Keen to get GenAI going on your ServiceNow platform but not sure where to begin? Here’s what you need to know to get started with Now Assist.
Generative AI is poised to revolutionise how businesses handle self-service, agent productivity, and developer innovation.
To help you prepare for the adoption of Now Assist in your ServiceNow platform, we’ve put together some insights and actionable steps based on leading practices and the latest guidance from ServiceNow.
What are the benefits of Now Assist?
Now Assist offers substantial improvements across three primary user categories: employee/customer, agents and developers.
- Employee/Customer: Take employee, customer, and citizen services to the next level with faster auto-resolution of issues. Accelerate catalogue requests with LLM-powered, multi-turn conversations – and quickly find answers and actions drawn from approved knowledge articles with Q&A Search.
- Agents: Enhance productivity by summarising lengthy conversations when transferred to a live agent with case summarisation, and close cases faster with resolution note generation and knowledge article generation.
- Developers: Use power tools to create and modify workflows faster, increasing process efficiency, and streamlining code creation with text-to-code and text-to-flow features. Anywhere code exists on the platform – write it faster!
"GenAI case and incident avoidance has saved $5.5 million annually, and contributes to a 54% improvement in efficiency, saving $8,000 weekly."
If you’re into your numbers, ServiceNow has highlighted the following results from their own "now-on-now" implementation of Now Assist products:
- The platform's total GenAI case and incident avoidance has saved $5.5 million annually, and contributes to a 54% improvement in efficiency, saving $8,000 weekly.
- Additionally, the GenAI search function on Now Support aids in approximately 20% of case avoidance, equating to $60,000 saved per week.
- 56% of customers and employees felt positively about using Now Assist summarised results.
- Agents halved the time taken to generate resolution notes for incidents, and 54% of case summaries effectively eliminated tedious tasks.
- For developers, the platform boasts a 52% acceptance rate for generated code (text-to-code).
Day one capabilities and requirements
Based on ServiceNow's own production usage during testing, Now Assist can save up to 38 minutes per user, per day.
But, while products are still being developed, there are limited capabilities available today. To benefit from Now Assist on day one, you’ll need to meet certain criteria and configurations.
Required and ideal criteria
- Currently using ServiceNow ITSM, CSM, ITOM or HR products
- Operating on Vancouver Patch 2 or above
- Using Next Experience and Configurable Workspaces
- Using English as the primary instance language
- Using Knowledge Management, Virtual Agent, AI Search, Live Agent Chat, and/or Flow Designer
Getting started with Now Assist
The first step to enabling Now Assist in your ServiceNow instance is to use the Now Assist Admin Console to activate the applications and skills that you’re entitled to. From the console, you can install and activate the necessary plugins.
Now Assist features are accessible in Workspaces across the platform through the Now Assist panel. Activating this panel enables agents to interact seamlessly with Now Assist, enhancing their workflow.
Now Assist’s capabilities, like incident summarisation, are known as skills. Start by configuring skills that are tailored to your organisation’s specific use cases. This is crucial for getting value out of Now Assist. Remember to periodically review and update these skills to ensure they remain relevant and useful.
The Now Assist Admin Console includes an Account Information page, where you can review your licensing information. This allows you to verify which plugins and features you’re entitled to and check their status.
The Account Information page also offers an option to opt out of data sharing. Users granted the data steward role can configure this setting based on your organisation’s data governance policies regarding sharing data with ServiceNow.
Watch the video below for a deeper dive into the Now Assist Admin Console:
Overcoming potential blockers
To be successful in adopting Now Assist products, you should devise a strategy that accounts for the following blockers:
- Team skills and roles: Ensure teams are up-skilled and roles are well-defined. Develop a detailed project plan and team training programme.
- Compatibility issues: Verify that the instance and patch versions are compatible. Create a comprehensive upgrade plan if necessary, and make use of ServiceNow release notes to track change management.
- Portal and tool usage: Evaluate the use of Employee Centre or a ServiceNow Portal to take advantage of Now Assist.
- Application dependencies: Ensure that the latest ServiceNow out-of-box experiences and all necessary components like Next Experience, AI Search, and Service Operations Workspace are installed and activated.
- Multi-lingual environments: Evaluate using Dynamic Translation (available in Washington release).
- Knowledge base and documentation: Optimise the health of the knowledge base and service catalogue.
- Limited incident/case documentation: Advise agents to provide richer documentation and historical notes.
Are you ready for Now Assist?
By preparing your instance and team according to the above, and addressing potential blockers, your business will be ready to harness the power of Now Assist for the Now Platform.
This brings the potential to not only improve self-service and agent efficiency but also significantly accelerate developer innovation, leading to enhanced overall productivity and customer satisfaction.
