[Platform Academy Recap] Introducing the New NowAssist for Catalog Generation in Catalog Builder

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Introducing the New NowAssist for Catalog Generation in Catalog Builder

This Platform Academy session focused on a significant enhancement to NowAssist for Catalog Builder, the new Catalog Generation with Live Preview experience. The session included a walkthrough of the current experience and its limitations, a detailed look at what's changing, a live demo of the new experience, and an open Q&A.

Whether you're a catalog administrator, a platform developer, or a process owner looking to streamline how your organization builds and maintains catalog items, this recap covers everything you need to know.

The Current Experience and Its Limitations

We kicked off with a look at how NowAssist for Catalog Builder works today. The current experience uses a one-shot generation model: you provide a single prompt, and NowAssist generates an entire catalog item based on that input.

While this is a useful starting point, it comes with notable friction:

• Any change requires starting over. If the generated item isn't quite right, say a variable is missing, a field type is wrong, or the structure needs adjustment, there's no way to refine it. You regenerate from scratch.
• No visual feedback during generation. You write your prompt and wait for the result, with no preview of what's being built.
• Manual editing after the fact. Once the item is generated, any fine-tuning has to be done field by field in the Catalog Builder interface.

For simple catalog items, this can work well enough. But for anything with complexity; multiple variable types, conditional logic, or iterative stakeholder input, the one-shot model creates unnecessary rework.

What's New: Catalog Generation with Live Preview

The core of the session introduced the enhanced experience, which fundamentally changes how you interact with NowAssist in Catalog Builder. Rather than a single prompt-and-generate cycle, the new workflow supports an ongoing, conversational approach to building catalog items.

Here's what that looks like in practice:

Multi-Turn Conversation

Instead of crafting one detailed prompt and hoping it captures everything, you can have a back-and-forth dialogue with NowAssist. Start with the basics: the item name, description, and core variables, then layer in additional requirements across multiple turns. Each turn builds on the previous one rather than replacing it.

Iterative Refinement Without Rework

This is one of the most impactful changes. When you ask NowAssist to modify a variable, add a UI policy, or restructure the form layout, it preserves everything you've already built. No more regenerating the entire item to fix one field.

Targeted Edits

You can direct NowAssist to make changes to specific parts of the catalog item. For example, you might ask it to make a particular field mandatory, change a dropdown's options, or add a new section, all through natural language, and all without affecting the rest of the item.

Real-Time Live Preview

As you build, a live preview updates in real time to show you exactly what the catalog item will look like. This means you can evaluate the form layout, variable ordering, and conditional behavior before publishing, catching issues early rather than after the item is live.

Natural Language Commands for Complex Logic

One of the more powerful capabilities demonstrated in the session was the ability to create UI policies and conditional logic using natural language. During the demo, we showed how you can instruct NowAssist to add show/hide rules on variables — for example, displaying a specific field only when a user selects a particular option, without manually configuring UI policies.

Enhancing Existing Catalog Items

A key addition with this release: the enhanced experience isn't limited to building new items from scratch. You can also open an existing catalog item in Catalog Builder and use NowAssist to iteratively update and refine it. This was demonstrated in the final portion of the live demo.

Availability

The enhanced Catalog Generation with Live Preview experience is available in the March Store Release.

Watch the recap here: