click Generate AI Suggestions to review context-aware responses drawn from past assessments.

How AI Response Assist Works?

• Finds similar questions (even when they’re written differently) from past assessments about the same entity — using only the assessments the responder has access to.

• Shows multiple answer suggestions, with the best match ranked at the top are applied as the answer and other suggestions for user to choose.

• Shows source references (which assessment) so responders know exactly where the answer came from.

• Never overrides user-entered content. The responder stays fully in control and can change or reject any suggestions.

• Makes AI assistance visible and easy to review. An AI summary shows how many suggestions were generated and applied, and an AI filter lets responders quickly focus on only the questions with AI suggestions.

What are the benefits for my organization?

With AI Response Assist, assessments become faster, easier, and more consistent — saving hours of manual work while reducing risk and accelerating decisions. And this is just the beginning. Future iterations will expand beyond past assessments to include documents, connected records, and broader organizational knowledge.

How do I activate it?

It is currently available as a private preview through the ServiceNow Innovation Lab Programme. The Innovation Lab provides select customers early access to in-development features and an opportunity to work closely with ServiceNow product teams to shape the experience through feedback. Participants are expected to provide feedback through a few Zoom conversations and a survey to help refine the feature before broader availability.

Currently access is limited to customers who have Integrated Risk Management (IRM) and Smart Assessment Engine (SAE) already enabled, hold an active GenAI license, and can test the feature in a sub-production instance.

If you are interested in being one of those customers please reach to me and we can have a conversation.

If you are already enrolled in the Innovation Lab program for SAE, you can request install access in the ServiceNow Store listing: Now Assist for Smart Assessment Engine