Platform Academy: Now Assist Center: AI Made Simple for Developers

[Sharon_Barnes]

Now Assist Center: AI Made Simple for Developers

Overview

If you've been managing AI features on the ServiceNow platform for a while, you know the drill: skills are configured in one place, analytics live in another, agents are set up somewhere else entirely, and figuring out what's actually deployed in your instance requires a scavenger hunt across multiple tools. Now Assist Center is built to fix that.

Generally available as of May 2026, Now Assist Center is a unified workspace that brings everything you need to implement, configure, and monitor AI into one place. Think of it the way ServiceNow Studio brought your day-to-day development tools together. Now Assist Center does that for AI.

💡 Version note: Base features (activation, agent advisor, asset inventory, AI-powered assistant) require Zurich Patch 9 or higher. Monitoring/Performance and the AI readiness assessment require Zurich Patch 10 or Australia Patch 3 or higher.

What It Is (and What It Isn't)

A quick framing note worth making upfront: Now Assist Center is your developer and admin cockpit for AI implementation and monitoring. If you're familiar with AI Control Tower, that's more like the flight tower: governance and visibility across your entire AI landscape, including external AI you've registered in the registry. Now Assist Center is where you actually fly the plane: building, configuring, deploying, and monitoring specific ServiceNow skills, agents, and assistants.

Here's what's included:

Centralized landing page with links to all the tools you actually use: AI Agent Studio, AI Search, Now Assist Admin Console, and more, without having to remember where each one lives.

Asset inventory showing what is installed in your instance: agents, workflows, skills, and more.

Unified settings for Guardian, model providers and LLM versions, AI Agent Advisor configuration, experience activation, and data sharing.

Consolidated monitoring and analytics for Skills, AI Agents, and Conversational Assistants, gathered from the places where they previously lived separately.

AI readiness checks your instance's readiness based on customization, data or application versioning gaps.

AI-powered assistant panel to help you administer and configure AI through conversation.

Getting Your Instance Ready: The AI Readiness Assessment

Before you start implementing features, it's worth checking your instance's AI readiness. Now Assist Center surfaces the same assessment engine behind Now Assist Readiness Evaluation (NARE) directly in the interface.

The assessment runs entirely in your instance (nothing leaves your environment). It scans for:

Customizations or configurations that could block AI features from working correctly

Data gaps in fields that AI needs to generate useful output (for example, incomplete historical resolution notes will limit what the AI can learn from)

Outdated plugins that need to be updated before specific features will work

Results link directly to the specific records and configurations in your instance so you can act on findings immediately. After you make changes, rerun the assessment to track progress.

💡 Version note: Monitoring and analytics tabs are available starting with Zurich Patch 10 or Australia Patch 3.

Faster Activation with Actionable Use Cases

Once you're in Now Assist Center, the landing page shows you a set of actionable use case cards: features that aren't active in your instance but are ready to turn on. These are the quick wins.

Clicking a card opens the Now Assist Panel and walks you through a conversational setup for that specific feature. No need to find the right screen, figure out which settings apply, or guess at the right order of operations. It's essentially a checklist that does most of the work for you, and the cards update as you work through them so you can see what's left.

💡 Heads up: Dismissed use case cards do not reappear. If you accidentally dismiss one, you can still set up the capability manually through the workspace, but the shortcut won't come back.

AI Agent Advisor: Finding Where Agents Can Actually Help

The AI Agent Advisor does something genuinely useful: it looks at the actual tickets and cases in your instance and tells you which ones are good candidates for AI agents to handle.

It works across ITSM, CSM, and HRSD. The advisor runs a process mining analysis, clustering tickets by type and volume, and surfaces your highest-value automation opportunities with supporting examples. You can configure the cost assumptions it uses (hours per ticket, hourly rate) so the output reflects your actual environment.

From there, you can follow the built-in steps to create a new agent or activate an existing one for that use case. It's a much cleaner path than trying to figure out from scratch which workflows are worth automating.

Monitoring and Analytics: Everything in One Place

This is one of the most practical improvements Now Assist Center brings. Previously, analytics for skills lived in the Now Assist Admin Console, analytics for agents lived in AI Agent Studio, and assistant analytics were in Assistant Designer. Now it's all consolidated into a single set of tabs:

Activation tab: what's turned on, when it changed, and user adoption by category (skills, agents, assistants).

Performance Explorer: execution status, faults, and behavior over time.

Skills tab: everything that was in the Now Assist Admin Console: usage summary, adoption, skill performance, offensiveness context, prompt injection monitoring, and user search analysis.

Agents tab: what previously lived in AI Agent Studio analytics: overview, insights, consumption, and performance.

Assistants tab: cumulative assist usage, adoption, self-service rate, sentiment, and assist data.

Business Value tab: track and report on the value your AI deployments are delivering.

💡 Version note: Monitoring and analytics tabs are available starting with Zurich Patch 10 or Australia Patch 3.

The Business Value Dashboard

The Business Value tab is worth calling out specifically because it solves a real problem: how do you show your stakeholders that this is working?

The dashboard lets you define the value of specific skills and agents in terms of time saved per execution. Out-of-box metrics come with suggested time values but a blank hourly rate field, which you fill in based on your own numbers. The dashboard then multiplies your execution count by those values, giving you a running total.

A few things worth knowing

You can add custom skills and workflows to the tracking, not just the defaults.

Your business value data stays in your instance. ServiceNow doesn't aggregate or benchmark it across customers.

The calculation is straightforward: minutes saved per execution x hourly rate x execution count. You control the assumptions.

The AI-Powered Assistant Panel

Now Assist Center includes a conversational assistant panel available throughout the workspace. It's built specifically for the admin and configuration use cases you're working on inside Now Assist Center: activating skills, adjusting settings, querying your current configuration, and getting answers to how-to questions backed by product documentation.

Getting Started

Here's what you need and how to get in:

Requirements

Plugin: Now Assist Center (sn_na_center), installed via Application Manager

Release: Zurich Patch 9+ for base features; Zurich Patch 10 / Australia Patch 3+ for Monitoring/Performance and AI readiness

Licensing: Any Now Assist or AI license (Foundation, Advanced, Prime, or equivalent)

Role: admin, or sn_na_center.nac_admin

Navigation

1. Go to Workspaces > Now Assist Center.

Wrapping Up 🎉

Now Assist Center pulls together the pieces that used to be scattered: activation, configuration, readiness assessment, agent advisor, monitoring, and business value tracking, all in one place. If you've spent time hunting across multiple tools to understand what's deployed and what's working, this is the workspace you've been waiting for.

Now Assist Center is getting updates monthly, so capabilities will keep expanding. The Now Assist Center Hub on the ServiceNow Community is a good place to track what's new as releases come out.

Check out the Now Assist Center Hub for more resources