Unpacking Labs: Build an AI Agent

[Travis Toulson]

Building AI Agents Together: A Community Lab Walkthrough

As part of ServiceNow’s Community Week, we gathered some of our illustrious MVPs to dive into the “Build an AI Agent” lab. Together, we build an Agentic Workflow, design an AI agent, wire it up with tools, and test it while navigating version differences, overlooked prompts, and a surprise Abraham Lincoln impersonation from the LLM.

What We Built:

• An Agentic Workflow to orchestrate tasks.

• A Knowledge Expert AI Agent with tools to read and update knowledge articles.

• A script tool to pull in article content and another to rewrite the content based on user input.

What We Learned:

• Prompts Matter: You need to speak to the AI like a person, not a developer. Leave technical terms to the tools, and describe tasks like you would to a colleague.

• Supervised vs Autonomous: Let your agent ask before it does something dangerous, but keep it streamlined for simpler steps.

• The Version Gap is Real: With different attendees on different releases (Zurich vs Yokohama), we saw feature differences and even errors. Be ready to adapt if you're using a PDI or newer instance.

• Output Varies: Even with identical prompts, each of us got different article rewrites. AI is powerful—but not deterministic.

• Security and Access Controls: As the platform evolves, access management is becoming increasingly important in AI agent execution.

This lab gave us the opportunity to not only build something together but also talk about how these agents could be applied in real-world scenarios including everything from troubleshooting C3 issues to evaluating document compliance or even scrubbing HIPAA data.

Whether you're an AI agent newbie or already building complex agentic workflows, this session offers real examples, gotchas, and collaborative insights into what’s possible with the latest ServiceNow AI tooling.

🚀 Try the lab for yourself at ServiceNow University
🧰 Don’t forget to subscribe and check out the rest of our Community Week labs and live streams!