Agentic workflows, agents, and skills

  • Release version: Australia
  • Updated July 28, 2026
  • 2 minutes to read
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    Summary of Agentic workflows, agents, and skills

    Agentic workflows, agents, and skills enable ServiceNow customers to transform business requirements into fully configured AI artifacts within their custom scoped applications. This capability is part of Build Agent and allows you to generate agents and skills tailored to your application's data model, roles, and access controls without needing to build them from scratch.

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    Only users with the Build Agent - Prime role can create agents and skills, and access to these features depends on your entitlements. Development requires use of ServiceNow Studio or the ServiceNow IDE.

    Key Features

    • Skill Creation: Build Agent supports creating skills using multiple tool types such as FlowAction, ServiceNow Otto Skill, Inline Script, Explicit Script, SubFlow, and WebSearch. Skills must be published to be used by other skills.
    • Agent Creation: Agents can be created using various components including catalog items, conversational topics, flow actions, Otto Skills, record operations, scripts, search retrieval, subflows, and web searches.
    • Reuse of Existing Components: Only FlowActions and Subflows already part of your app scope are reused rather than creating new ones, maintaining consistency and scope alignment.
    • Search Retrieval Tool: For agents requiring knowledge retrieval, Build Agent configures a search retrieval tool that uses existing search profiles and semantic search indexes (available from Australia Patch 3 onwards) to optimize data queries relevant to your use case.
    • Four-Phase Generation Pattern: Build Agent applies a structured approach consisting of Assess (evaluating readiness), Analyze (identifying use cases), Design (proposing architecture), and Build (generating scoped agents and skills).
    • Scoped to Custom Applications: Agents and skills are tailored to your specific application context, including tables, roles, business rules, and ACLs, resulting in domain-specific AI artifacts. Applications lacking data or configuration receive more generic agents.
    • Governance and Deployment: Generated agents are automatically registered in AI Control Tower for centralized governance and are deployed using standard update sets, ensuring streamlined management and compliance.

    Practical Benefits for ServiceNow Customers

    • Accelerates AI integration by automating the creation of agents and skills based on existing application context.
    • Ensures AI artifacts respect application security and data models, reducing risk and increasing relevance.
    • Supports a variety of AI tools and workflows, enhancing flexibility in how AI capabilities are embedded in business processes.
    • Improves maintainability through reuse of existing components and centralized governance.
    • Facilitates knowledge retrieval features that leverage your organization's current search configurations for more accurate results.

    Build Agent can generate agentic workflows, agents, and skills scoped to your custom app. Turn business requirements into configured AI artifacts without building from scratch.

    Only users with Build Agent - Prime may create agents and skills.

    Verify that you have access to ServiceNow Studio or the ServiceNow IDE.
    Note:
    Your entitlements determine whether you have access to agentic workflows, agents, and skills in Build Agent.

    Skills must be published before they can be used as a tool by another skill.

    Build Agent supports the following tool creation:
    Note:
    1. *You can use only FlowActions and Subflows that are already part of your app scope. Build Agent reuses existing FlowActions and Subflows instead of creating new ones.
    2. **When you create an agent that requires knowledge retrieval, Build Agent can configure a search retrieval tool scoped to your use case. The tool queries your existing search profiles to identify the best match, retrieves the associated search sources and return fields, and checks whether semantic search indexes are available.
      Note:
      You must be on Australia Patch 3 or higher to use the search retrieval tool.

    The agentic capability turns business requirements into fully configured agents, skills, and agentic workflows for custom applications. It first evaluates existing app context, such as tables, roles, business rules, and metadata. Then Build Agent applies a four-phase pattern to generate artifacts scoped to your application's data model, roles, and ACLs:

    Assess
    Evaluates data model readiness for AI.
    Analyze
    Identifies use cases from existing tables, roles, and flows.
    Design
    Proposes an architecture with a recommended quick-win.
    Build
    Generates agents and skills scoped to the application's data model, roles, and ACLs.

    In-App agents can work with any custom scoped application. Applications with real data, established roles, and defined automation produce more targeted, domain-specific artifacts. Applications with no data or configuration produce agents that aren't scoped to a specific data model.

    Note:
    Generated agents are automatically registered in AI Control Tower for centralized governance, and artifacts deploy through standard update sets.