Exploring app generation

With the Now Assist for Creator application, your developers can create applications through conversations with generative AI.

App generation overview

Your developers can begin creating applications through a natural conversation with generative AI. They can describe their business process and engage in a back-and-forth conversation with Now Assist to develop an application for your organization. With this feature, your organization can expedite the initial development of a basic app that can then be customized.

Note:

Your administrators and developers must be assigned with the admin and now.assist.creator roles to use app generation. For more information about using app generation, see Generate apps with Now Assist for Creator.

Figure 1. App generation begins

There are three distinct phases to building apps with Now Assist for Creator using the app generation skill and a fourth phase to verify the app in App Engine Studio.

Figure 2. App generation workflow

Conversation

Your developers can chat with Now Assist for Creator to specify the business processes they want in the application including the details on the objectives, users, workflows, and experiences.

Refinement

Now Assist for Creator provides a summary of the application requirements based on the information collected during the conversation. The developer reviews each summary and if the requirements meet the application's needs, they move forward with generating the app. If the developer wants to make changes, they can stay in the conversation and keep editing. Now Assist continues to refine the application requirements based on their comments, and provides summaries until the developer chooses to proceed with generating the application.

Generation

Now Assist for Creator generates the application and associated components, including the tables, roles, access control lists (ACLs), and record producers.

The developers can open and verify everything that is generated in App Engine Studio, which is available with Now Assist for Creator. The developer can modify the app to make it suit your organization's needs. For example, the app's functionality can be extended by adding flows and automation, script includes, business rules, and other features.

App generation generates the following components and metadata.

Table 1. Supported metadata

Label	Name	Usage
Table	sys_db_object	Tables organize data into rows and columns for easy reference: Collection of records with information Records contain fields that store data for the application Each record corresponds to a table row, and each field on a record corresponds to a table column
Role	sys_user_role	Set of permissions that are assigned to users and groups
Access control list (ACL)	sys_security_acl	ACLs manage role-based access control for the application: Rules that define role access to resources and permitted operations ACLs that can be applied at the field or table level
Form	sys_ui_form	Interface that enables users to submit data to create or update records in a table
Record producer	sc_cat_item_producer	Type of form that enables users to enter information that generates a task-based record

App generation benefits

Benefit	Feature	Users
Quickly reach a starting point and establish a base for further development.	Generate apps with Now Assist for Creator	Developer

• General guidelines for using app generation
  Learn about general guidelines for using the app generation skill.