🙄What is ‘Now Assist’?
- Now Assist for ITSM is our generative AI-powered application that enhances our existing industry-leading AI capabilities, which, in combination, elevate the employee experience and accelerate productivity within IT to the next level.
- Fundamentally, with generative AI, we can improve our ability to understand user intent, synthesize knowledge from the data on the ServiceNow AI Platform®, and generate contextualized responses.
- We’re incorporating generative AI at the platform level and applying it to use cases across IT, from enhanced self-service search to incident summaries and resolution notes generation.
- Now Assist for ITSM provides context and streamlines work, allowing IT staff to spend more time resolving complex issues.
🤔Why 'Now Assist'?
- After gathering feedback from multiple companies, one common theme emerged: organizations are under pressure to provide better experiences and more efficiency
Increasing efficiency while maintaining an exceptional user experience has become mission-critical for leaders.
😨The World of Work is Challenging
9%-time lost reorienting due to task switching - Harvard Business review
20%-time lost searching for information to complete a task or workflow - Mckinsey
43% of employees miss important information because they have too many applications open - Gartner
😎Our ServiceNow Solution:
The core functionality of Now Assist revolves around summarizing key interactions and generating content to support agents. It automates tasks such as:
- Summarizing incidents, chat conversations, and change requests
- Generating resolution notes and knowledge articles
- Recommending chat replies to agents
Agentic AI Workflows
- Agentic AI workflows in Now Assist for ITSM streamline and enhance IT service management by assigning tasks to specialized AI agents that work collaboratively to handle complex processes such as incident triage, resolution, and change planning.
- These workflows reduce manual effort and accelerate response times by intelligently managing tasks across the process.
- They improve accuracy by automatically categorizing incidents, suggesting solutions, and generating key documentation.
- As a result, IT teams can focus on higher-value work while delivering faster and more consistent support to end users.
💸Now Assist for IT Service Management can increase:
1.Operational efficiency
2.Employee experience
3.Organizational throughput
Now Assist capabilities
The image above shows the capabilities of Now Assist for IT Service Management. This infographic also shows which skills are available for the different levels: ITSM Standard, ITSM Professional, and ITSM Enterprise.
Now Assist for ITSM skills:
1.Now Assist for IT Service Management (ITSM) skills bring the power of generative AI directly into an agent’s daily workflow.
2.These skills help agents work faster and more intelligently by summarizing key information, generating helpful content, and providing contextual insights within the flow of work.With Now Assist skills, agents can automatically summarize incidents, chats, and change requests.
- They can generate resolution notes or knowledge articles and recommend replies for chat or email conversations.
- Additional skills provide insights such as change request risk explanations, sentiment analysis, and suggested next steps based on similar past incidents.
5. Together, these AI-driven capabilities reduce manual effort, improve response times, and ensure agents have the information needed to resolve issues efficiently and deliver a better service experience.
Here's a list of all skills supported in Now Assist for IT Service Management (ITSM) (My favourite one’s😍😞
- Chat summarization
- Incident summarization
- Chat reply recommendation
- Incident assist
- Chat Summarization:
- Provides an agent with a summary of a requester's Virtual Agent chat history. An agent can also generate a summary of the entire interaction when the chat ends or when an incident is created for further troubleshooting before or after the chat ends.
2.Incident Summarization:
- Enables an agent to expedite the incident troubleshooting process by generating and reviewing a summary that includes the issue, actions taken, and resolution.
- Agents can create, refresh, copy, post the summary to work notes, provide feedback, and use it during assignment handoffs.
- The summary is generated from key incident fields such as Short description, Description, Work notes, Additional comments, and Email.
- Chat Reply recommendation:
- This skill enables an agent to generate a reply recommendation from a chat using the Now Assist icon. The chat reply recommendation skill displays a pop-up window that an agent can use to generate a recommendation and review it before sending it as a reply to the requester.
- Incident assist:
- Enables an agent to quickly obtain common incident related information conversationally within the incident record by asking questions related to the supported topics in the Now Assist panel. Incident assist topics supported in the Now Assist panel include:
- Caller's assets
- Caller's recent incidents
- On-call experts from support groups
- Similar resolved incidents
Benefits of using Now Assist for ITSM:
- Now Assist for IT Service Management (ITSM) helps teams work smarter by combining generative AI with everyday service operations.
- It reduces manual effort by automatically summarizing incidents, chats, and change requests, and by generating resolution notes and knowledge articles.
- Agents spend less time gathering context and more time solving problems, while employees receive faster and more accurate responses.
- Leaders benefit from improved service quality, reduced mean time to resolution, and consistent documentation that supports continuous improvement.
- By embedding AI directly into the flow of work, Now Assist enhances efficiency, accelerates decision-making, and improves experiences across the entire IT service lifecycle
Skills for each role
- Requester
Skills:
- Now Assist in Virtual Agent
- Now Assist in AI Search
2. Agent
Skills:
- Chat summarization
- Chat reply recommendation
- Incident summarization
- Change summarization
- Resolution notes generation
- Knowledge article generation from multiple incidents
- Sidebar chat summarization
- Now Assist in recommended actions
3. Owner/Admin
Skills:
- Simplified Virtual Agent setup and Large Language Model (LLM) topic creation
- Out of the box LLM powered topics
- Conversational catalog insights
- Success dashboard
- Analytics
Now Assist for ITSM creates a virtuous loop:
Now Assist for ITSM for enhanced agent productivity:
- Better/Improved Service Quality
- Less/Reduce Mean Time to Repair (MTTR)
- Better Experiences
How to Configure Now Assist for IT Service Management (ITSM)
- If you have the admin role, you can configure the Now Assist for IT Service Management (ITSM) application so that agents can use the generative AI capabilities in Service Operations Workspace for ITSM and in Core UI
Points to remember:
- Domain separation is supported in Now Assist for IT Service Management (ITSM). For details, see
Domain separation in the Now Assist Admin console. For information on Domain separation for the generative AI skills, see Using Now Assist for IT Service Management (ITSM) Generative AI skills.
- The incident summarization is applicable only for incidents in the New, In progress, On-hold, and Resolved states as long as the incident state mappings that are provided in the base system aren’t customized.
- The change request summarization is applicable only for change requests in the Assess, Authorize, Scheduled, Implement, Review, and Closed states as long as the change request state mappings that are provided in the base system aren’t customized.
How to Begin?
Procedure
- Install the Now Assist for IT Service Management plugin (sn_itsm_gen_ai).
- For information about the application dependencies, see Supporting information for Now Assist for IT Service Management (ITSM).
- For information about the installation process, see Install Now Assist plugins.
- Navigate to Admin > Now Assist Admin.
- Select the Now Assist Skills tab.
- Activate and configure the skills for the Now Assist for ITSM features.
These features are grouped under the Technology workflow group. Each feature has its associated skills.
- On the tile for your skill, select Activate skill.
- Select the inputs or triggers for the selected skill.
For information about the inputs and triggers for each skill, see Skill inputs and triggers for Now Assist for IT Service Management (ITSM).
Example Define trigger screen for the Chat summarization skill
7.After you've configured the inputs or triggers for the selected skill, select Save and continue to go to the next step.
You can return to a previous step by using the Back button.
- Select where you'd like to display the skill.
- In-product: When selected, the Now Assist skills are displayed on forms and workspaces. For the skills that appear in-product, select the down arrow to identify the roles that can use the skill.
- Now Assist panel: When selected, the Now Assist skills are available in the Now Assist panel. If you don't see this option, you must activate the Now Assist panel. For more information, see Turn on the Now Assist panel.
For the skills that appear in the Now Assist panel, select the down arrow to identify the roles that can use the skill.
- After you've configured the display for the selected skill, select Save and continue to go to the next step.
- Review your choices and select Activate to complete the configuration.
And Boom💣☀️ ...Your skill is configured.
😇Summary of Now Assist from this article:
Now Assist for ITSM is a generative AI-powered solution that enhances IT service management by embedding AI into daily workflows. It helps agents summarize incidents and chats, generate resolution notes, recommend replies, and improve overall productivity. It reduces manual effort and improves service quality.
😌What I learn in this?
- How generative AI improves ITSM processes.
- The importance of skills like incident summarization and chat reply recommendation.
- How Agentic AI workflows automate complex IT tasks.
- Basic steps to configure and activate Now Assist.
- How it helps reduce MTTR and improve efficiency.
💯Key Points from the Overall Blog:
- Built on the ServiceNow AI Platform.
- Improves operational efficiency and employee experience.
- Automates summarization, documentation, and recommendations.
- Supports agents, requesters, and admins with role-based skills.
Conclusion:
Now Assist for ITSM modernizes IT operations by bringing generative AI into the flow of work. It helps teams resolve issues faster, work more efficiently, and deliver a better service experience.
Documents used for this article are from:
- ServiceNow University Course: https://learning.servicenow.com/lxp/en/pages/learning-course?id=learning_course&course_id=0b5bb9ac87...
- ServiceNow Documentation: https://www.servicenow.com/docs/r/it-service-management/now-assist-for-it-service-management-itsm/co...
Your inputs and suggestions are welcomed. Also let me know if you found any mistake or any points which may be missing in the article.
💡If you find this Helpful, do mark it as Helpful 😊
Regards,
Soham Tipnis
ServiceNow Developer || Technical Consultant
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/sohamtipnis10
