Now Assist summarization in GRC: How to make it part of your risk program

[Shimoli Gandhi]

This is one in a series of articles exploring capabilities on the ServiceNow AI Platform that you may not be aware of but could be useful in improving your risk program. 

 

The reality of GRC work

At its core, GRC involves lots of reading risk assessments, issues, risk events, regulatory alerts, audit findings, control attestations, policy documents. Most of what compliance managers, risk managers, and audit practitioners do is analyze and synthesize information from a lot of data. The records pile up.  Then approvers need context. Regulations require constant updating. There aren't enough hours.

This is why Now Assist summarization is one of the most practical and useful AI capabilities for GRC teams using the ServiceNow Platform. Of all the Now Assist skills available today, Now Assist summarization is the one risk teams are most likely to feel the benefits of day one.

Despite its impact, customers tell us that their organizations rarely use Now Assist summarization out-of-the-box. They configure it so it sounds like them. They want to apply it across every record type their teams spend time in.

That's what this post is about—how to embrace summarization in risk quickly so your team can do less reading and take more action.

A quick functional overview

Now Assist is the generative and agentic AI capability layer on the ServiceNow platform. Summarization is a platform-native capability. The same underlying capabilities (summarization, generation, and agentic workflows) show up across ITSM, CSM, HRSD, ITOM, and, of course, IRM.

The platform takes any record, with the right configuration, and produces a grounded, readable summary of what's in it. The specific summarization skills you may already know in IRM (risk assessment, risk event, issue, regulatory alert) are specific use cases of that platform capability. They're pre-configured, pre-prompted, and tuned to the record types they ship against.

That distinction matters because it's the key to the rest of this post: Because summarization is a platform-wide capability, the prompt is authored once and embedded in the workflow. That way practitioners don't need to re-explain what they want every time they open a record. The AI shows up already knowing the context — the record type, the fields that matter, the output format, the audience. This is what AI in the workflow actually means, and it's what makes platform-native summarization different from pasting a record into a standalone chatbot.

Now Assist 101: where to go for what

Before we dive in, let’s start at the basics and define the three concepts that cause some confusion: 

• Now Assist Skill Kit — where skills are built and edited. Go here to change what a skill does or how it behaves.
• Now Assist Admin — where skills are activated and surfaced. Go here to change where a skill shows up or who can see it.
• AI Agent Studio — where agentic workflows are built. Skills involve single steps (summarize this, generate that) while agents are multi-step AI reasoning that can call skills and tools to perform one or more tasks.

Shorthand: Use Skill Kit to build it. Admin activates and surfaces it. AI Agent Studio orchestrates the agents.

Where summarization shows up in IRM today

Now Assist for IRM ships summarization skills for several core GRC record types today — risk assessments, risk events, issues, regulatory alerts, and others. If you'd like to see them in action, the Now Assist for IRM Speed Learning has short walkthroughs for each type.

The rest of this post explains how to integrate summarization into the rest of your risk program.

Part 1: Make it your own by refining summaries from the context menu

This is a good place to start: keep the OOB skill but give practitioners the ability to adjust the summary right inside the record. They can make it shorter, longer, more formal, more casual without leaving the workflow.

The Now Assist context menu is the platform feature that makes this possible. When a summary is generated, practitioners see a Refine button that opens a set of refinement actions. Each action produces a new version that can be toggled against the original.

At a high level, configuring it looks like this:

In Now Assist Admin → Now Assist Experiences → Now Assist context menu → Configurations, open the configuration for the record type you want to extend.

Step 1: Configure the trigger. Decide the default action (what happens when a user clicks Now Assist directly) and set any available additional actions.

Step 2: Add refinement actions (optional). Pick the style that fits your organization— Shorten, Elaborate, Formal, Casual, Sympathetic, Regenerate.

Step 3: Activate the refinement action. Practitioners will see the Refine button on every summary with the options you enabled, and can toggle between the original and refined version with one click.

Here's a short video walkthrough of configuring the refinement actions.

This approach is the most popular “make it your own” change and can be applied to any summarization record.

Part 2: Make it your own by creating custom skills for records without an OOTB summarization skill

GRC summarization needs vary widely. An audit team might want an audit executive summary across all issues opened in a quarter. A third-party risk team might want a vendor assessment summary. A compliance team might want a regulatory change summary scoped to a specific jurisdiction. A policy team might want a policy review summary.

Every one of these is just a variation of “summarize this record (or set of records) in a particular way, for a particular audience.”

This is where the power of the ServiceNow Platform lies. Because Now Assist summarization is platform-wide and not limited to the record types with OOB skills today, you have everything you need to extend it. With the Now Assist Skill Kit, you can build your own summarization skill and connect it to any record or table in your GRC portfolio.

Here's an example.

Step 1: General info. Go to Now Assist Skill Kit → Custom skills → Create skill. Fill in the skill name, a short description, and pick your default provider. ServiceNow supports both the Now LLM Service and bring-your-own-LLM. You configure roles and access to define who can invoke the skill.

Step 2 — Prompt creation. Use AI to help you write a comprehensive prompt that includes the persona (“you are an audit expert…”), the context (which record(s)the skill is acting on), the instructions, and the output format. Think about whether the scope of the prompt is wide enough to address edge cases.

Step 3 — Skill inputs. Define which data the skill consumes. For a GRC use case, this would be a table (issues, risks, policies, regulatory alerts) and the corresponding fields.

Step 4 — Test and publish. Test the skill, refine the prompt, then publish. Now the skill is visible across your instance, and you can refine the output with the Now Assist context menu, if needed.

This Now Assist for IRM Speed Learning video here walks through the full flow.

As you can see, the process is pretty simple thanks to the platform. Configure the OOTB experience to guide how summaries are created. Build custom skills to extend summarization into every corner of your GRC portfolio. The capability is yours to explore and extend wherever your GRC work takes you.

Try it for yourself

How do you get started? Turn on a Now Assist for IRM summarization skill and try refining a summary.

Which records or tables in your GRC portfolio would you most want summarization applied to? The ones where your team spend a lot of time reading.  What are those in your organization?

Already built your own Now Assist summarization skill? Tell us what record type and what problem it solved. We will feature standout examples.

Tell us what you think in the comments.

Resources to get started:

• Now Assist for IRM — Product documentation
• Now Assist Skill Kit — Product documentation
• Now Assist for IRM Speed Learning Series
• Now Assist Skill Kit Tool and Deployment FAQ
• GRC Community (talk with peers about GRC & AI)
• Now Assist Community (talk with peers about Now Assist)