Generative AI (GenAI) has taken the world by storm. People are using it in their work, and many enterprises are integrating it in their workflows. According to McKinsey’s State of AI Global Survey, 65% of organizations were regularly using GenAI in 2024.
ServiceNow ITSM has also launched its own GenAI platform by the brand name of Now Assist. It’s changing the way IT service management (ITSM) is functions within businesses. Now Assist accelerates productivity, saves money, and improves customer experience by putting GenAI to work.
In this article, we’ll look at what Now Assist is in ServiceNow’s ecosystem, its capabilities, benefits, and how it is transforming ITSM.
What is ServiceNow Now Assist?
Now Assist is a generative AI platform provided by ServiceNow. It is embedded within the Now Platform and integrates with ITSM and CSM modules to bring generative AI features directly into your ServiceNow workflows.
ServiceNow and AI aren’t a new story. The company has been enhancing its workflows with AI-based smart automation for over a decade. Now Assist is the latest offering in this pursuit, one that has been met with positive reception.
Capabilities of the Now Assist platform
Now Assist offers a suite of features that can be used at various places in ServiceNow. Whether it’s app development, operations, or management within ServiceNow, Now Assist brings contextual intelligence to the table.
1. Skills
Skills are the core features of Now Assist. A skill in the platform is a specific GenAI capability that solves a specific task. They are packaged so admins can enable, configure, and govern them without needing to train or build LLMs themselves.
2. AI agents
AI agents are part of Now Assist’s broader set of features. These are smarter AI units that perform end-to-end tasks with multiple skills. Developers can also create custom AI agents that tie into their own processes.
3. AI-powered search
Now Assist offers AI-enhanced search with better, smarter search results. The answers in the search are more relevant and actionable based on the internal business knowledge or resolved incidents.
4. Content generation
You can generate text or content in Now Assist, such as emails, articles, or chat replies. It is also very helpful in vibe coding with code generation and automation.
5. Virtual chatbots
Teams can use Now Assist for virtual agent topics, chat contexts, and to respond and deflect to human agents as needed.
Benefits of ServiceNow Now Assist for ITSM
Now Assist supports ITSM teams by speeding up work and making services smarter. Here’s how it helps in real terms:
- Now Assist can answer complicated questions accurately, which can cut resolution times by as much as 40%.
- It gives personalized suggestions and solutions, so employees actually use the tools and services more, boosting adoption by up to 20%.
- ITSM professionals can automate repetitive tasks and workflows to reduce manual effort by a considerable margin.
- Now Assist can spot issues with IT equipment before they happen through sensor data. This helps to prevent failures and downtime.
- New hires can use the AI platform’s customized onboarding plans to make the process quicker and smoother.
- For routine problems like password resets, Now Assist can auto-generate workflows to fix them, freeing people up for more productive tasks.
- It can draft high-quality content like product descriptions, release notes, and knowledge base articles to save time for content teams.
- Analysts can utilize it to pinpoint the underlying causes of recurring issues, so problems get fixed faster and more effectively.
- Now Assist can generate custom reports with actionable insights, giving teams clear data to make decisions.
Why Now Assist is the future of ITSM: Use cases
Let’s look at practical use cases of Now Assist in ITSM to understand why the platform is setting the future direction for the industry.
The problem: A multinational IT services company has 25,000 employees worldwide. Their IT Service Desk manages over 50,000 incidents per month, ranging from password resets to complex system outages. Before adopting Now Assist, they had long resolution times, overloaded support agents handling repetitive requests, and slow ticket triage with misrouted incidents.
How Now Assist helps
The company can roll out Now Assist for ITSM with three main skills.
- Intelligent ticker classification to read each new incident and automatically set the right category, priority, and assignment group.
- AI agents to suggest relevant knowledge base articles for a viewed ticket. Agents could then apply one-click resolutions for common fixes.
- Once the issue is resolved, Now Assist can draft a closure summary for the agent to review, ensuring consistent and audit-ready documentation.
This can help the company reduce average resolution time by up to 4.5 hours. ITSM agents can spend less time on manual triage and note-taking and more on proactive problem management.
Is Now Assist available for other ServiceNow modules?
Yes, you can deploy Now Assist for other modules within the ServiceNow ecosystem. For HR, Now Assist makes processes like onboarding or answering employee questions much smoother. New hires can get personalized, AI-driven guidance through the onboarding journey.
Similarly, it can be used in ServiceNow ITOM to keep an eye on systems to detect issues before they become major problems. It can proactively resolve or recommend fixes to prevent outages and minimize downtime, ensuring services stay reliable and resilient.
In ServiceNow CSM, customer service teams can respond to inquiries faster and more accurately. The AI suggests the best answers and even recommends the next best action to resolve an issue.
How to access ServiceNow Now Assist
Now Assist is not included in standard ServiceNow licenses. You’ll need a Pro Plus or Enterprise Plus license to access AI agents, pre-built skills, and GenAI Controller to manage LLMs.
Also, each AI action that you perform, such as generating a summary, will consume your licensed capacity. You also need to be on a supported release of ServiceNow to use the Now Assist platform, as older versions don’t support Now Assist.
Conclusion
The Now Assist platform is the company’s entry into the world of GenAI enterprise tools. It brings a new level of efficiency to IT service management and other business workflows.
ServiceNow has been working with AI for over a decade to augment business processes. And Now Assist is one of the best offerings by the company so far. You can use the platform to implement GenAI capabilities in almost any workflow. It will boost your productivity and efficiency across the enterprise.
If you want to use the full potential of ServiceNow products like Now Assist, partner with Xavor Corporation as your ServiceNow consulting partner. We have certified ServiceNow experts in different modules that can help you infuse Now Assist’s AI capabilities in your custom business workflows.
Contact us at [email protected] to book a free consultation session with our ServiceNow team.