AI in ITOM AIOps

  • Release version: Australia
  • Updated July 2, 2026
  • 5 minutes to read
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    Summary of AI in ITOM AIOps

    AI features in ITOM AIOps empower ServiceNow customers to enhance IT operations by automating alert triage, incident investigation, service health analysis, and reliability improvements. Utilizing generative AI and agentic workflows, these capabilities reduce manual effort, accelerate problem resolution, and improve service reliability. Availability of specific AI features depends on your ServiceNow licensing tier.

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    Agentic Workflows

    Agentic workflows use AI agents to autonomously or semi-autonomously manage alert-related tasks. Key workflows include:

    • Analyze alert impact: Investigates alerts from observability tools (e.g., Dynatrace, New Relic), providing insights on severity, impact, ownership, and root causes to help operators quickly understand alert blast radius.
    • Manage alerts autonomously: Automates alert triage, impact analysis, root cause investigation, and generates summaries and reports, enabling operations teams to handle incoming alerts without manual intervention.
    • Analyze potential impact: Assesses how change requests affect servers and services, helping change managers evaluate risk before approval by automatically analyzing affected configuration items (CIs) and services.

    AI Agents

    Standalone AI agents run on schedules or triggers without user input. For example:

    • SLO creator agent: Automatically generates service level objectives (SLOs) for services or CIs based on historical incidents and alerts, helping teams adopt SLOs efficiently. Notifications are sent when SLOs are created or error budgets are low.

    Generative AI Skills

    These on-demand AI capabilities generate analyses, summaries, or descriptions to assist operators in specific tasks:

    • Alert analysis skill: Produces human-readable summaries and technical context for individual alerts to support investigation.
    • Alert group analysis and description generation skills: Provide simplified or comprehensive AI-generated summaries of alert groups, improving understanding and communication of alert significance.
    • Past incident analysis skill: Retrieves and summarizes historical incidents related to an alert, including resolution details and contacts, aiding faster resolution.
    • AI-generated incident creation skill: Automatically creates incidents with AI-generated descriptions directly from alerts, reducing manual documentation effort.
    • Service Observability analyze dashboard skill: Summarizes dashboard data and highlights insights or anomalies within a selected time frame, helping operators quickly interpret unfamiliar dashboards.
    • Analyze service health skill: Assesses overall service health by analyzing all relevant observability dashboards, assisting in impact assessment, root cause identification, and incident response.

    Practical Benefits for ServiceNow Customers

    • Accelerate alert triage and incident investigation with AI-generated insights and automated workflows.
    • Improve service reliability by automatically generating and monitoring SLOs based on historical data.
    • Reduce operational overhead through autonomous alert management and incident creation.
    • Gain clearer, AI-powered understanding of alert impacts, service health, and change risks.
    • Enhance decision-making and response times with summarized dashboards and historical incident analytics.

    AI features in ITOM AIOps help operators triage alerts, investigate incidents, analyze service health, and improve service reliability using generative AI and agentic workflows.

    AI features in ITOM AIOps span several products. The following tables summarize all available AI features by type and product.

    Note:
    Depending on your license, you will have access to certain application features, generative AI skills, agentic workflows, and AI agents. For more information, see ServiceNow product tiers.

    Agentic workflows

    ServiceNow Otto for ITOM includes agentic workflows that use AI agents to complete alert management and investigation tasks autonomously or with minimal operator input.

    Table 1. Agentic workflows in ITOM AIOps
    Product AI feature Description Use case Resources
    Event Management, Express List Analyze alert impact agentic workflow Uses observability AI agents to investigate an alert and surface information about its severity, impact, ownership, and potential root causes. Integrates with observability tools such as Dynatrace, Kentik, and New Relic. An operator selects an alert from an observability-connected source and wants to understand its blast radius, identify responsible teams, and find potential root causes before escalating.
    Event Management, Express List Manage alerts autonomously agentic workflow Provides a unified AI-driven process that automates alert triage, impact analysis, and root cause investigation. Generates reports, summarizes key insights and possible next steps, and stores structured findings in the alert record. Also analyzes Health Log Analytics alerts in an alert group and can classify alerts as proactive or reactive. An operations team wants alerts to be triaged, analyzed, and summarized automatically as they arrive, with AI insights available in Express List without manual intervention.
    Event Management, Express List Analyze potential impact agentic workflow Analyzes how a change request might affect relevant servers and services. The agent verifies prerequisites, retrieves the change request, selects up to 10 affected servers, identifies matches with suggested services, and displays an impact analysis in the ServiceNow Otto panel. The analysis is also saved to the change request work notes. Includes Service Mapping Candidate and Service Mapping Candidates Impact skills. An operator or change manager wants to assess the risk of a change request before approving it, without manually reviewing all affected CIs.

    AI agents

    Standalone AI agents in ITOM AIOps run autonomously on a schedule or in response to a trigger, without requiring user input.

    Table 2. AI agents in ITOM AIOps
    Product AI feature Description Use case Resources
    Service Reliability Management SLO creator agent Runs every 14 days and processes up to 25 services or CIs that do not already have auto-generated SLOs. Analyzes historical alerts, incidents, and outages to generate one SLO per service or CI with up to 10 service level indicators (SLIs). Generated SLOs are active by default. Email notifications are sent to team managers when SLOs are generated and when the error budget falls to 25% or lower. Requires ServiceNow Otto for ITOM and Service Reliability Management. A team wants to adopt SLOs without manually defining them, using historical incident and alert data to generate a starting point for each service. SLO creator agent

    Generative AI skills

    Generative AI skills in ITOM AIOps are discrete, on-demand capabilities that operators invoke to generate analyses, summaries, or descriptions for a specific alert, group, or service.

    Table 3. Generative AI skills in ITOM AIOps
    Product AI feature Description Use case Resources
    Event Management, Express List Alert analysis skill Generates a human-readable brief of an alert and additional technical information to support investigation. Available in the ServiceNow Otto panel, on the alert Overview tab in Service Operations Workspace, and in the Express List preview panel. Analyses are provided in English regardless of the language used in the alert description. An operator opens an alert and wants a quick summary of what it means and what to investigate next.
    Express List Alert group analysis skill Generates a simplified, human-readable description of an alert group and technical information to support investigation. Available in the Express List preview panel. An operator selects an alert group and wants to understand its overall significance before deciding how to respond. View an alert group analysis by ServiceNow Otto in Express List
    Express List Alert group description generation skill Generates a comprehensive description of an alert group that encompasses all alerts within the group. The generated description replaces the original alert group description. An operator wants to replace a system-generated alert group description with a meaningful, AI-generated summary that reflects the full scope of the group. Generate an alert group description in Express List using ServiceNow Otto
    Event Management, Express List Past incident analysis skill Queries historical records to find related past incidents and analyzes their frequency, criticality, work notes, and resolution. Presents a summary of the most relevant incidents in the ServiceNow Otto panel, including resolution strategies and contact details for teams who resolved similar incidents. An operator is investigating an alert and wants to know whether similar issues have occurred before and how they were resolved.
    Express List AI-generated incident creation skill Creates an incident with a human-readable, AI-generated description directly from an alert in Express List. An operator determines that an alert requires an incident and wants the incident description generated automatically rather than written manually. Create an incident from an alert with ServiceNow Otto in Express List
    Service Observability Analyze dashboard skill Summarizes a single Service Observability dashboard using generative AI, including calling out insights found in the charts. The skill analyzes data within the selected time period and reports any insights it finds. Results remain available for one hour. Requires manual activation. An operator wants a quick orientation to an unfamiliar dashboard or needs to identify anomalies in chart data without manually reviewing each chart.
    Service Observability Analyze service health skill Analyzes all available Service Observability dashboards for a selected service. Detects insights, reports on general service health, and helps operators assess service impact, identify root causes, and streamline incident response. When activated, the skill also runs automatically during incident investigation from the Investigate tab. Requires manual activation. An operator is triaging an incident and needs to quickly assess service impact, identify root causes, and determine next steps across all dashboards for the affected service.