what is the basic difference between Now Assist Skill and AI agent and agentic workflow?

Ramjipal · ‎12-21-2025

Ankur Bawiskar · ‎12-21-2025

My thoughts:

-> Now Assist Skill is a single GenAI “capability”

-> an AI Agent is an autonomous actor that chains skills and tools to achieve an outcome

-> an agentic workflow is the orchestration layer that coordinates one or more AI agents across steps

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Ankur
✨ Certified Technical Architect || ✨ 9x ServiceNow MVP || ✨ ServiceNow Community Leader

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Dr Atul G- LNG · ‎12-21-2025

Hi @Ramjipal

"Now Assist" is a specific feature that uses AI to enhance user productivity within the platform. It offers proactive suggestions, conversational interactions, and automates tasks within ServiceNow.

"Agentic AI," on the other hand, is a broader concept encompassing multiple AI agents working together to solve problems with limited supervision. It's about integrating AI across the enterprise to automate processes, optimize workflows, and improve customer experiences.

"Now Assist" is a ServiceNow GenAI product which leverage LLM's to perform a task intelligently on the platform

whereas "AI Agents" is a more broader term in which AI centric agents leverage the now assist skills to solve a use case for wider audience.

https://www.servicenow.com/community/now-assist-forum/what-is-the-difference-between-agentic-ai-and-...

A good read

https://www.servicenow.com/community/developer-forum/difference-between-ai-agent-now-assist-and-virt...

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/beyond20_servicenow-ai-skills-vs-agents-whats-activity-73813356212161...

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nishant3101 · ‎12-21-2025

🔹 1. Now Assist Skill → Task-level AI

What it is:
A single-purpose AI capability that helps with one specific action.

Key traits:

Reactive (responds when invoked)
Narrow scope
No decision-making or chaining
Works inside an existing workflow

Examples:

Generate a ticket summary
Suggest a response to an incident
Rewrite or classify a description

👉 You ask → it helps → stops

🔹 2. AI Agent → Goal-oriented AI

What it is:
An AI entity that can reason, decide, and take actions to achieve a goal.

Key traits:

Understands intent
Chooses which skills/tools to use
Can take multiple steps
Still operates within defined guardrails

Examples:

Diagnose an issue and recommend resolution steps
Decide whether to reset password, route ticket, or ask follow-up questions
Handle a user request end-to-end with minimal human input

👉 You give a goal → it plans → it acts

🔹 3. Agentic Workflow → Orchestrated intelligence

What it is:
A full workflow where multiple AI agents and skills collaborate, often with humans in the loop.

Key traits:

Multi-step, multi-agent orchestration
Combines AI + workflows + approvals
Long-running and outcome-driven
Highest level of autonomy

Examples:

Employee onboarding (access, hardware, approvals, comms)
Major incident handling with diagnosis, updates, and remediation
End-to-end service fulfillment across systems

👉 You define the outcome → the system coordinates everything