Disclaimer: This is a personal project, and is not an official plugin from ServiceNow. No warranty is given.
I'm excited to share something I've been working on privately: a custom Now Assist Skill that automatically generates release notes from the contents of an update set (including all child update sets).
If you've ever had to manually sift through customer updates one by one just to piece together what changed in a given update set, you know the pain. That workflow ends here.
This solution stitches together multiple platform capabilities into a seamless end-to-end experience.
Here's what's under the hood:
- Flow Action: Crawls through the target update set and its children, then assembles structured Markdown metadata representing everything that was changed.
- Custom Now Assist Skill: Accepts the update set's
sys_idas input, invokes the Flow Action via an embedded tool call, then combines the generated Markdown with a carefully crafted prompt to produce clean, human-readable release notes. - UI Action: Provides a one-click trigger directly on the Update Set form and handles writing the output back to the record.
The entire solution is packaged in a custom global-scope application (a necessary architectural decision, since sys_update_set doesn't allow non-global apps to register UI Actions against it).
Once installed, you'll see a new "Generate Release Notes" button on your update sets. The generated notes are prepended to the description field, so your existing content is preserved. Fair warning — this hasn't been through rigorous regression testing, so proceed with appropriate caution in production environments. Also, this may only work on instances that are on the Zurich release, and have Now Assist enabled.
Everything you need is in a single importable XML (you may receive preview errors that you can accept/skip, depending on the instance configuration).
Find all the scripts and prompts in the attached PDF as well, in case you want to build it from scratch.
