Platform Academy - July 10th, 2025 - An Admin's Guide to Now Assist.

[Sharon_Barnes]

An Admin’s Guide to Now Assist: Setup, Skills, and Real-World Insights

If you’re an admin working in the ServiceNow ecosystem, you’ve likely heard of Now Assist—ServiceNow’s generative AI engine embedded into the platform. But where do you start? How do you manage it across products? And what kind of visibility do you have into what it's actually doing?

In a recent Platform Academy session, Sharon Barnes laid out a practical, no-fluff guide to rolling out Now Assist. Here’s what you need to know.

Start at Basecamp: The Now Assist Admin Console

This is your command center. From here, you can activate Now Assist across ITSM, HRSD, CSM, and Creator Workflows. The Admin Console is available out-of-box in Vancouver and newer releases, but remember, you may need to enable certain plugins manually.

Step-by-Step: Setting It Up

• Plugin Authorization: Head to the store and authorize the plugins your org will use (e.g., Now Assist for Creator).

• Installation via Application Manager: Install those apps directly in your instance.

• Skill Activation: Navigate to the Skills tab, filter by workflow or feature, and activate via guided wizards. Some are one-click setups; others (like summarization) require more fine-tuning.

Experiences and Permissions

Once skills are activated, you can control how users interact with them:

• On-record experiences

• Now Assist Panel

• Context menus in workspaces

Access to these can be restricted/granted by skill and user role, making it easy to roll out gradually or restrict access.

Deep Dive: Analytics That Matter

Sharon showed us how to go beyond just enabling features and actually track impact with the Now Assist Analytics dashboard. You’ll get data on:

• Skill adoption by department

• Self-service resolution rates

• User search patterns

• Guardian monitoring

• Value Insights: how much time AI is saving your teams

For those on the latest (Yokohama or later) releases, this includes seven powerful dashboards. And yes—you can export the data, customize dashboards, and even build your own reports.

Pro Tips

• Use analytics to justify ROI to stakeholders.

• Customize access with read-only viewer roles for leadership.

• Stay updated—Now Assist enhancements roll out every 2–3 months.

What’s Next?

Additional enhancements are scheduled for the August release, including new LLM options and enhanced analytics capabilities. 

This is your moment to bring the power of AI into your workflows—confidently and securely.