Chat responses in Slack conversations

  • Release version: Zurich
  • Updated June 16, 2026
  • 2 minutes to read
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    Summary of Chat responses in Slack conversations

    ServiceNow enhances Slack conversations with advanced chat responses powered by Large Language Models (LLM). This feature improves user experience by delivering synthesized, streaming, and agentic responses along with people cards, making interactions smarter, faster, and more informative directly within Slack.

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    Key Features

    • Synthesized Response: Provides unified, conversational answers by aggregating multiple Genius Results, Knowledge Base articles, and catalog items into a summarized, easy-to-consume format. Users receive relevant information with citation links, and can explore additional options like Knowledge Base articles or catalogs.
    • Streaming Synthesized Response: Enables real-time message updates during processing, reducing latency and boosting engagement. This feature supports longer or more complex queries effectively and requires enabling Now Assist in Virtual Agent for Slack.
    • People Card: Displays detailed information about a person queried in Slack, including email, contact number, and a link to their ServiceNow profile, enhancing context and responsiveness.
    • Agentic Response: Shows real-time steps performed by AI agents while generating responses. Users can monitor AI actions and take interactive steps during conversations, improving transparency and control.
    • API Integration: Allows triggering AI agents via REST API calls to automate and customize chat assistant behaviors within Slack conversations.

    Practical Impact for ServiceNow Customers

    By integrating these chat response capabilities into Slack, ServiceNow customers can expect more efficient, context-aware help desk and knowledge interactions. Users get faster, unified answers with the ability to explore details seamlessly, improving productivity and satisfaction. Real-time streaming and agentic responses enable dynamic and transparent AI support, while people cards enhance communication by providing quick access to contact details. The REST API support offers flexibility to tailor AI assistant workflows to specific business needs.

    Enhance your users experience in Slack conversations with smarter chat responses powered by the Large Language Models (LLM) based capabilities, such as synthesized response, streaming synthesized response, agentic response, and people cards.

    Synthesized response

    With synthesized responses implemented in Slack conversations, the user experience is increased in several ways for the response to contain the most relevant items and information, such as:
    • Returning multiple Genius Results and topics in carousel format.
    • Providing unified search across topics and catalog items.
    • Providing a multi-Knowledge Base Q&A pipeline that enables multiple snippets from multiple Knowledge Base articles to be passed to the LLM as the context for answer generation.

    The overall synthesized response helps users experience a conversational flow that understands query intent, searches across records of various types, and summarizes results in a unified, easy-to-consume response.

    When you start a conversation in Slack and ask a question, with Now Assist enabled on it, you receive a summary of the response with catalog items and topics followed by the citation links. For example, if you enter a command laptop in your conversations, you see the responses in a synthesized format.

    Slack synthesized response in a Now Assist enabled conversation.

    When you select the View other options button they get the list of available Knowledge Base articles and catalogs, which you can select and go through the details.

    Streaming synthesized response

    Streaming synthesized response in Slack conversations provides a faster interaction and more engaged user experience with real-time updates while the messages are processed. To learn more about response streaming, see Chat streaming responses and Manage an assistant chat experience.

    To enable response streaming in Slack conversations, see Enable Now Assist in Virtual Agent for Slack. With response streaming enabled in Slack conversations, you can experience the following enhancements:
    • Reduced latency in conversations
    • Increased engagement
    • Ability to handle longer or more complex queries effectively

    People card in synthesized response

    When your users inquire about a person in Slack conversations, they can view the synthesized response with a people card having the person's details, such as email id, contact number, and link to the ServiceNow profile.

    Agentic response

    With agentic response implemented in Slack conversations, your users can view the real-time details of different steps performed by an AI agent while generating the response to your query. If required, users can also take actions while the conversation is ongoing.

    To learn more about enabling agentic response, see Use agentic support for a chat assistant.

    Example of triggering AI agents through REST API

    Example of using the sn_aia REST API endpoints to trigger agents through REST API calls.

    {
    "jsonrpc": "2.0",
    "id": "{{$guid}}",
    "method": "message/send",
    "params": {
    "message": {
    "kind": "message",
    "role": "user",
    "parts": [
    {
    "kind": "text",
    "text": "Help me plan a calculator app"
    }
    ],
    "messageId": "{{$guid}}"
    }
    }
    }