Smart Assessment Engine — How to use it across your IRM workflows (with video tutorials)

Mary Hain · Monday

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Welcome to the Speed Learning Series for the Smart Assessment Engine (SAE), where you'll find everything you need to get up and running with ServiceNow's modern assessment engine for IRM and beyond. You'll learn how to design templates, trigger assessments, respond to them in a streamlined modern UX, and automate everything in between.

The Smart Assessment Engine (SAE) is a common core capability across the ServiceNow IRM portfolio, a shared infrastructure that powers assessments wherever you need them, rather than a standalone tool. SAE puts assessment design, distribution, analysis, and reporting directly in the hands of risk and compliance practitioners, eliminating the need to involve a developer or partner to create or modify assessments.

SAE replaces the classic assessment experience with a unified, intuitive interface featuring a drag-and-drop template designer, configurable question types, contextual reference data, scoring and normalization, response automation, post-assessment actions, and multi-contributor collaboration.

Where SAE shows up today

SAE currently powers assessments across Policy and Compliance Management (Control Attestation), Risk Management (Risk Identification, RCSA), Third-Party Risk Management (internal and external third-party assessments, IRQ, tiering), Operational Resilience (Importance & Impact Tolerance), and the CRI Profile Accelerator. As a common core capability, SAE coverage continues to expand across the Risk suite.

Here are some of SAE's key capabilities to help you get started. To go directly to a YouTube playlist, click here.)

Design & Configure

Features that help you build assessment templates with the drag-and-drop template designer. Create assessments that support a range of types — Control Attestation, Risk Identification, third-party questionnaires, and more — using nine question types (text, drop-down, radio button, check box, number, reference, attachment, date, and code).

You can configure conditional visibility, justifications, attachments, and reference panels so respondents have the context they need without leaving the application. You can also set up scoring at the question, subsection, section, and assessment levels with optional normalization for fair cross-assessment comparison.

Smart Assessment Template Designer >

Scoring assessments >

Control Attestation using Smart Assessment Engine >

Automate & Trigger

Features that help you connect SAE to the rest of your platform. You can trigger assessments from Workflow Studio or scripts when an upstream condition is met, for example, when a Control state changes to Attest.

Or Configure Response Automation so questions auto-populate based on prior answers, table queries, or scripted logic. You can use Post-Assessment Actions to automatically update records, generate follow-up tasks, or trigger subflows once an assessment is submitted.

Triggering assessments >

Automating response >

Post-assessment automation >

Respond & Collaborate

Features that give respondents and reviewers a clean, modern experience. For example, auto-save protects in-progress work, the progress bar tracks completion, and reference panels surface contextual data alongside questions. Combine multiple assigned assessments into a single view with optional auto-copy of responses across templates.

For larger assessments, you can add multiple contributors with full-assessment or section-level access (granular delegation), with real-time collaboration and presence indicators that show who's actively working alongside you.

Responding to assessments >

Combine assessments for control attestations >

Using Smart Assessments in IRM’s CRI Profile Accelerator >

Migrate & Maintain

Features that protect your prior investment and keep templates current. This include migrating existing legacy metric types from the Assessments and Surveys application into SAE templates. Sections, questions, and response options carry over automatically. The Quick Edit feature enables you to make minor corrections (typos, formatting, instruction updates) to published templates without creating a new version, while a full edit history maintains audit traceability.

Creating an assessment template from legacy assessment >

Quick Edit for published templates >

SAE Speed Learning Playlist

Watch the latest video tutorials from the Speed Learning Series:

Smart Assessment Engine FAQs

What is the Smart Assessment Engine (SAE)?

SAE is ServiceNow's modern assessment engine designed to automate and optimize assessment processes across Risk workflows. It provides risk and compliance teams a unified, configurable, and access-controlled assessment experience for designing templates, triggering assessments, collecting responses, scoring results, and automating post-assessment actions. No developer time required.

What can I use SAE for?

SAE supports a range of assessment types, including Control Attestation, Risk Identification, third-party questionnaires (IRQ, tiering, external assessments), CRI tiering and profile assessments, and more. It's used across compliance management, third-party risk management, privacy management, audit management, business continuity management, and operational risk management.

How do I activate SAE?

You activate by downloading it from the ServiceNow Store and then completing the initial setup checklist. Required plugins include Smart Assessment Core, Smart Assessment Designer, and Smart Assessment Connected. Optional plugins enable Migration Tools, Post-Assessment Actions, Advanced Response Automation, Basic Scoring, and Collaboration. After installing the required plugins, refer to the upstream application documentation for module-specific setup steps (for example, enabling smart assessments in Policy and Compliance Management).

What question types does SAE support?

SAE supports nine question types: text, drop-down list, radio button, check box, number, reference (dynamically populated from a ServiceNow table), attachment, date, and code (barcode/QR scan). Each question type can be configured with attributes such as required, conditionally visible, justification, attachment requirements, and preferred answers.

Who can create, respond to, and manage assessments?

SAE uses role-based access to manage assessments. Template managers and assessment admins design templates and configure scoring. Assessment actors respond to and reassign assessments. Assessment readers can view and comment. Template developers create response automation scripts. Granular delegation allows section-level contributor access for larger assessments.

How do I trigger an SAE assessment?

You can trigger assessments from Workflow Studio using the Trigger Smart Assessment flow action, or from a script using the same action via a code snippet. A typical example is triggering an assessment when a Control record's state changes to Attest. The trigger specifies a published template, the assessors, due date, scope items, and other optional inputs.

Can I migrate my existing legacy assessments into SAE?

Yes. Use the Smart Assessment Migration Tools plugin to migrate existing metric types from the Assessments and Surveys application into SAE templates. Metric categories become sections, metrics become questions, and metric definitions become response options. Migrated templates land in Draft state for review before publishing. Here is an article on mapping legacy sections to help you get started. This Community article features some useful tips for the migration.

Can multiple people work on the same assessment?

Yes. SAE Collaboration enables real-time multi-contributor assessments with presence indicators that show who's actively editing. The primary owner can grant full assessment access to contributors or use granular delegation to assign specific sections to subject matter experts — with hierarchical inheritance to subsections.

Where can I learn more?

Visit the ServiceNow product documentation for SAE, or join the discussion on the ServiceNow GRC Community. Instructor-led and on-demand resources are also available in ServiceNow University.

Some useful resources

Look up more articles and blogs on smart assessments.