This blog aims to be a deep dive blog on the features coming in Now Assist for HR February 2025 Store and Yokohama family release. Here are the new capabilities that a part of the release:
- Journey Generation
- Knowledge Graph Uptake for VA topic
- Growth Plan Generation
- LLM VA Topics for HRSD with Third party Integrations for User Data
- Now Assist in Virtual Agent Enhancement
- AI Agent Studio
- Help Resolve Tuition Requests
- AI Agents for High Volume HR Requests
- External Content Connectors
Journey Generation
- Persona: Managers
- Availability: Journey Designer February 2025 store release.
- Dependency: Now assist for HR Feb 2025 Store release
The Journey Generation feature boosts a manager's productivity by using Now Assist to draft journeys based on the manager's input of journey details and employee information.
When creating the journey, managers will have an option to build with Now Assist. Once a manger selects that option, they will be routed to select the employee for whom journey is being created for and a field to provide detailed description of the journey in their natural language.
On clicking Generate the draft, this will create a draft journey with stages and tasks for the manager to review.
Once a manager reviews these stages and tasks, they can make changes as needed before publishing it.
Knowledge Graph for HR
- Persona: Admin, Employee
- Availability: Now assist for HR February 2025 store release.
Knowledge Graph is a personalized knowledge schema that is created by the admin. When knowledge graph is enabled for VA topics, it allows for a more contextually aware, personalized response to the employee.
In the Now Assist for HR February store release, we have shipped an out of the box (OOB) knowledge graph schema for HR which brings together some of the commonly used HRSD tables. We have also shipped a Virtual agent topic - Employee Self travel visa request. While interacting with VA when the employee chooses this topic, virtual agent is able to lookup information that is already known to the system instead of the employee having to provide all those details to the virtual agent. This informed contextual aware response is more personalized for the employee and improves their experience.
This is an example of knowledge graph where you can see that there are nodes and connections which makes looking up data known to the system much easier..
Growth Plan Generation
- Persona: Employees
- Availability: Now assist for HR February Store Release.
- Dependency: Talent Development Core and Now Assist for HR
With our February store release, employees can leverage Now Assist while working on their growth plan .
An employee can specify in natural language their goal and what they want from their growth plan. This will generate a draft growth plan with relevant activities unique to an employee and their desired goals.
LLM VA Topics for HRSD with Third party Integrations for User Data
- Persona: Employees
- Availability: Now Assist for HR February Store Release.
- Dependency: Enterprise Service Management Integrations Framework(v3.7.1)
LLM VA Topics for HRSD with Third Party Integrations is introducing additional out of the box VA topics and sub-flows for specific use-cases that can be used with Workday. This is in addition to the other integrations we introduced in the past few releases.
These topics are specific to updating personal details of an employee in Workday. We support requests for changing Email ID, Address, Phone number, Date Of Birth, and blood group making updates in real time.
Now Assist in Virtual Agent Enhancement
- Persona: Employees
- Availability: Yokohama family release
In this release of Now Assist for Virtual Agent, we’ve extended our model integration to GPT 4 o and Llama, so you can choose which model is powering the VA experience. In addition to these improvements, we are handling ambiguity in intent better. As an example, if an employee can ask for something that has multiple meaning or is similar to something, we can now provide a list of options to clarify the employee’s question before pointing them to a resource and eliminate the disambiguation. The Virtual Agent can also better recognize the employee as an entity and know who is requesting for something and pull up the corresponding information.
We also have an auto launch experience that gives employees more alerts and information on what tasks the Virtual Agent is executing on. This reduces the confusion on what Virtual Agent is doing and provides a better user experience for the employee. Lastly, we have made improvements to the conversational catalog experience where we have made it more conversational in how it responds.
AI Agent Studio
- Persona: Admins, Platform Owners
- Availability: Now Assist for HR March 2025 Store release
- Dependency: Now Assist for HR
To deploy and configure AI Agents, you can use the AI Agent Studio to help you get started. The AI Agent Studio guides you through the deployment process so you can automate and realize value quickly.
Before diving deeper into Agentic AI, let’s define some new terms, like use case and AI Agents. A use case is the business objective and an end goal we are trying to reach. Each use case will have various AI Agents working together. These AI Agents will have roles and instructions on what they need to do. There are various platform tools like workflows, integrations, and skills aligned to the AI Agents. These tools allow the AI Agents to autonomously take action on the tasks that they are assigned to.
In the AI Agent Studio, there are various capabilities to make it easy for you to implement AI Agents:
- Prompt Rewriting – Auto-generation of instructions for AI agents and use cases to mitigate prompt paralysis + streamline setup/config
- Recommended Tools/Agents – System-recommended Tools and AI agents to mitigate the need to navigate to other apps
- OOB BU Agents and Use Cases – Promoted OOB Agents and Use Cases
- Overview Video – Conceptual breakdown of AI Agents
- Journey Checklist – checklist for setting up and configuring AI agents/use cases
On the “Create and Manage” tab, this is where you can easily activate and configure your AI Agents. Here you can modify the AI Agents, as well as provide tools and instructions on the AI Agent’s role and responsibilities.
After configuring the AI Agents, you can test them out right from the Studio view and quickly edit them in one place.
Along with these capabilities, there is also a dashboard available to you to measure value and success.
- Analytics – Dashboard built in Performance Analytics to measure KPIs for impact on business (tasks resolved using AI agents, conversations using AI agents, etc) as well as usage metrics (execution plans, AI agents tasks, etc)
With the AI Agent Studio, we are providing one place to get all configuration work done, so you have an easy and fast deployment experience.
Help Resolve Tuition Requests
- Persona: HR Operations, Admins, Platform Owners
- Availability: Now Assist for HR March 2025 Store release
- Dependency: Now Assist for HR
In our March release of AI Agents, we are releasing an out of the box use case for requests that require policy validation, which are usually manual and require high effort for resolution.
In this case, this is built specifically for tuition reimbursement scenarios where you need to reference a policy to approve or disapprove a request that comes in. For this use case, there are seven out of the box agents that are mapped to it. These seven AI agents will accelerate the way human agents can resolve cases.
The seven agents include:
- HR total rewards - case details manager: This agent can fetch details of a HR Total Rewards case.
- Tuition reimbursement requestor information retriever: This tool can collect details about the tuition reimbursement requestor
- Tuition reimbursement policy content retriever: This agent can fetch the content of tuition reimbursement policy.
- Tuition reimbursement checklist creator: This agent specializes in generating a detailed checklist of criteria that must be satisfied to obtain approval for tuition reimbursement request. This agent can execute only if Tuition Reimbursement policy content is provided.
- Tuition reimbursement eligibility evaluator: This agent can assess tuition reimbursement requester eligibility for tuition reimbursement pre-approval.
- Approval task creator: The Approval Task Creator agent is responsible for creating new approval tasks. It first checks for any existing approval tasks, notifies the manager about them, and proceeds to create a new task if none exist.
- HR case closure evaluator: This agent can update HR case state and work notes for the case closure.
Key configurations:
For the Policy Issue Resolver use case, you can start by going to your AI Agent Studio. Here, you will provide instructions in your natural language on what the end goal for this use case is.
From there, you can define what AI Agents are needed for this use case.
These AI Agents can be further defined with instructions and the tools that are needed to execute on their assigned work.
After you’ve set up the AI Agents and the use case, you can test out the AI Agents using the Testing feature. You can see the individual AI Agents getting activated and see them in action. You can make changes right away and ensure you are creating the desired experience.
AI Agents for High Volume HR Requests
- Persona: HR Operations, Admins, Platform Owners
- Availability: Now Assist for HR March 2025 Store release
- Dependency: Now Assist for HR
Alongside with the policy issue resolver use case, we released standalone AI Agents that can be used to address high volume HR requests.
Here are the 8 AI Agents that are included with this release:
- Employee time off request assistance AI agent
- Employee holiday calendar retrieval AI agent
- Employee total rewards information AI agent
- Employee profile information AI agent
- Expense details completion AI agent
- Employee personal information updates AI agent
- Employee performance feedback AI agent
- Employee benefits information AI agent
These 8 AI Agents can be used to configure a larger use case and help resolve cases faster for HR teams. Note that these standalone agents call on existing integrations that can be used in resolution for the listed HR queries.
Key Configurations:
To get started, you can access these individual AI Agents in your AI Agent Studio. From there, you can provide instructions on what the AI Agent’s role and responsibilities will be.
From there, you can add tools, like integrations to other systems, to pull in the PTO information to ServiceNow. Once you have completed this step, you can click on Testing and see your AI Agents in action.
External Content Connectors
- Persona: Admins, Platform Owners
- Availability: Now Assist for HR March 2025 Store release
- Dependency: Now Assist for HR
In this release, ServiceNow is releasing out of the box connectors to two external systems and sources, i.e. SharePoint Online and Confluence Cloud and is also including an admin UI to manage content crawling. These external content connectors will make it easier for admins to create the connection between ServiceNow and the external systems.
Employees can access this experience through the Now Assist for Virtual Agent and get synthesized responses that come from external and internal sources, which will allow employees self-service more through Virtual Agent.
Key Configurations:
As an admin, you can set up these connectors in the “External Content Connectors” admin home page. You will get a pop up on which connector you’d like to configure. From there, you’ll be taken to the configuration page, where you can put the necessary information.
Once this is completed, you can start or schedule the content crawl. You can choose to do a one time crawl or set up a new schedule.
You also have flexibility in choosing the crawl type, whether it’s a full or partial crawl. We also respect user permissions and only show results that the user can only see. You can define the permissions through the “User Mappings Crawl” section.
Once the crawl schedule has been defined, you can monitor it in real time and see the history of the crawl. You can trouble shoot the errors within that crawl on the spot.
Once the connection and the crawl has been established, now let’s make this experience available in Now Assist for Virtual Agent. You can go to your Now Assist Admin Console and find your Now Assist in Virtual Agent skill.
Go to the “Information Sources” tab and add the SharePoint Online or Confluence Cloud connector as a part of the search source.
This sums up the features and enhancements in our February 2025 store release and the Yokohama family release. For more information on these capabilities, please check out the following:
- Product Documentation
- Yokohama Deep Dive Blog - HR Service Delivery
- HR Multi-Instance Integration Blog
- What's New in Yokohama - Webinar Recording
