Exploring ServiceNow Otto for Strategic Portfolio Management

Use ServiceNow® Now Assist skills and AI agents in multiple SPM workspaces to transform Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) into a continuous value engine-embedding intelligence across every stage and to provide optimize resources and smarter investments resulting in delivering continuous value.

Skills

The ServiceNow Otto for SPM application includes the generative AI skills and features that enable your product, project, portfolio, and demand managers to leverage Now Assist skills so that they can streamline their processes and workflows.

Quick story generation

As a product manager or agile team member, generate complete user stories directly from an epic using the Quick story generation skill, without lengthy conversations or manual authoring. Available in both Agile Development 2.0 and EAP applications, this Now Assist feature removes the friction of story creation so your team can focus on delivery.

To generate a story, open an epic and select Generate Story from the Stories related list. Enter one or two lines of context to guide Now Assist, then select Generate. Now Assist generates a story title, description, and acceptance criteria based on the epic and your input. Review and refine all fields inline before saving the story directly to the epic's related list.

By using the Quick story generation skill, you can:

• Create well-structured stories instantly, reducing the time and effort spent on manual story authoring.
• Generate complete stories including title, description, and acceptance criteria, ensuring consistency across your backlog.
• Maintain full control with inline editing of all AI-generated fields before saving, preserving human oversight throughout the process.
• Use a fast, non-conversational option in both Agile Development 2.0 and EAP. In EAP, you also have access to the conversational Agile story generation agent for creating multiple stories for an epic.

Goal insights skill

Generate insights for goals to gain predictive, actionable visibility into goal health using the Goal insights skill. The skill analyzes the goal, its targets, subgoals, and aligned work, then delivers concise, data‑driven insights—including AI forecasted status, confidence of achieving the goal, targets at risk, delayed or stalled aligned work and recommendations—helping goal owners and contributors proactively manage risks and improve goal outcomes. You can trigger the skill by selecting the Goal insights or Show insights on the grid view or goals' full details page respectively.

Note:

When you generate insights for a goal, insights are also generated individually for each of its targets.

Generate a concise, structured summary of any demand using the demand summarization Now Assist skill. The skill reviews the demand fields and related lists and helps create a clear summary of the demand. You can trigger the skill by selecting the Summarize button on the demand form.

The generated summary is displayed in a summary card in the demand form.

Generate acceptance criteria skill

As a product manager, generate clear, comprehensive, and testable acceptance criteria for your user stories, instead of spending hours writing and refining them manually.

You can review and refine the suggested options to ensure they meet your story requirements without slowing down planning. By helping you streamline generating acceptance criteria as a process, this skill helps save time, improve quality, and speed up delivery with cleaner backlogs and better collaboration.

Target generation skill

Generate measurable targets from goal's information and optional context with the Target generation skill in Strategic Planning Workspace. The skill automatically populates key fields in the target creation form, ensuring precision and alignment to the goal. This enables teams to define clear and measurable outcomes and accelerate the target creation process.

Identify similar records skill

Detect similar demand records using the identify similar records Now Assist skill. The skill identifies similar demand records based on contextual similarity in the name, description, and business case content, with a minimum 85% similarity threshold. It also excludes the outdated and irrelevant records. You can trigger the skill by selecting the Identify similar demands button on the demand record page.

The similar demand records identified by Now Assist are displayed in the Similar Demands related list as well as in a message banner at the top of the record page.

Refine records

Improve record quality by enabling AI assistance in the rich and long fields of Product idea, Demands, Epic, Projects, Capability, Features, Stories, Project tasks, Risks, Strategic priorities, Goals, Targets, Initiatives, Feedback, Milestones, and Story forms. You can enable text refinement with the Elaborate and Shorten options on the records to support portfolio, project, product, demand managers and agile team members in creating and editing records content more effectively.

Multi feedback summarization or Feedback summarization

Provides your product managers with a concise and informative summary of the lengthy customer feedback comments. The product managers can generate a summary from the name and description of one or multiple feedback records so that they can quickly understand the feedback context. The generated summary can be directly converted to an execution item. Now Assist can generate a summary from the feedback only if the feedback has at least 60 words in the fields that are used for the input data. The 60-word minimum optimizes the experience by verifying that there’s enough information to make a summary.

The following example shows a summarization of multiple feedback records by using the multi feedback summarization skill.

Figure 1. Multi feedback summarization skill

Project doc summarization, Planning Item doc summarization, or EAP doc summarization

Provides your product managers with a concise and informative summary of the selected or complete text by using Now Assist in Docs. Your product managers can summarize, elaborate, or shorten the selected or complete content on Docs to quickly understand the key information by using the Project doc summarization (Project Workspace), Planning item doc summarization (Strategic Planning), or EAP doc summarization (Enterprise Agile Planning) skill.

Figure 2. Now Assist in Docs

Project insights generation

Monitor the progress and changes in each project through the Project insights generation skill. With minimal effort, your project managers can schedule a cadence for generating project insights and receive it via email. They can track key elements such as the project, project task, milestone, resource assignment, ridac, and financial. They can also prioritize key elements to focus on. They can also decide the cadence of receiving project insight emails.

Figure 3. Now Assist Project insights generation skill

Conversational experiences for demand creation

Simplify the process of creating a Demand within the Employee Service Management (ESC) portal by using the Now Assist conversational catalog creation capability.

• Avoid searching through the list of catalog items to find the right item for demand creation.
• Answer contextual questions in the chat to auto-populate the relevant fields in the Demand form.

If Microsoft Teams and Mobile are enabled as a display location for Now Assist in Virtual Agent, users can use the conversational experience to create a demand in those applications too.

Note:

This skill is available within the Platform category of the AI Admin Hub console.

Project status generation

Generate an AI‑assisted project status report using project status generation skill.

With project status generation skill, Now Assist predicts overall and dimension‑level project health (such as schedule, cost, resources, and scope), generates an executive summary using weekly project data, and provides a rationale for each prediction. Project Managers can generate a status report where AI pre-populates key fields:

• Overall project health
• Health by dimensions (schedule/cost/resources/scope)
• Executive summary
• Rationale/analysis for each predicted health value

This skill streamlines the process of status report creation in Project Workspace.

AI Admin Hub console

An administrator can use the AI Admin Hub console in Strategic Planning Workspace to activate and manage Now Assist features and skills in Workspace. For more information about the AI Admin Hub console, see Overview tab in Now Assist Admin.

AI agents

The ServiceNow AI agents use LLMs (Large Language Models) to process tasks, from basic responses to complex problem-solving and optimize the live agent workflows. For more information on Now Assist AI agents, see Using AI agent or agentic workflows in ServiceNow Otto for Strategic Portfolio Management.

Related concepts

• Configure Now Assist Admin features
• Using AI agent or agentic workflows in ServiceNow Otto for Strategic Portfolio Management

Related topics

• Exploring Now Assist Admin
• AI Agent Studio