Using nowassist for document extraction

[AnuragAkGupta]

We have recently got out NowAssist license and while playing around with native MCP server and AI agent/Skills available, I was trying a use case - Extract the attachment from a record ( eg.- incident), read the content and give the output as a summary. I have tried using recommended ways - copying OOB Incident Summarization skill and add Attachment as an additional input, tried to create an AI agent with the available skill - Extract Information from document. 1st problem I faced was not every skill can be added to the MCP server tool directly. While I was able to add Incident summarization skill to the MCP server tools, Extract information from document skill was not available to add. My goal is to use the skill to test the functionality from any third party app, for now I am using postman to do it. I am able to connect to MCP server, use other OOB tools like Create Incident, Update incident etc from postman. But how can i get this use case done about reading the attachment and giving the content as output.

[boteeuwen]

The reason you cannot add Extract Information from Document directly to the MCP server is that only a supported subset of Now Assist skills can be exposed as MCP tools. That document extraction skill depends on Document Intelligence processing, so it is not available the same way as skills such as Incident Summarization.

A good approach is to put the attachment handling into a subflow in Workflow Studio. Pass in the record sys_id and table, find the attachment, extract or summarize the content using the available Now Assist or Document Intelligence actions, then return the result as a simple string output.

You can then expose that subflow through a custom Now Assist skill and add that custom skill to your MCP server. This also keeps the MCP input and output simple, which makes it easier to test from Postman or another third party client.

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