Get Value from ServiceNow Arc on Day One, Without Building Anything
Most AI tools make you start with a blank prompt box and a lot of trial and error. Arc starts with work you already have: your calendar, your inbox, your files, your day, and your ServiceNow instance. This guide walks through the first things to try, in the order I'd recommend.
To get started, sign in to Arc with your ServiceNow credentials and connect it to your ServiceNow instance. Once you're signed in, Arc can work with the same records and workflows you use every day, so you can get useful results from your first session.
Step 1: Connect your work apps first
Everything Arc does well depends on context, so connect your tools before anything else. Arc supports connections to Microsoft 365, including email, calendar, and files, and to your ServiceNow instance. Once connected, Arc can read your schedule, find a document you mentioned last week, draft a reply grounded in the thread it's responding to, or pull the open incidents your team is working on.
Connect in this order: calendar, email, files, then ServiceNow. Calendar gives you the fastest visible win, because Arc can immediately show your day. You control what each connection can access, and you can disconnect at any time.
Step 2: Start with "For you" tasks
The For you section contains ready-made tasks that work with no setup. Start with these three:
- "Plan my day." Arc reviews your calendar and open commitments and proposes a sequence for the day, including focus blocks and gaps where you can work through email.
- "What meetings do I have today? Add prep notes to each." Arc lists your meetings and adds context for each one, drawn from related emails and documents. This is useful for the 10 minutes before a call you've forgotten about.
- "Summarize my last meeting and extract action items." Arc pulls the summary and the follow-ups from your most recent meeting, so you don't have to rewatch it or rebuild notes from memory.
Each of these is a complete task. Run them, read the output, and adjust your next prompt based on what you see.
Step 3: Schedule recurring tasks
Any task can run on a schedule. Common starting points are a weekday morning brief that runs "Plan my day," a daily "List open P1 and P2 incidents" check before stand-up, a Friday summary of the week's meetings, or a daily sweep for emails that need replies.
There are two ways to put a task on a schedule:
- Ask Arc directly. You don't have to wait for a task to finish first. You can ask Arc to schedule it up front. Start with a "For you" task like "Plan my day" and say when to run it, for example, "Every morning at 8am, plan my day." You can also schedule a task after you've seen its output. Once a run looks right, tell Arc to repeat it on a cadence, like "do this every weekday at 8am."
- Use the Schedules tab. Open the task, choose the schedule option, and set the frequency and time.
Once a task is scheduled, manage it from the task list: pause, edit, or delete it there.
Scheduled runs save their output, so you can review what Arc did while you were away. Check the output after the first few runs to confirm the task is doing what you intended, then adjust the wording if needed.
Step 4: Try a skill
A skill is a packaged set of instructions for a specific kind of work, such as drafting a status update in your team's format, reviewing a document against a checklist, or turning a spreadsheet into a summary. You don't write the instructions yourself. You pick the skill and hand it your material.
Skills work in one of two ways:
- User-invoked skills are ones you trigger on purpose with a slash command, like
/meeting-followup. You decide when to run them. Use these when you have a specific job to kick off and want to drive it yourself. - Agent-invoked skills are ones Arc reaches for on its own when it recognizes the work. For example, drop a CSV into the chat and ask "what's in this?" and Arc automatically applies the Summarize data skill (
/data-summarizer). You never have to name it, though you can call it by name if you want.
Arc ships with 27 skills out of the box. Browse them in the skills library and try one on something real, such as a document, report, or dataset you're already working on this week. The fastest way to learn what a skill does is to run it once on your own content and see what comes back.
A good one to start with: point Arc at a spreadsheet or CSV you have on hand, such as a ticket export, a budget, or a list of sign-ups, and ask it to summarize the file. The Summarize data skill (/data-summarizer) returns row and column counts, key statistics, and a few charts, so you get a feel for the data in seconds without writing a formula. Other day-one favorites include creating a Word document (/docx) or PowerPoint deck (/pptx) from a few talking points, pulling text and summaries out of a PDF (/pdf), or wrapping up a meeting with /meeting-followup.
Step 5: Let subagents do the heavy lifting
For bigger tasks, Arc can hand work off to a subagent, a separate worker that tackles one focused job, such as searching across your files and email, reading and summarizing long material, or pulling ServiceNow records. This keeps the main conversation clean. Arc includes 6 built-in subagents out of the box.
You don't have to manage any of this. Write the outcome you want in plain language, and Arc decides when a task is worth splitting off to a subagent and runs it for you. For example, "find the pricing deck Sarah sent in March" becomes a search, "turn last week's thread into a summary" becomes a read-and-summarize pass, and "list open P1 and P2 incidents" routes to your ServiceNow instance. You describe the result, and Arc handles how the work gets done.
Step 6: Try IT service desk questions in your ServiceNow instance
Once your instance is connected (ask your ServiceNow admin if it isn't yet), you can ask everyday IT service questions in plain language, with no app, flow, or configuration to build. Two good starting points:
- "List open P1 and P2 incidents." Arc returns the current high-priority incidents, including number, short description, assignment group, and when each was opened, so you can see what needs attention first.
- "Show recent change requests." Arc lists recently created or updated changes with their state and planned dates, so you can spot scheduling conflicts or changes that need review before a maintenance window.
Follow up in the same conversation, and Arc keeps the context from its last answer: "Which of those P1s are unassigned?" or "Summarize the change requests scheduled for this weekend."
Arc reads these records with the permissions of your own ServiceNow account. If a result looks incomplete or a request is denied, ask your ServiceNow admin to confirm your role has access to that table.
This is Arc reading your data so you can decide what's next: listing, showing, and summarizing, never changing records on its own. Automating the response to what you find is a later step.
Step 7: Build on the Memory Map
Arc keeps a Memory Map, a view of what it has learned about your work over time: your stated preferences (how you like summaries formatted, your default instance), key facts and decisions, and the people and projects you work with. You can open it to see what Arc knows. The more it reflects your world, the less context you have to re-explain in each prompt.
Shape it deliberately:
- Tell Arc what to keep. When you want something to stick, say so: "Remember I prefer bullet summaries," "Note that Priya is my manager," or "Remember I own the Network assignment group." Explicit cues like "remember" or "note" are the reliable way to save a fact for future tasks.
- Correct it as you go. If Arc gets something wrong, tell it the right version. The correction updates the Memory Map and improves later answers.
- Review it early. After your first week, open the Memory Map and clear out anything stale or wrong. Memory reflects past state, so your current instruction always wins over an old note, but keeping it tidy means fewer surprises.
Step 8: Understand governance and approvals
Arc asks for your approval before it takes an action that matters, such as sending an email, sharing a file, posting to Teams, or updating a ServiceNow record. You'll see exactly what Arc proposes and decide how to proceed. Read-only requests, like listing incidents, generally run without a prompt.
Each approval gives you two choices:
- Allow. Arc performs this single action and asks again next time.
- Always Allow. Arc can take this type of action going forward without prompting.
Use Allow until you trust a workflow, and reserve Always Allow for actions you've reviewed enough to be comfortable with. For instance, you might let Arc draft replies in your inbox freely while still approving every send, or let it read incident lists without prompting while approving each record update yourself.
A few examples of how an approval looks:
- Email. You ask, "Reply to Marcus confirming Thursday at 2 pm and ask for the updated budget." Arc drafts the reply and shows it to you. Send it with Allow, or edit it first.
- Teams. You ask, "Post the meeting action items in the Product channel." Arc shows the message and the target channel. Approve it with Allow, or choose Always Allow for posts to that channel if this is a routine for you.
- ServiceNow. You ask, "Add a work note to INC0012345 summarizing what we found." Arc shows the proposed note and the record it will post to. Approve it with Allow, or choose Always Allow for work notes like this if you add them often.
These controls work within the rules your administrator sets in Super Intelligence Control Tower, the governance console where your organization defines which actions Arc may take, which always require approval, and which are off-limits. Some sensitive actions will always ask for approval, and occasionally a verification code, no matter how often you've approved them before. A few may be restricted entirely by policy. Within those bounds, approvals keep you in control while Arc handles the routine work, and over time you'll decide which everyday actions you're comfortable letting it take on its own.
Where to go next
You don't need a project plan to get value from Arc. You need a few minutes. Start with four things:
- Sign in with your ServiceNow credentials
- Connect your calendar
- Run "Plan my day"
- Run "List open P1 and P2 incidents"
That's the whole first session. In the time it takes to grab a coffee, Arc has already shown you both sides of what it does: organizing your day and surfacing the service work that needs attention, using your real data, with nothing built and nothing configured.
Once that clicks, widen the circle. Connect your email and files so Arc can act across your whole workday, put one recurring task on a schedule so a brief or an incident check runs without you asking, and try a skill on something real. Then, at the end of your first week, open your Memory Map and tidy up what Arc has learned. The few minutes you spend there are what turn a capable assistant into one that already knows how you work.
The pattern holds as you go: describe the outcome you want in plain language, approve what matters, and let Arc handle the routine. Everything else in this guide is a bigger version of what you did in those first few minutes.
