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NowAssist Virtual Agent results.

Vinay49
Tera Expert

Hello all,

We have developed the nowAssist VA and configured the Knowledge Table as the primary informational source. While the system is able to retrieve accurate results, the responses currently include more information than requested.

For example:
If a user asks: “What is the storage capacity of Plan A?”, the response should return only the storage value (e.g., “500 GB”). However, the current output includes extra details such as plan features, benefits, and comparisons, which are unnecessary for this query.

Can we do something here to get only the result which we really need?

Thanks in Advance.

3 REPLIES 3

Vikram Reddy
Tera Guru

Hi @Vinay49,

 

There are really two levers here, and most builds only pull one of them. The first is the response instructions on the skill or tool itself. If this is built through AI Agent Studio with a knowledge/search retrieval tool pointed at the Knowledge table, open that tool and check two things: the Tell the LLM how to respond (or additional instructions) field, and the Response type setting, which controls the output transformation strategy. "Verbose" is the option that produces the longer, more eloquent answer with extra context baked in, so if that's set, that alone explains a lot of what you're seeing. Switch it to Concise and add an explicit instruction such as "answer only the specific attribute the user asked about, do not include plan features, benefits, or comparisons unless the user asks for them."

The second lever is the article itself, and honestly this is the one people skip. Now Assist is doing retrieval-augmented generation, it pulls the relevant chunk of the article and summarizes what's there, so if your Plan A article has storage capacity sitting in the same section as features, benefits and a comparison table, the model treats all of that as "the answer." A few things worth checking on the content side:

  • Is storage capacity written as its own clearly headed, self-contained fact, or is it buried inside a larger "Plan A overview" section?
  • Are you using a comparison table to list plan attributes? ServiceNow's own knowledge-authoring guidance for Now Assist flags tables and comparison matrices as a known weak point, LLMs summarize them poorly and tend to over-include, so converting that data to plain descriptive text per plan usually tightens responses noticeably.
  • Are features/benefits and hard specs (storage, pricing, limits) in the same article? Splitting spec-only content into its own tightly scoped section, one topic per article as ServiceNow recommends, gives the retriever less to drag along.

In practice I'd fix the instructions first since it's a five minute change, then clean up the Plan A article if it's still over-answering. If you're on the classic Now Assist in Virtual Agent knowledge topic rather than an AI Agent Studio tool, the same "Tell the LLM how to respond" field is available on the topic configuration, so the instruction fix still applies.

References

 

Thank you,
Vikram Karety
Octigo Solutions INC
My Blog: glideandgen.com

This is not derived from AI Agent Studio. It is the now Assist Virtual Agent(Ai Search enabled for this assistant), where we have the option to select an information source. In this case, the search source has been configured to use the Knowledge Base only,  and all other sources (such as AI Agents and Skills)  are not included.

Vinay49_0-1784125586654.png

 





rpriyadarshy
Kilo Sage

@Vinay49

 

I assume  NowLLM is used for your AI Search.

The citation Source which is KB here has additional Information also or LLM seems to be Hellucinating?

 

WHAT is the response when you ask - What is the storage capacity of Plan A . Give me Only Storage Capacity value in one line?

 

Regards

RP