Crafting Clarity: Customizing Now Assist Analytics

[Sharon_Barnes]

🚀 Mastering Now Assist Analytics: The Admin’s Guide to Unlocking AI Insights in ServiceNow

As ServiceNow continues to expand its AI footprint, understanding how your organization uses those capabilities becomes more critical than ever. Whether you're an admin, platform owner, or developer responsible for monitoring AI usage, the Now Assist Analytics suite delivers powerful insights into what's working, where improvements are needed, and how much value you're really getting from Now Assist.

In a recent Platform Academy livestream, Sharon Barnes—Outbound Product Manager for the Now Assist Admin Console and Analytics—took us on a deep dive into the world of Now Assist usage analytics. If you missed it or want a recap, here’s everything you need to know to start measuring, reporting, and optimizing your AI workflows.

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🎯 What Is Now Assist Analytics?

Now Assist Analytics is a collection of prebuilt dashboards and reporting tools that help you measure the adoption, performance, and value of ServiceNow's Now Assist skills and actions. It is an out-of-box ServiceNow App available to any customer with a Now Assist license—no additional licensing required.

At its core, it gives you answers to questions like:

• How many Now Assist skills are being used?

• What departments are using it, and how?

• Are we actually saving time?

This is not just another metrics dashboard—this is the key to visibility across your AI-powered workflows.

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🧭 Out-of-the-Box Dashboards: Everything You Get

If you’ve just installed the Store App, here’s what you’ll find ready to go:

1. Usage & Adoption Dashboard

Shows:

• Department-level adoption

• Top skills trends 

• Filters by time, product (e.g., ITSM, HR), and channel (Now Assist panel, Virtual Agent, or in product)

Perfect for: Platform owners looking to prove usage and adoption to leadership.

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2. Self-Service Performance Dashboard

Visualizes:

• Deflection rate through Virtual Agent or Service Portal

• How often is Now Assist providing helpful responses

• End-user feedback on AI-generated answers

Perfect for: ITSM/HR leaders interested in deflection impact and support case reduction.

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3. Skill Performance Dashboard

Tracks:

• Usage trends per skill

• User engagement over time

Perfect for: Identifying which Now Assist features are being used and which aren’t.

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4. Guardian Insights

Monitors:

• Latency

• Offensive or flagged prompts

• Guardian block reasons and category breakdowns

Perfect for: Governance and AI Stewards ensuring compliance and safe AI usage.

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5. Search Analyzer

Tracks:

• Top search terms with or without results

• Genius result usage

• Knowledge and Catalog hits/misses

Perfect for: Developers who want to improve content discoverability and search performance.

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6. Context Menu Dashboard

Tracks:

• Usage of in product Now Assist suggestions (like summarization or text generation)

• Acceptance, rejection, or ignore rates

• Skill-level feedback

Perfect for: Understanding which in product skills are working or need tuning.

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7. Value Insights

Estimates:

• Writing time saved (e.g., content creation, resolution notes)

• Reading time saved (e.g., summarizations)

Perfect for: ROI reporting. Helps communicate how AI saves real time for your team.

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🧩 Subscription Management vs. Now Assist Analytics

It’s important to differentiate between:

• Now Assist Analytics Dashboards: Data is updated once a day and specific to the skills used in the instance you're logged into (dev, prod, sub-prod).

• Subscription Management: Aggregated usage across all instances, with a ~48-72 hour delay. Focuses on assist consumption.

If you’re asking “How many assists have we used across everything?” Subscription Management is the place to look. It even includes assist ratios, helping you understand how much each action that uses a skill costs in assists.

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⚙️ Custom Reporting: When You Need More

Out-of-box dashboards are solid, but sometimes you need to go deeper. That’s where custom reporting comes in.

🔑 Key Table: sys_gen_ai_usage_log

Everything meaningful flows through this table:

• What skill was used

• Who used it

• When it was triggered

• The number of assists consumed

However, reporting on this table is blocked out-of-box. You’ll need to:

1. Add sys_gen_ai_usage_log to the glide.ui.permitted_tables system property.

2. Grant the appropriate ACLs if non-admins need access.

3. Build custom dashboards using Performance Analytics or Data Visualizations.

This is your go-to approach when you need to create tailored reports for for your specialized use cases.

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🔒 Best Practices & Warnings

• Don’t edit OOTB dashboards directly. It will break future upgrades. Instead, copy reports or clone them into new dashboards.

• Upgrades are frequent! Stay current to get the latest dashboards.

• Data timing matters: Different sources update on different cadences (real-time, daily, delayed), which can cause apparent mismatches. That’s normal, just align on time zones.

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🧠 Final Thoughts

Now Assist Analytics brings transparency to Now Assist usage on the ServiceNow platform. Whether you're trying to justify investment, optimize your skills, or ensure compliance, these tools give you what you need to take action.

If you're not using Now Assist Analytics yet, start now. And if you are, dive deeper—your data has more to tell you than you think.