Can individual AI agents be activated and used without activating the parent agentic workflow?

Suggy · ‎09-30-2026

Is there any recommendation even today that AI agent must be part of Agentic workflow? or can we have individual AI agents and execute them?

Recently ServiceNow has introduced the option of enabling AI agent in Otto Panel and I see this dedicated page starting Australia - https://www.servicenow.com/docs/r/intelligent-experiences/ai-agent-landing-page.html

I am guessing that there is some change in strategy where we can start activating and use the desired AI agents (without activating the Agentic workflows?)

Overall its actually confusing like what approach we have to take - to activate the Agentic workflow or individual agents given that customer wants to implement Otto for ITSM for example 😕

Suggy · ‎10-04-2026

No one? 🙂

Suggy · ‎10-14-2026

Closing this thread as I see ServiceNow support team themselves are clueless about this OTTO /NOW ASSIST product. Then how can community help 😄

This is really a great product 😄

Vamsi_Krishna07 · ‎10-14-2026

Hello @Suggy ,

I recently created an AI Agent for a customer and was able to trigger it through NAP (Otto Panel) by enabling the AI Agent in the Otto Panel option.

sanjaygupta · a week ago

The documented approach is still to use AI agents inside an agentic workflow. Docs from the Xanadu release say that without an agentic workflow, your agents don’t know when or what to work on. I couldn’t find any documentation saying the new AI agents library page changes this or lets agents run standalone, so I wouldn’t read it as a change in strategy.

The new page is a library of all the ServiceNow AI agents. It is a place to see and open the agents your license includes, and it isn’t an activation switch for them. You reach it from All > AI Agent Studio > Agentic Solutions > AI Agents tab. To use an agent you need the right Otto plugins or product tier, and the agent’s user and data roles must be set correctly. The page I could open is the Brazil release version, so check the Australia version in your instance.

For Otto with ITSM, the safest path is to activate the base-system agentic workflows. These are read-only, so you duplicate them first. The community guide covers four ITSM ones: Generate my work plan, Triage and categorize ITSM incidents, Investigate and resolve ITSM incidents, and Wrap up and resolve incidents. Activate them like this:

Go to All > AI Agent Studio > Agentic Solutions.
Duplicate the base-system agentic workflow you want.
Set the security controls and add the roles users need, such as itil.
Activate the related AI agents.
Turn on the Display toggle for your copy, and turn it off on the original to avoid a “Possible duplications found” warning.
Test in the Manual test tab with a user who has the itil role.

Manual testing doesn’t support live agent help in the panel. For that, test through Now Assist in Virtual Agent. Build and test in a sub-production instance first, and capture changes in an update set.

If you tell me your release and product tier, I can narrow down which agents and workflows apply. You can also confirm with your ServiceNow account team whether standalone agents are supported for your use case.

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