Using agentic workflows in ServiceNow Otto for CMDB

Users with the sn_cmdb_user role can access several ServiceNow Otto for CMDB agentic workflows.

Agentic workflows

Table 1. Available agentic workflows for ServiceNow Otto for CMDB

Agentic workflow name	Description	Available AI agents
Create configuration item	Occasionally, you might create a CI manually. To help you, the Create configuration item agentic workflow accepts your natural language request and verifies that it understands which class the new CI should belong to. The workflow then checks Identification and Reconciliation engine (IRE) rules to determine the required attributes for the CI and requests that information. After you provide sufficient data, the workflow promotes that the proposed CI includes the attributes that you requested, complies with IRE rules, and is not a duplicate. The workflow then creates the CI. For more information, see Create a CI using ServiceNow Otto	CMDB CI creator
Provide advice on CMDB governance	Data governance can be an overwhelming task. The Provide advice on CMDB governance agentic workflow supports data admins and owners by methodically working through the many-faceted process of improving CMDB data accuracy, completeness, and health. The objective is to help users to trust the data that they use for their work. For more information, see Getting advice from ServiceNow Otto on CMDB governance.	CMDB data manager CMDB data certification and attestation manager CMDB data ownership manager CMDB health metrics manager CMDB life cycle manager CMDB principal class manager
Search CMDB	The Search CMDB agentic workflow enables you to search for CIs by specifying any of several attributes of the CIs of interest. The workflow accepts your natural language request, verifies your search goal, and then, depending on the information you provided, generates a keyword search, a single-table search with dot walks, or a multi-table search that involves relationship navigation. The workflow can infer CI relationship data to generate an appropriate query. For more information, see Use ServiceNow Otto to search the CMDB.	CMDB CI search

Note:

You can use Now LLM Service, Azure OpenAI, Google Gemini or Anthropic Claude on AWS as the AI model provider for all generative AI skills and AI agents. Use the Configuration Controls in AI Control Tower to define which options are available, then set the skill-level preferences in the AI Admin Hub console. For more information, see Large language models on the ServiceNow AI Platform®.

Enable security implementation to execute AI agents and agentic workflows through Access Control Lists (ACLs) and user identities. ACLs provide the Run As capability to let agents and agentic workflows execute actions either as a dynamic user or as an AI user. For more information, see Implement access control in AI agents

Running AI agents autonomously

Important:

By default, all agentic workflow and AI agent records are read only.

To run the AI agents autonomously, you must first duplicate the agentic workflow and then proceed with the following steps:

• Activate the agentic workflow.
• Activate all agents within the agentic workflow.
• Activate the trigger to invoke the agentic workflow automatically. If you prefer to invoke it manually, activating the trigger isn’t necessary.

• Create a CI using ServiceNow Otto
  The Create configuration item agentic workflow accepts your natural language request to manually generate a valid CI in the class that you specify.
• Getting advice from ServiceNow Otto on CMDB governance
  Data governance can be an overwhelming task. The Provide advice on CMDB governance agentic workflow supports data admins and owners by methodically working through the many-faceted process of improving CMDB data accuracy, completeness, and health. The objective is to help users to trust the data that they use for their work.
• Analyzing the impact of a change or incident
  The Assess CMDB impact agentic workflow identifies the upstream services and CIs that are likely to be affected by an incident or by a proposed change. The workflow reasons about propagation likelihood based on CMDB dependency topology and the nature of the change. The workflow returns a structured list with impact levels and the reasoning.
• Use ServiceNow Otto to search the CMDB
  The Search CMDB agentic workflow enables you to search for CIs by specifying any of several attributes of the CIs of interest. The workflow accepts your natural language request, verifies your search goal, and then, depending on the information you provided, generates a keyword search, a single-table search with dot walks, or a multi-table search that involves relationship navigation. The workflow can infer CI relationship data to generate an appropriate query.
• Business application candidate agent
  The Business application candidate agent discovers and suggests business applications to associate with existing application services in the CMDB, reducing manual mapping effort and improving data governance. The agent uses AI clustering and feedback loops to propose business application candidates for your review.
• Recommend service graph connector agentic workflow
  Sometimes you're not sure which integration to use to capture CI data. When you provide ServiceNow Otto with the name of a particular CI class, it can recommend the data sources or Service Graph Connectors and ingestion sources that can best populate CMDB data.