Now Assist and Agentic AI glossary

Learn about the terms and concepts used in Now Assist.

agents

An agent, in the context of AI, refers to a software entity that can perceive its environment, make decisions, and take actions to achieve specific goals. Agents can be simple or complex, ranging from basic reactive systems to sophisticated entities that learn and adapt over time. They are often used to automate tasks, interact with users, or manage complex processes.

agentic AI

Agentic AI refers to artificial intelligence systems that possess autonomy, enabling them to function independently and make decisions without continuous human oversight. These systems can perceive their environment, reason, learn from experience, and execute tasks to achieve specific goals. In ServiceNow AI Platform, agentic AI is powered by AI agents, agentic workflows, and Voice/Web agents.

agentic conversation

Agentic conversation refers to interactions between humans and AI systems where the AI exhibits autonomous behavior, making decisions and taking actions to achieve specific goals. In an agentic conversation, the AI agent can understand the context, reason, and respond accordingly, often without requiring explicit human direction. You can enable it in Virtual Agent, Now Assist panel, Voice/Web agents, and enhance it through Knowledge Graph, RAG, and Open Prompts.

agentic system

An agentic system is a type of software or AI that perceives its environment, makes decisions that are based on that perception, and takes actions to achieve specific goals, often with minimal human intervention. An agentic system can learn, adapt, and operate independently to solve problems or perform tasks.

agentic workflow

An agentic workflow is a structured sequence of tasks executed by one or more AI agents with minimal human intervention to fulfill a business objective. You can create and manage these workflows in AI Agent Studio by using triggers, tools, and evaluation plans, and deploy across ITSM, HR, and CSM use cases.

AI agents

AI agents are autonomous digital workers that use LLMs, tools, and workflows to complete tasks across ITSM, HR, and CSM on behalf of users. They can reason, plan, and act independently or collaboratively. You can create and manage them using AI Agent Studio and orchestrate them in AI Agent Orchestrator. These agents are embedded in Now Assist panels, Virtual Agent, and custom workflows.

The AI agent is a virtual worker that performs specific tasks leveraging tools from the ServiceNow AI Platform such as workflow, skill, script, knowledge base, etc.

AI compliance

AI compliance refers to the adherence to regulatory requirements, standards, and guidelines governing the development, deployment, and use of artificial intelligence systems. It involves ensuring that AI systems are designed and implemented in a way that meets legal, ethical, and organizational standards. This includes addressing issues related to data privacy, bias, transparency, and accountability. You can manage it through audit trails, model life cycle management, and data masking by using AI Control Tower in ServiceNow AI Platform.

AI Control Tower

AI Control Tower is a centralized governance hub for managing AI models, agents, and compliance across the ServiceNow AI Platform. It provides visibility into model usage, performance, risk and compliance, and is integrated with Now Assist Admin console.

AI governance

AI governance refers to the set of policies, procedures, and standards that guide the development, deployment, and use of AI systems within an organization. It ensures that AI systems are aligned with organizational values, comply with regulatory requirements, and are used in a responsible and transparent manner. In ServiceNow AI Platform, you can manage AI governance through AI Control Tower, AI Trust Guard, and role-based access in Now Assist Admin console.

AI steward

An AI steward within ServiceNow AI Platform is a governance role responsible for overseeing the life cycle of AI assets, including models, data sets, and prompts. You can use AI stewards in AI Control Tower to coordinate governance activities between legal, security, compliance, and innovation teams for the responsible deployment of AI agents, skills, and models across the platform.

Citation

Small, interactable number next to AI-generated content in the Now Assist panel that cites the source of the information.

custom skill

A user-defined AI capability tailored to meet specific business needs. It is created and trained using relevant data and prompts.

dynamic translation

A feature in Now Assist that translates user input to English and then translates the AI-generated responses back to the user's preferred language.

External Content Connectors

External

External Content Connectors is a ServiceNow® Store application that enables AI Search to index and search content from external repositories like Atlassian Confluence Cloud and Microsoft SharePoint Online. It expands search capabilities to include external content while maintaining original access permissions.

generative AI

A technology that uses large language model (LLM) to generate text, summaries, and other content.

Generative AI Controller

A tool to customize the generative AI experience on the ServiceNow AI Platform, including integrating third-party large language model (LLM) licenses.

guardrail

A mechanism that monitors and evaluates user input and AI-generated response to ensure it is safe and appropriate.

Knowledge Graph

The Knowledge Graph organizes structured and unstructured enterprise data into a semantic network that AI agents can query. The ServiceNowKnowledge Graph application enhances the performance of Now AssistVirtual Agent, AI agents, and generative AI skills by leveraging structured and unstructured data from various sources. It provides a customized user experience by creating and managing Knowledge Graph schemas through a user-friendly interface. The application integrates with AI agents and Virtual Agent, offering prebuilt integrations for seamless functionality.

large language model (LLM)

A complex machine-learning model trained on large datasets to generate human-like responses to user input.

multi-turn catalog ordering

A feature in Now Assist that allows users to order catalog items from the service catalog through a conversational interface.

native translation

A feature in Now Assist that uses the LLMs provided by the Now LLM Service to generate responses in the user's preferred language. You can enable and configure it in the Now Assist Admin console.

Now Assist

Now Assist refers to generative AI experiences on the ServiceNow AI Platform. With Now Assist, you can improve productivity and efficiency in your organization with better self-service, faster answers and recommended actions, and empower users to search more effectively.

Now Assist Admin console

A console for administrators to quickly set up, configure, and monitor generative AI features and capabilities offered under Now Assist.

Now Assist Analytics

A dashboard that provides insights into the usage, value, and performance of Now Assist.

Now Assist context menu

A generative AI feature that assists agents in creating and editing emails and chat replies, available in the Next Experience for specific workflows.

Now Assist Guardian

A feature that monitors and evaluates content created with generative AI to protect users from harmful, offensive, or inappropriate content. It can log incidents and prevent such content from being displayed.

Now Assist panel

A conversational interface to summarize chat, case, or incident or generate resolution notes so that you can get the context of the information more quickly.

Now Assist skill

A predefined capability within Now Assist that uses generative AI to perform tasks such as generating summaries, resolution notes, and so on.

Now LLM Service

A component of the ServiceNow AI Platform that leverages large language models (LLM) to enhance generative AI capabilities. It supports various Now Assist skills, such as chat summarization, case summarization, and resolution notes generation.

offensive content detection

A guardrail in Now Assist Guardian that logs and blocks offensive, harmful, or inappropriate content.

Orchestrator

The AI agent orchestrator is a specialized agent that plans, coordinates, and manages the execution of tasks across multiple AI agents. It holds short-term memory, tracks goals, and ensures agents collaborate effectively. This component is central to Agentic AI architecture and is configured in AI Agent Studio. The orchestrator conducts the planning and leads a team of AI agents to address a given agentic workflow.

prompt injection detection

A security feature in Now Assist Guardian that identifies and prevents malicious inputs from being used to manipulate AI-generated responses.

Q&A genius result

Q&A Genius Results in Now Assist provide users with concise, actionable answers generated from relevant knowledge articles and other sources. These results are displayed as actionable cards, each including a link to the source knowledge article for further reference.

Retrieval Augmented Generation

Retrieval Augmented Generation is a generative AI technique that enhances large language model (LLM) outputs by retrieving relevant enterprise content, such as knowledge articles or records and using it as context to generate more accurate and actionable responses. Within ServiceNow, RAG is implemented in products like Now Assist for Search, where it powers Genius Results cards by combining AI Search with generative responses. It is also configurable in AI Agent Studio, allowing admins to define RAG based tools that retrieve external or internal data to support autonomous or supervised AI agent workflows.