Creating custom agentic workflows, in-app agents, and skills with Build Agent
Summarize
Summary of Creating custom agentic workflows, in-app agents, and skills with Build Agent
Build Agent empowers ServiceNow customers to create and deploy custom agentic workflows, AI agents, and skills directly within their ServiceNow environment. This capability uses an intent-driven approach where you describe the business problem or desired outcome, and Build Agent automatically determines and generates the appropriate components—whether workflows, agents, skills, or combinations thereof. It leverages your instance’s existing data, roles, permissions, and automation, significantly reducing development time and complexity without requiring prior AI expertise.
Show less
Key Features
- Context-aware generation: Build Agent analyzes your application files and instance data to tailor agents and skills to your specific use cases.
- Reusability: Before creating new components, Build Agent scans for existing agents, skills, and workflows that may satisfy your requirements and proposes reusing them.
- Agentic workflows: Enables orchestration of multi-step automated processes by describing the end-to-end process, with Build Agent producing integrated workflows that connect agents, triggers, and actions.
- Custom skills: Allows creation of skills scoped to your application’s data model and access controls, enhancing agent capabilities without manual skill definition.
- Governance integration: Guides you through defining access controls and permissions during agent and skill creation to maintain security and compliance from the start.
- Seamless testing and management: Created agents can be tested and activated in AI Agent Studio and monitored through AI Control Tower.
Practical Benefits for ServiceNow Customers
- Accelerates development of AI-powered automation tailored to your specific business needs.
- Reduces the need for coding and AI expertise by automating complex agent, workflow, and skill creation based on your business intent.
- Ensures governance and security are embedded naturally in agent development, aligning with enterprise compliance requirements.
- Enables continuous reuse and improvement by leveraging existing components within your ServiceNow instance.
- Improves operational efficiency by automating manual tasks and orchestrating integrated workflows within your platform.
Requirements and Additional Resources
You must have ServiceNow Otto for App Engine to create agents and skills using Build Agent. Additional learning materials and detailed guidance are available through ServiceNow resources such as the Build Agent documentation and Pro Developer Academy sessions focused on AI agent development.
Use Build Agent to create and deploy custom agentic workflows, AI agents, and skills that add agentic experiences to your ServiceNow custom applications, supported by the built-in governance framework.
The agentic development capabilities in Build Agent extend beyond building applications. You can use the same intent-driven approach to create custom AI agents, design agentic workflows that orchestrate multi-step automated processes, and build skills directly within your ServiceNow environment. You don't need to specify whether you want to build an agent, a workflow, or a skill. Instead, describe the business problem or outcome you want to achieve, and Build Agent determines the appropriate components to generate. Depending on your requirements, it may create an agentic workflow, one or more agents, a set of skills, or a combination of all three.
Before generating any new components, Build Agent scans your instance for existing agents, skills, and workflows that may already satisfy your requirements. If there are matches, Build Agent proposes using the existing components or creating new ones, so you can reuse what's already available before adding to your instance. In each case, Build Agent uses your instance's existing tables, roles, permissions, and automation patterns as context.
All you need to do is describe the business problem you want to solve, and Build Agent determines whether to build an agentic workflow, an agent, or set of skills, and identifies the tools required. Drawing on its understanding of your application context, Build Agent handles the complexity of agent creation for you, with no prior knowledge required and significantly less development time.
As part of the agent and skill creation process, Build Agent guides you through defining access controls and permissions alongside the agent itself, keeping governance integrated from the start. Once created, you can test and activate the agent in AI Agent Studio, then monitor and govern it in AI Control Tower.
Custom in-app agents
Build Agent reads your application's files to understand the context, then plans and creates agents and skills tailored to your app's specific use case. For example, Build Agent can identify manual tasks within your application that are candidates for automation, then plan and build a custom agent to handle them autonomously, no code required. Once created, the agent is available in AI Agent Studio for testing, trigger setup, and further configuration.
Agentic workflows
Build Agent can generate agentic workflows that coordinate sequences of automated actions across your ServiceNow instance. Rather than scripting individual steps, you describe the end-to-end process you want to automate, and Build Agent produces a flow that connects agents, triggers, and actions in a coherent sequence. This context-awareness sets the ServiceNow approach apart from generic AI development tools: Build Agent understands constructs specific to ServiceNow to produce flows that are meaningfully integrated into the ServiceNow AI Platform.
Skills
Build Agent can generate custom skills scoped to your application's data model, without manually authoring skill definitions. You describe what you want the skill to do, and Build Agent creates skills that align with your existing table structure, field configurations, and access controls.
You can create custom skills individually, that is, they don't need to be used as tools for an agent. Think of skills as custom instructions that extend the quality of your agentic development outcomes. For more information, see Exploring Now Assist Skill Kit.
Helpful resources
- Create agentic workflows, agents, and skills
- Details on how to create custom agentic workflows, in-app agents, and skills with Build Agent.
- Pro Developer Academy: Vibe Coding AI Agents
- Pro Dev Academy session recording on building in-app agents agentically.