Now Assist AI agents release notes

The ServiceNow® Now Assist AI agents application provides solutions that can perceive the environment, decide, and proactively act to achieve specific goals without the need for constant human oversight. Now Assist AI agents is a new application in the Yokohama release.

Now Assist AI agents highlights for the Yokohama release

Yokohama Patch 11

• Review changes to Now Assist usage measurement.
• Execute agentic workflows, AI agents, and tools in AI Agent Studio with role masking.
• Additional role configuration is required for agentic workflows and AI agents included with Now Assist applications.
• Run and review agentic workflow executions on forms in the Core UI and workspaces.
• Framework extensibility with a new condition builder.
• Support multilingual conversations.

Yokohama Patch 6

• Create and maintain versions of LLM instructions for AI agents and agentic workflows to help organize and iterate on prompts and test their effectiveness.
• Follow updated guided setup steps for agentic workflows and AI agents with additional guidance for successful instructions sent to the LLM.
• Duplicate existing script, record operations, and search retrieval tools to reduce the work needed to create unique AI agents.
• Monitor new analytics in the AI Agents Analytics dashboard to track valuable insights in customer satisfaction with AI interactions.
• Use Google Gemini and Anthropic Claude on AWS as AI model providers for Now Assist skills and AI agents in addition to Now LLM Service and Azure OpenAI.
• View the agentic workflow and AI agent activity on your AI Agent Studio.
• Map the right agents for agentic workflow execution with Dynamic orchestrator in Virtual Agent for better performance and accuracy.
• Create different types of AI agents.
• Custom output transformation strategies for an AI agent.
• Execute AI agents and agentic workflows from workspace or Core UI.
• Run AI agents and agentic workflows in a non-interactive execution mode.

Yokohama Patch 3

• Use cases in Now Assist AI agents are now called agentic workflows.
• Choose either Azure OpenAI or Now LLM Service as your preferred large language model (LLM) for AI agents and agentic workflows in the AI Agent Studio settings.
• Use Virtual Agent for AI agent interactions.
• Execute agentic evaluation runs to evaluate agentic workflows based on execution log data to compare against benchmarks and monitor performance.
• Improve the quality of LLM responses by passing information between tools.
• Hide citations for an agentic workflow or AI agent.
• Transactions done by an AI agent for an agentic workflow are recorded in the name of the AI agent.
• Enable AI agents to store and retrieve memories with categories.
• Use Knowledge graph and File retrieval as tools in creating an AI agent.

Yokohama Patch 1

• Define agentic workflows with an execution plan for automatically resolving the incoming cases and incidents.
• Use the Now Assist panel to communicate with the agent during issue resolution.
• Clone existing AI agents and agentic workflows to save time and avoid manual configuration.
• Enable Now Assist Guardian to automatically identify and block offensive messages.
• View the usage and performance of your AI agents with the AI agent analytics dashboard.
• Enable multiple conversations for AI agents on the Now Assist panel.

See Now Assist AI agents for more information.

For the Platform Now Assist release notes, see Now Assist release notes.

Important:

Now Assist AI agents are available in ServiceNow Store. For details, see the "Activation information" section of these release notes.

Now Assist AI agents features

Yokohama Patch 11

Configure role masking for AI agents and agentic workflows

Role masking restricts access to specific roles based on configuration to verify that agentic workflows, AI agents, and tools run within the boundaries of the roles configured to meet their business needs while reducing the risk of unauthorized access to the agents and the agentic data.

Add AI agent learning

Enhance AI agent learning through episodic memory, enabling AI agents to improve by learning from past successful interactions.

Select channels and access for an agentic workflow

Create and update UI actions for workflow executions and display handling. You can specify conditions for the display of the UI actions.

Add a desktop action to an AI agent

Add Desktop action as a tool to an AI agent to perform desktop automation for repetitive tasks.

Configuring Now Assist AI agents

Support multilingual conversations for AI agents across languages.

Manually test the execution of an AI agent and Manually test the execution of an agentic workflow

The testing page on AI Agent Studio has two testing options:

• Manual test
• Automated evaluation

Observe the different versions of an AI agent behavior in manual tests and in automated evaluations using the Manual tests and Automated tests tabs.

Test user access to an AI agent and Test user access to an agentic workflow

Test how an AI agent or agentic workflow completes a task and if it enables users permission to access it.

Model Context Protocol Client

• Authorization upgrades to support segregation of Resource Server and Authentication Server through Protected Resource Metadata (PRM).
• Use the mcp_guardian_check property to enable guardian checks for MCP Client when there’s an MCP tool call.
• Supervise the pagination with mouse device support to show large number of services from an MCP server through the sn_mcp_client.cursor.max_iterations system property.
• Add a title field for human-friendly display names that can be used as a programmatic identifier.

Use in-product experiences for agentic workflows on forms

In the Core UI and workspaces, you can use UI and declarative actions to run agentic workflows. You can also see the presence, progress, and output of agentic workflows performed on a record. The execution details for each agentic workflow include who is supervising the workflow, estimated and total time taken, processing messages, and step history.

Review and approve requests and tickets with the Approval Assistance AI agent

You can use the new approval assistance AI agent to view all pending approval requests and access detailed information about them. You can then approve requests and tickets and make updates to them from Now Assist in Virtual Agent.

Configure email notification alerts for AI agent and agentic workflow executions

Configure alert email notifications for unexpected or undesired behavior from AI agents and agentic workflows. You can configure the thresholds for triggering the alerts on the Agent Properties table, and you can add or update the recipients of the email notifications from the Notifications table.

Create an external AI agent

Create new external AI agents that connect to third-party agentic AI systems. Use Agent2Agent protocol or integrate agents manually to configure them in AI Agent Studio to use in the ServiceNow agentic AI system.

Add a Knowledge Graph to an AI agent

Use Enterprise Graph (Small) as a resource to create a Knowledge Graph tool for an AI agent in the AI Agent Studio.

Yokohama Patch 6

AI Agent Studio

View and troubleshoot the agentic workflow and AI agent executions on AI Agent Studio.

Configuring Now Assist AI agents - Dynamic Orchestrator

Maps the right agents for an agentic workflow with Dynamic Orchestrator for better performance and accuracy of the agentic workflow execution.

View analytics for customer satisfaction with AI interactions

Multiple new metrics have been added to the AI Agent Analytics dashboard, accessible from the AI Agent Studio to provide insight into average customer satisfaction and customer satisfaction with the best and worst performing agentic workflows and agents.

New third-party AI model provider options available for all Now Assist applications

Google Gemini and AWS Claude are available for Now Assist skills and AI agents in addition to Now LLM Service and Azure OpenAI.

Add tools and information to an AI agent

The output transformation strategy for an AI agent output now contains a new option called Custom.

With Custom output transformation strategy, a Transformation Instructions field with a text area is enabled for the user to provide their specific instructions for refining the output as per the agentic workflow. The instructions will also ensure that the transformation is done as per the user's need.

Configuring Now Assist AI agents - AI Agent Background Channel

Invoke the agentic conversations from the Workspace or Core UI via the AI Agent Background channel, that is associated with the AI Agent Background Provider, to execute the AI agents and agentic workflows.

Configuring Now Assist AI agents - Interactive and non interactive AI agents

Run AI agents and agentic workflows execution in one of the following ways:

• Interactive Mode: AI agents reach out to the user for information during fallback.
• Non interactive Mode: AI agents do not reach out to the user during fallback but send the execution output to the user.

Yokohama Patch 3

Select Virtual Agent as a display option for AI agents

Choose to display AI agent output in Virtual Agent. You can also discover AI agents in Virtual Agent conversations.

Disable citations in AI Agent Studio

Disable citations for specific agentic workflows or AI agents in AI Agent Studio where citations are not required or involve confidential information.

Create an AI agent

• Long term memory: Add or delete categories for AI agents to store and retrieve memories.
• Additional tools available while creating an AI agent.
  • Knowledge graph
  • File retrieval

Evaluate agentic workflows and AI agents

In Now Assist Skill Kit, you can execute evaluation runs for your agentic workflows. You can select evaluation plans and the execution log datasets to judge whether your agentic workflows are consistently completing tasks and using the correct tools.

Yokohama Patch 1

Create an AI agent

Create an AI agent to assist your live agents while resolving cases, incidents, or tasks:

• Create AI agents to gather data, make decisions, and complete tasks that would otherwise need to be done by a human.
• Add one of the following tools or information sources for the AI agent to execute:
  • Catalog item
  • Conversational topic
  • Flow action
  • Now Assist skill
  • Record operation
  • Script
  • Search retrieval
  • Subflow
  • Web search

Create an agentic workflow

Create an agentic workflow with an execution plan to solve complex tasks with Now Assist. You can also do the following tasks:

• Clone an existing agentic workflow to avoid manual configuration.
• Create triggers when creating an agentic workflow that calls the AI agent when a condition or objective is observed.
• Test an agentic workflow before execution.
• Resolve record-based cases with AI agents.

Enable Now Assist Guardian in AI agents

Enable Now Assist Guardian in AI agents to automatically identify and block offensive messages that are sent by human agents.

Multiple conversations in Now Assist AI agents

Enable live agents to interact with multiple AI agent conversations through the Now Assist panel.

AI Agent Analytics dashboard

Analyze the performance, efficiency gain, and usage of AI agents through preconfigured dashboards.

UI changes

Yokohama Patch 11

Create an AI agent

The guided setups for creating an AI agent and agentic workflow have been updated.

Define security controls for an agentic workflow and Define security controls for an AI agent

New security configuration UI pages have been added in the AI Agent Studio application to configure security controls for agentic workflows and AI agents for role masking.

Yokohama Patch 6

Follow new guided setups for agentic workflows and AI agents

The new steps for the guided setups for AI voice agents and agentic workflows includes additional help text and guidance for writing LLM instructions to help improve outcome and task completion.

Manually test the execution of an AI agent

The tab names on the AI Agent Studio testing page have been renamed. The Test scenario tab is renamed to Test AI reasoning tab and the Output tab to Chat responses tab.

Yokohama Patch 3

Now Assist AI agents - The phrase "use case" has been updated to "agentic workflow".

In AI Agent Studio, the phrase "use case" in the UI has been replaced with the phrase "agentic workflow" on all screens.

Tools visible when testing AI agents

When testing an AI agent, individual tool processes are now visible in the testing window, enabling you to track tool use, successes, or failures when trying out new AI agents.

Use data picker for value overrides in AI agent tools

When creating or modifying tools for AI agents, you can now use a data picker in value override fields. This helps ensure that information in records fields is transferred between tools.

Changed in this release

Yokohama Patch 11

Changes to Now Assist usage measurement

Starting with Yokohama Patch 5, Now Assist usage measurement is transitioning from a 365-day look-back model to a 365-day burn-down model, with usage resetting at the contract anniversary date. For more information, refer to KB KB2704710: Now Assist Usage - Overview & New Measurement Logic.

Some Now Assist skills are turned on by default

The new default behavior works as follows:

• New customers: When you install a Now Assist product, designated skills are turned on automatically.
• Existing customers who are upgrading (starting with Yokohama Patch 11): Any previously unconfigured skill is turned on automatically (the skill was never configured and turned on, then turned off again). Previously configured skills that were turned on, then off, remain inactive.

Configure ACLs for AI agents and agentic workflows

Configure the access control lists for who can discover and trigger AI agents and agentic workflows in their guided setups in AI Agent Studio. You can determine whether an AI agent or agentic workflow behaves as a dynamic user or as an AI user. You can also specify if an AI agent or agentic workflow can be available to all authenticated users or publicly available.

Platform Request status AI agent

The request status AI agent provides an AI-generated summary of the most recent comments from the AI agent or other people working on a ticket. You can add attachments to an open ticket or incident to support a request action. To find more information about an open ticket, you can ask the request status AI agent follow-up questions based on previous answers from the agent.

Configuring Now Assist AI agents

Run AI agents and agentic workflows concurrently in AI Agent Background Channel and in Non-interactive mode.

Add a Knowledge Graph to an AI agent

The Global Graph resource for creating a Knowledge Graph tool has been renamed to Enterprise Graph.

Yokohama Patch 8

Confirm your web search tool provider data policies

If you select Google as your web search provider for web search AI agent tools, Google will use Grounding with Google Search, offered under a Global Standard deployment, and data may be routed to places outside of regions specified on your ServiceNow instance as a result. Consult your organization's data policies before enabling AI agents with web search tools that use Google as the provider.

Yokohama Patch 6

Add version control to instructions sent to the LLM

You can review multiple versions of instructions sent to the LLM when designing your AI agents or agentic workflows. You can choose which version is active to help with testing or evaluating the success of an AI agent or agentic workflow to compare against other versions. Versions are named and ordered by time created for organizational purposes.

Duplicate and edit existing tools when creating new AI agents

When adding a tool to an AI agent, you can select an existing tool instead of creating a new tool from scratch. After an existing tool is added, you can make changes to suit the specific AI agent’s needs.

Now Assist AI agents reference

The sn_aia.enable_agent_tool_input_value_overrides system property is migrated to the [sn_aia_property] agent system property.

Yokohama Patch 3

Monitor more AI agent analytics in the AI Agent Analytics dashboard

Two new pages have been added to the AI Agent Analytics dashboard, giving administrators more indicators, visualizations, and breakdowns to track AI agent performance and usage.

Exploring Now Assist AI agents

Impersonation in Now Assist records transactions done by an AI agent in the name of the AI agent who executes the agentic workflow.

Activation information

Now Assist in AI agents is available with activation of any Now Assist plugin from the ServiceNow Store. For more information about the prerequisites for using Now Assist, see Install Now Assist AI agents.

Additional requirements

You must first install the supported Now Assist version of ServiceNow to be able to use the Now Assist AI agents. For more information, see Install Now Assist AI agents.

Enable the Next Experience UI Framework before you can use the Now Assist panel.

Browser requirements

Now Assist AI agents supports various browsers, including Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge. Now Assist AI agents isn’t supported in Internet Explorer.

Accessibility information

Voice Input for Now Assist AI agents

Administrators can enable an optional voice input setting for the Now Assist panel in the Now Assist Admin console. This feature gives users a voice-to-text input option to access the Now Assist skills in the panel in any supported language. For more information, see Enable voice input for Now Assist panel.

Once enabled, the Enable voice input for the Now Assist panel option is available in individual user accessibility preferences. See Configure Next Experience accessibility preferences for more information.

Voice-to-text input can help users with mobility impairments access generative AI skills without using a keyboard. This feature can also be useful to blind or low-vision users, neurodivergent users, non-native language speakers, or mobile users on the go, such as field service agents.

Localization information

Now Assist AI agents is built on the GPT-4o-based framework and supports localization according to the GPT-4o model.

Related ServiceNow applications and features

Now Assist panel

With the ServiceNow®Now Assist panel, you can get assistance from generative AI experiences to solve customer issues faster. Use this conversational interface to summarize a chat, case, or incident, get help, or generate resolution notes so that you can get the context of this information more quickly.

Generative AI Controller

The ServiceNow® Generative AI Controller lets you integrate third-party large language models (LLMs) with your workflows.

AI Search

The ServiceNow® AI Search application provides a consumer-grade search engine for Service Portal, Now Mobile, and Virtual Agent. Intelligent query features help you quickly find the answers you need.

Now Assist Skill Kit

Use the ServiceNow® Now Assist Skill Kit to create and publish custom prompts and skills for Now Assist. Creating custom skills and prompts enables you to have greater flexibility with Now Assist's generative AI capabilities.