Project Insights Engine: What Gets Surfaced and Why

Vibha Sharma · yesterday

What is Now Assist for SPM Project Insights?

Now Assist for SPM continuously monitors your project data and delivers AI-generated insights directly to project managers — surfacing risks, delays, and opportunities without requiring manual review of every task, resource, and budget line.

This article covers how insights are generated, how they reach you, and what cadence options are available.

How Insights Are Generated

Each time the insight engine runs a project, it executes a five-step pipeline. The first three steps are deterministic — they use rules and thresholds to evaluate project data. The last two steps use the Now Assist LLM to summarize and synthesize the results into human-readable output.

#	Step	What happens
1	Scheduled trigger	A daily scheduled job (SPM Email Insight Job) checks every project's Work Item Report Schedule Configuration. If a project's next due date has been reached based on its configured cadence (weekly / bi-weekly / monthly), it queues that project for an insight run.
2	Data fetch	For each enabled insight topic, the relevant data provider queries the ServiceNow database and loads the project's data — tasks, milestones, resource assignments, RAID items, cost plans, or the project record itself — scoped by the data scope rules described in each topic card below.
3	Rule-based analysis	Each topic's analyser evaluates the fetched data against its configured thresholds — days overdue, allocation percentages, variance amounts, open states, and so on. This step produces a list of raw insight objects, each with a plain-text description and structured metadata. No LLM is involved at this stage.
4	LLM summarization (per dimension)	The raw insight list for each dimension (task, milestone, resource, RAID, financial, schedule) is sent to the Now Assist LLM via the 'Project insights generation' skill. The LLM receives the list and returns a structured JSON response with insights classified into high, medium, and low severity buckets — in natural language suitable for a project manager audience.
5	Overall summary (cross-dimension)	Once all five dimensions have been processed, a second LLM call synthesizes the results into a cross-dimension overall project health summary. This summary is what appears at the top of the email and in-app insight view, giving the project manager a single narrative that reflects the project's full health picture.

Output structure

The final output stored per project run consists of: :

Per-dimension insights — Each of the five dimensions (task, milestone, resource, RAID, financial) produces a set of insights classified as high / medium / low. Schedule variance produces a single insight.
Overall summary — A synthesized narrative covering the project's health across all dimensions, highlighting the most critical items requiring immediate attention.
Record links — Each insight is linked back to the specific ServiceNow record it was generated from (task number, risk number, cost plan, etc.) so the project manager can navigate directly to the source.

How Insights Are Delivered

Delivery Channels

Now Assist for SPM delivers project insights through two channels simultaneously:

Email — A structured insight digest is automatically sent to the project manager's inbox on each run. The email summarises all active insights across all enabled topics, grouped by dimension and severity.

In-App — Insights are also surfaced directly in the Project Workspace within the ServiceNow platform, accessible to anyone with access to the project. The in-app view provides the same insight content with direct links to the underlying records.

Cadence

Insights are generated on a recurring schedule controlled by a daily scheduled job. The job checks each project's configured cadence and runs insights when the next due date is reached.

Cadence Option	Frequency	Typical Use
Weekly	Every 7 days	Fast-moving or high-risk projects requiring close monitoring
Bi-Weekly	Every 14 days	Standard projects — this is the system default
Monthly	Every 30 days	Lower-activity projects or executive-level reporting cycles

Note: Cadence is configured per project in the project's Work Item Report Schedule Configuration record. The default is bi-weekly. Changing the cadence also changes the data fetch window used when loading task and resource data for analysis.

Availability

This feature is available for customers on Zurich Patch 7 and above. You'll need Now Assist with it_project_manager role to access it.

Read More

Article 2: Configuring Project Insights and Understanding Severity Levels (coming soon)
Article 3: What Project Insights Detects — Tasks, Milestones & Resources (coming soon)
Article 4: What Project Insights Detects — RIDAC, Financials & Schedule (coming soon)