Public Sector Digital Services release notes

The ServiceNow® Public Sector Digital Services application enables government agencies to provide citizens, businesses, and other agencies with important services such as public records, licenses, permits, and social services. Public Sector Digital Services was enhanced and updated in the Australia release.

Public Sector Digital Services highlights for the Australia release

• Manage field operations and view/create investigative tasks directly within the case context using the Tasks tab, found within an ICM investigative case record. Use the Create Work Order button to allow a case to be escalated to an Field Service Management work order without leaving the ICM workspace.
• ServiceNow Otto® is the new AI experience brand. This change is reflected in the name of ServiceNow products, including ServiceNow Otto for Public Sector Digital Services (PSDS). Your product entitlements remain unchanged. Check your entitlements to determine your access to specific features.
• Control the visibility of the grant program lifecycle stepper on the Grant Program record page by disabling or enabling it per instance.
• Route flagged documents back to applicants, prompting re-upload of the corrected document, maintaining a complete audit trail within the system. Flagged documents now persist in the system rather than being deleted immediately.
• Enter award information and allocate budget across categories using the restructured Program Budget activity. The new three-section workflow separates total program budget, budget categories, and award allocation types for a clearer, more intuitive budget configuration experience. Budget allocations and balances update in real-time as you enter percentages across categories.

• Enable other governments to launch citizen-facing services using the GOV.UK Developer Toolkit, a library of reusable portal widgets that follow UK GDS guidelines, enabling ServiceNow developers to build compliant service portals for UK government customers.

• Submit funding and decline recommendations, as a Grant Program Manager for any scored subset of proposals as a Funding Allocation Request, enabling incremental funding decisions without waiting for the entire portfolio to complete review. The Grant Program Director can approve or reject each request, with rejected proposals returning to the working queue for future consideration.

• Release result letters per proposal as each Funding Allocation Request decision is approved, rather than waiting for all decisions across the program to be finalized. This enables rolling notification of award, decline, or ineligibility outcomes in Grants Management.

• Consolidate the case narrative, evidence, entities, team assignments, investigative tasks, and related cases into a single record page with Investigative Case Management Foundation.
• Manage persons, property, vehicles, organizations, locations, and events, including specialized entity types like firearms with detailed identification, specifications, origin, and ballistic information, and link them to cases and to each other with Investigative Case Management Entity Management.
• Manage physical and digital evidence tied to investigative cases, with structure fields for collection details, source and context, security classification, and links to related entities such as persons, vehicles, locations, and organizations using Investigative Case Management Evidence Management.
• Create Chain of custody documentation in every evidence record, capturing each transfer from the moment of collection.
• Synthesize narratives, entities, evidence, and activity history into a structured summary using Investigative Case Management Case Summarization.
• Validate large volumes of uploaded documents, verify information, flag issues, and highlight key details for case agents with the Document Screening Al Skill, used with ServiceNow Otto for Public Sector Digital Services (PSDS).

See Public Sector Digital Services (PSDS) for more information.

Important:

Public Sector Digital Services is available in the ServiceNow Store. For details, see the "Activation information" section of these release notes.

Important information for upgrading Public Sector Digital Services to Australia

After the upgrade, certain public sector menus and menu items in CSM Configurable Workspace revert to their original CSM label names. You can relabel these items for public sector use by updating the labels for the Customer, Accounts, and Service Organizations UX list category records. For more details on relabeling, navigate to All > Constituent Service > Administration > Guided Setup, and select Configurable Workspace for Public Sector Digital Services > Customize Workspace Labels Manually.

Customers who have not opted into new third-party LLM models may be silently routed to them during skill execution. If the new model is not provisioned or available in the customer's environment, this will result in skill execution failures. Check the models your skills are using in the AI Admin Hub console.

New in the Australia release

Enhancements to the grants management Workspace- Rolling grant approvals

Propose awards and declines for any scored subset of applications at any time. The Rolling grant approval feature enhances the Grants management funding workflow, by giving Grant Program Managers the flexibility to propose awards and declines for any scored subset of applications at any time, without waiting for the entire proposal portfolio to complete review. From this release, Grant Program Managers can choose to process funding decisions incrementally as proposals are scored, or continue working in the traditional full-portfolio model.

The feature introduces the Funding Allocation Request as a new record type — an approval packet that groups a subset of proposals for Grant Program Director review. The Grant Program Director can either approve the Funding Allocation Request or reject it, returning all proposals in the batch, regardless of whether they were on the funding or decline track. The proposals in the rejected batch feed back into the Grant Program Manager's working queue, re-entering the funding pool for future review and funding allocation opportunities. The Funding Allocation Requests introduce an alternative to the previous all-or-none approval model and enable continuous, long-running grant programs to operate on a single program record.

Release result letters per proposal for Rolling grant approval scenarios in Grants Management. Once a proposal’s funding or decline decision is approved through its Funding Allocation Request (FAR), the corresponding award, decline, or ineligibility letter can be issued to that applicant independently—without waiting for program-wide completion.

Investigative Case Management

Create an investigative case using Investigative Case Management. Investigative Case Management guides investigators through the process of organizing, tracking, and resolving investigations, ​developing case details,​ assigning investigators and team members​, and track evidence with logging and metadata. The following features are available as part of Investigative Case Management:

• Entity Management
• Evidence Management

With Entity Management, investigators can create investigative tasks and workflows for investigative activities with automated metadata capture (time, source, entities, classification)​, as well as define processing with teams and attorneys and collaborate across agencies/divisions. With Evidence Management, investigators can log and triage evidence metadata (digital, physical, testimonial)​ and maintain an audit trail (Chain of Custody logging), as well as draft, review, and create reports with supporting evidence​​.

Task Tab and Field Service Management case escalation in Investigative Case Management

Use the Tasks tab in the investigative case record to view and create investigative tasks directly within the case context. Use the Create Work Order to escalate a case directly to an Field Service Management work order without leaving the ICM workspace​​.

ServiceNow product tiers

The ServiceNow AI Platform now brings you a new AI experience with three licensing tiers available:

• Foundation: AI basics to deliver insights
• Advanced: AI to boost productivity across relevant use cases
• Prime: Act autonomously with all AI assets, and create your own

Depending on your license, you will have access to certain application features, generative AI skills, agentic workflows, and AI agents.

Use ServiceNow Otto for Public Sector Digital Services (PSDS) Skills to create case narratives and screen documents

Complete case narratives and make refinements to investigative case records using ServiceNow Otto for PSDS Gen-AI skills. Investigators can streamline case narrative refinement by editing content, adjusting tone, and regenerating the narrative for clarity and completeness.

Use the Case Narrative Refinement AI Agent to refine case narratives in Investigative Case Management

Produce clear, accurate, and well-structured case narratives using the Case narrative refinement AI agent, embedded within the case record page. This AI agent analyzes existing narratives and related case data to suggest improvements in clarity, structure, tone, and completeness, and highlighting gaps and inconsistencies.

Document Screening AI Skill for Social Benefits Playbook

Validate large volumes of uploaded documents, verify information, flag issues, and highlight key details for case agents using the Social Benefits Playbook with the Document Screening Al Skill, part of ServiceNow Otto for Public Sector Digital Services (PSDS).

GOV.UK Developer Toolkit GDS Service Portal

Launch citizen-facing services using the GOV.UK Developer Toolkit, a collection of pre-built, GDS-compliant portal widgets that developers and partners can use to build service portals for UK government agencies. The GOV.UK Developer Toolkit comes with standardized components (homepage, FAQs, Registration, Profile, login, case detail, knowledge search, record producers) that can be used to assemble portals that meet UK accessibility and design standards and are compliant with GOV.UK Design System patterns​. WCAG 2.2AA compliant, and 400% zoom/reflow support has been added.

Granular configuration admin roles

Several new granular admin roles enable admins to complete administrative configuration tasks on the Public Sector Digital Services platform without requiring the full admin role. These granular access roles enable a high-level administrator to define and assign custom roles that contain only the specific permissions a user needs, decreasing the number of users with full administrative power over the instance. For more information on granular admin roles, see Granular admin roles.

UI changes

Updated Coral theme

The Coral theme has been improved to enhance usability across web, mobile, and portal experiences that use Next Experience and Core UI:

• A fully overhauled color system for smoother gradients and better contrast.
• Softer outlines and more rounded components for a new, accessible look.
• A significantly improved dark mode with deeper blue tones for reduced eye strain.
• New AI gradient styles and subtle animations to highlight intelligent features.
• Smarter focus behavior that reduces visual clutter for mouse users.

Enhancements to Constituent Service Portals

UI Enhancements have been made to all Public Sector Digital Services constituent portals by replacing legacy widgets (for example, portal banners, data lists) with standardized, CSM Configurable Widgets and components. The update verifies backward compatibility, migration guidance, usage analytics, and provide training for admins, and also enables dynamic data rendering, and better filtering across service flows.

Enhancements to Investigative Case Management Configurable Case role-based access

Extend write access and restrict read access to cases based on Assigned Office, Assignment Group, or both to allow automatic case access alignment with organizational units without managing the Teams tab manually.

Enhancements to Document Screening

Applicants can select a specific document type from a pre-configured, category-scoped list during upload, stored on the document record and displayed read-only to internal agents in both portal and Workspace views.

Changed in this release

Large language models on the ServiceNow AI Platform®

Starting with the September 2026 release, Now LLM Service is being prepared for future deprecation. The Now LLM Service is no longer the default model provider for new or inactive AI assets, and it is no longer selected by default in AI Control Tower. A third-party LLM is now selected by default for AI assets, while existing configurations using the Now LLM Service continue unchanged. The Now LLM Service is still available for manual selection. For details, see the Deprecation Process [KB0867184] article in the Now Support Knowledge Base.

Now Assist > ServiceNow Otto® announcement

Now Assist introduced AI on the platform. As that experience has evolved, there's a new name for the experience. ServiceNow Otto® is the conversational AI platform integrated into ServiceNow workflows. It provides agentic capabilities, supports multimodal interactions across web, mobile, and messaging channels, and enables autonomous orchestration for cross-system workflows.

Enhancements to Grants Management: Program Setup

• Grants Management Program Budget activity

  Use the restructured Program Budget step that is now organized into three sections: Program Budget, Budget Categories, and Award Allocation. Grant Program Managers can select from three award models—Single Award, Multiple Equal Awards, or Multiple Variable Awards—with budgets automatically derived from the Awards category. Real-time calculations update the Budget allocated and Balance left fields as you enter category percentages. This enhancement prevents completion until all of the program budget is allocated across the categories.

• Grants Management Setup

  Disable the six-step grant program lifecycle stepper at the instance level, reducing ambiguity about grant program state. By default, the stepper indicating the Preparing Program, Accepting Proposals, Evaluating, Awarding, Post-Award, and Closed states is hidden in the Grant Program record page and admins can enable it if required for deployments that follow a batch or competitive grant lifecycle. When turned off, program state is conveyed through existing status fields.

Enhancements to Grants Management: Proposal Playbook

• Grants Management Screen activity

  Flag and route a document back to the applicant while reviewing the proposal details in the screening step. The document persists in the Flagged section with all metadata intact. Grant program managers and Grant program directors can reverse the flag by selecting the reset status icon to move it back to Requires Verification with no data loss. Select Request Documents at the bottom of the Verify Documents screen to route flagged documents back to applicants automatically; this action creates a case task assigned to the applicant, sends a notification in the applicant portal prompting re-upload, and changes the document status to Pending Resubmission. Once the applicant uploads the corrected document, the Upload Additional Documents activity closes and you can continue verification, maintaining a complete audit trail throughout the process.

ServiceNow product tiers

The ServiceNow AI Platform now brings you a new AI experience with three licensing tiers available:

• Foundation: AI basics to deliver insights
• Advanced: AI to boost productivity across relevant use cases
• Prime: Act autonomously with all AI assets, and create your own

Depending on your license, you will have access to certain application features, generative AI skills, agentic workflows, and AI agents.

Activation information

Install Public Sector Digital Services by requesting it from the ServiceNow Store. Visit the ServiceNow Store to view all the available apps, and for information about submitting requests to the store. For cumulative release notes information for all released apps, see the ServiceNow Store version history release notes.

Related ServiceNow applications and features

Customer Service Management

The ServiceNow®Customer Service Management application enables customer service organizations and service operations to collaborate and resolve customer problems.

CSM Configurable Workspace

The ServiceNow®CSM Configurable Workspace application provides government agents with the tools to research information, respond to questions from the public, and resolve cases.

AI Admin Hub

The ServiceNow®Now Assist application uses generative AI to enhance user productivity and efficiency through conversation and proactive experiences.