Exploring AI Skill Kit
Summarize
Summary of Exploring AI Skill Kit
The AI Skill Kit plugin for Now Assist allows ServiceNow customers to create and activate custom prompts and skills when the out-of-the-box Now Assist skills do not meet specific needs. This capability offers enhanced flexibility by leveraging generative AI to tailor solutions according to unique use cases.
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Before building custom skills, users should be familiar with prompt engineering and understand how large language models (LLMs) generate probabilistic outputs, which can vary even with identical prompts. Effective skill development requires iterative testing with representative data and refining prompts based on actual results.
Getting Started and User Roles
To use AI Skill Kit, customers must update the Now Assist plugins via the Application Manager and assign the snskillbuilder.admin role to users who will develop skills.
- AI Developer: Responsible for creating skills, writing and refining prompts, and configuring skill settings. This role requires prompt engineering expertise and a strong understanding of LLM behavior.
- Now Assist Admin: Reviews and activates published skills to make them available at configured touchpoints. This user must have the admin role.
AI Skill Kit Workflow
The skill development process follows these key steps:
- Define the provider: Evaluate the benefits and limitations of different LLMs suitable for your use case.
- Build the prompt: Design prompts based on your Now Assist instance architecture, determining data inputs to enhance prompt effectiveness.
- Test the prompt: Use the AI Skill Kit editor to iteratively test and refine prompts to achieve desired outcomes.
- Deploy the skill: Publish skills to various ServiceNow interfaces such as the Now Assist panel, Context Menu, Virtual Agent, Flow Action, or UI Action for end-user interaction.
Benefits for ServiceNow Customers
AI Skill Kit empowers customers to design custom generative AI solutions that seamlessly integrate into ServiceNow workflows, enhancing efficiency and effectiveness through tailored automation and AI augmentation.
- Create a skill: AI developers can build custom skills or workflows aligned to business needs.
- Create and edit prompts: Developers can configure data inputs to augment prompts dynamically.
- Test and iterate: Prompt testing ensures skills perform as expected before activation, reducing deployment risks.
Next Steps
For practical guidance on configuring and using AI Skill Kit, customers should consult detailed documentation on setup, prompt creation, skill deployment, and best practices for scoping and designing AI skills within Now Assist.
Use the AI Skill Kit plugin for Now Assist to create and activate custom prompts and skills for Now Assist.
AI Skill Kit overview
Use AI Skill Kit to create custom skills when base system Now Assist skills don't fit your needs. Custom skills enable you to have greater flexibility with Now Assist's generative AI capabilities.
Before you build a custom skill
Because you write and refine the prompts that drive your skills, you should be comfortable with the fundamentals of prompt engineering and with how a large language model (LLM) behaves.
- How an LLM produces output, including its probabilistic nature and the fact that the same prompt can produce different results on different models.
- How to write, test, and refine a prompt based on the output it produces, rather than on how you expect the model to interpret your wording.
- The use case you want to solve and the persona you're building the skill for.
Effective skill development depends on testing the prompt against representative data from your instance and refining it based on the results, not on a single example. For the full set of guidelines and the phases of building a skill, see General guidelines for AI Skill Kit. For help defining requirements and outcomes before you build, see Scoping the skill.
Get AI Skill Kit
To use AI Skill Kit, you must update your Now Assist plugins in the Application Manager. For example, update your ServiceNow Otto for ITSM plugin to the latest available release.
You must also assign the sn_skill_builder.admin role to anyone who uses AI Skill Kit.
AI Skill Kit users
| User | Description |
|---|---|
| AI developer | Creates new skills, writes and refines the prompts, and configures the skill settings. This user must have the sn_skill_builder.admin role. Building an effective skill requires prompt engineering experience and an understanding of LLM behavior. |
| Now Assist admin | Reviews and activates published skills so that they're available at the configured touch points. This user must have the admin role. |
AI Skill Kit workflow
The following diagram shows the user journey for AI Skill Kit.
- Define the provider
- Understand the benefits and potential downsides of each large language model (LLM) that you're considering using.
- Build the prompt
- You must have an understanding of the architecture of your Now Assist instance and be able to define where input data should come from. You should also have an understanding of LLM fundamentals to build an effective prompt.
- Test the prompt
- AI Skill Kit enables you to test your prompt from the editor.
- Deploy the skill
- AI Skill Kit enables you to deploy your skill to Now Assist panel, Now Assist Context Menu, Virtual Agent, Flow Action, or a UI Action.
AI Skill Kit benefits
AI Skill Kit enables you to design your own custom generative AI functionality that is then easily deployed into the ServiceNow platform. Custom skills can augment workflows with generative AI to increase effectiveness and efficiency.
| Benefit | Feature | Users |
|---|---|---|
| Create custom solutions by building a custom skill or workflow. | Create a skill | AI developer |
| Create and edit prompts for skills and configure where you want to bring in data from to augment your prompt. | Create a prompt | AI developer |
| Test and iterate on your skill before activating it. | Test a prompt | AI developer |