Workflow Automation CoE > Flows > Getting Started with Intelligent Approvals
Intelligent Approvals
Let your policy documents do the approval work
Approvals are everywhere on a ServiceNow instance: change requests, travel expenses, catalog items, purchase orders. Most organizations have already done the hard work of writing down how those approvals should go. The policy lives in a PDF, a knowledge article, or a Word document somewhere. Someone put real effort into it.
Then that document gets handed to a developer.
The developer reads it, interprets it, translates it into workflow conditions and approval rules, and the business user reviews the result to confirm it matches the intent. By the time approval logic is live in production, weeks may have passed and the handoff has introduced at least some drift between what the policy says and what the workflow actually enforces. When the policy changes, the process starts over.
Even after all that work, approvals still wait in a queue for a person to click a button.
Intelligent Approvals changes both of these problems at once.
What Intelligent Approvals does
Intelligent Approvals is a new AI-powered capability that reads your existing business policy documents and uses them directly as the source of truth for approval decisions. There is no translation layer and no developer required to set it up. The same document your policy team maintains is what the platform evaluates against at runtime.
Here is how the four-step process works:
1. Import your policy document
Upload a PDF of your existing policy: a travel and expense policy, a change advisory board guideline, a procurement policy. The AI reads the document and identifies the approval triggers, decision criteria, and conditions it contains.
2. Test before you go live
The platform generates test scenarios based on the rules it found in your document and shows you what decision it would make for each one. You can see what percentage of incoming requests the AI can handle automatically, based on the specificity of your document.
3. Refine for accuracy
The AI surfaces improvement suggestions directly from your document: ambiguous language, missing conditions, or conflicting rules that would cause it to escalate to a person unnecessarily. You can take those suggestions back through your own review process and upload an updated version.
4. Automatic decisions at runtime
Once your policy is published, every incoming request that matches the triggering criteria is evaluated in real time. The outcome is one of three things: auto-approve, auto-reject, or "can't decide." When the AI can't decide, the request falls back to your existing approval workflow for a person to handle. Every decision is logged with which policy was referenced, what part of the policy applied, and the rationale for the outcome.
What this looks like in practice
A few use cases that have come up frequently in conversations with customers:
Change management
Most CABs already have documented guidelines for which changes require which approvals. Those same documents can be uploaded as policies and enforced automatically. Standard changes that clearly meet documented criteria approve in seconds rather than sitting in a queue.
Travel and expenses
A global T&E policy with conditions based on region, role, and cost is a natural fit. An AI that can read a rule like "EMEA employees may approve travel under $2,000 without manager sign-off for conferences on the approved list" can apply that rule consistently every time, at scale.
Catalog item requests
Catalog requests with clear criteria such as department, cost threshold, or asset type can be evaluated automatically, freeing service desk staff from routine approvals while ensuring policy compliance on every request.
Intelligent Approvals works alongside your existing workflows, not instead of them. When an approval has already been dispositioned by the AI, your existing ask-for-approval step honors that outcome. Duplicate approvals are explicitly prevented: the AI result is honored once, and your workflow moves forward.
Who it is for
Intelligent Approvals is designed for the people who own and maintain policy documents: managers, business partners, policy specialists, and the teams who support them. Creating and publishing a policy requires no developer involvement. The policy owner uploads the document, reviews the test results, and publishes them.
It works best for routine, single-step, or low-risk approvals where the consequences of an incorrect decision are not significant. Complex approval scenarios with highly custom logic, manual approval assignments, or multi-step parallel approvals are on the roadmap for future iterations.
Availability and requirements
What do you need to get started?
|
Requirement |
Detail |
|
Controlled GA (July 2026) |
Australia Patch 4 or Zurich Patch 11 |
|
License: full feature |
Now Assist for Platform (included in Pro Plus), or AI Platform Advanced or Prime |
|
License: policy creation only |
AI Platform Foundation |
|
Assist cost |
0 assists to create or publish a policy; 25 assists per approval evaluation at runtime |
|
Supported document types |
PDF (now); Knowledge Base articles, IRM Policies, and external cloud documents on the roadmap |
If you are not yet on Now Assist for Platform, speak with your account team. All new and renewed contracts include Now Assist entitlements.
Install now from the ServiceNow Store:
Intelligent Approvals on the ServiceNow Store
Share your feedback
We are actively looking for customers to test Intelligent Approvals and share what they are seeing. Your feedback directly shapes what we build next, from document type support to handling of more complex approval scenarios.
If you are interested in joining the feedback program, fill out the intake form linked below. We will be in touch to coordinate access and next steps.
Sign up for the Intelligent Approvals Feedback Program
For questions, contact the product team directly: Brian Bimschleger, Director of Product Management for Workflow Automation, at brian.bimschleger@servicenow.com.
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