Real Talk: On-the-Ground advice & considerations when implementing Now Assist

Charlotte AI Summit Recap 

Astrica and ServiceNow co-hosted an Employee Experience dinner prior to the ServiceNow AI Summit in Charlotte. The event was a great opportunity to share Astrica’s real-world experiences helping clients implement ServiceNow’s Now Assist suite of generative AI capabilities and preview the Agentic AI tools and capabilities being released later this month. 

I was honored to be invited to share Astrica’s expert approach and key considerations for clients planning a Now Assist implementation to clients and prospects. Now Assist is a suite of “turnkey” generative AI capabilities designed to increase agent efficiency and improve self-service by automating content generation. This includes features such as case summarization, resolution note generation, and knowledge article generation. It also is a great excitement builder for the upcoming Agentic AI implementations 

Now Assist: Implementation Approach 

Now Assist is a great first step for organizations as they embark on the journey to introduce AI capabilities that improve productivity and enhance employee& customer experience. Implementing the Now Assist suite of AI functionality is largely a straight-forward “turnkey” process from a technical perspective. From a project planning perspective, a Now Assist implementation primarily involves the development of a: 1) AI strategy; 2) organizational change management activities (very important!), and;  3) Technical and Analytic/reporting updates. 

1. Ensuring the Forest is seen: Setting AI Strategy 

An AI strategy for Now Assist should define the 1) objectives, 2) success criteria, 3) governance, and 4) roadmap for these new ServiceNow platform capabilities. The strategy defines clear key performance indicators (KPIs). This includes AI effectiveness, such as Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) for agent-assisted versus non-agent-assisted cases. Additionally, NowAssist usage across agents and features should be tracked. 

The strategy also addresses plans to align with the enterprise AI strategy and governance standards and policies. Astrica recommends the creation of an AI Product Owner role (does not have to be a fulltime person) accountable for AI governance, including practices related to AI ethics, safety, and transparency, as well as frameworks to address data privacy and security risks. ServiceNow resources to support AI governance include the Now Assist Guardian component, as well as responsible AI principles, data handling protocols, and security measures. 

An AI roadmap defines the prioritization, sequencing, and timing for implementing the suite of Now Assist AI features. Most of Astrica’s customers choose to begin their AI journey by enabling features to improve the internal agent and employee experience before expanding to customer-facing virtual agents. The roadmap should align the release of current and future capabilities, such as Write Now with Now Assist, Playbook Extraction, and the Now Assist Skill Kit, with the appropriate ServiceNow platform release and patch level. 

2. Don’t Skip Organizational Change Management (OCM): 

OCM for Now Assist adds a couple of specific new activities to the traditional OCM plan. First and foremost, organizations must address the fears among employees that AI will eliminate their jobs. Now Assist is a human enabler, allowing agents to provide improved service and focus more time on solving complex customer issues while automating mundane tasks, such as case summarization. Astrica has found that the most effective way to address these concerns is to (1) clearly communicate the objectives for AI and how the technology will improve performance metrics such as MTTR and CSAT, and (2) provide hands-on-keyboard training where agents can try this functionality first-hand. Demonstrating Now Assist functionality and how it will help agents is as simple as pushing a button, such as “Summarize Case.” 

3. A Straightforward Technical implementation and Clear Analytics and Reporting: 

Implementing the actual Now Assist AI features is simply a matter of licensing, validating the proper patch level, and enabling the features. 

It is critical to update reporting to measure the effectiveness of AI-assisted cases compared to non-AI-assisted cases, as well as the adoption of each AI feature by agents. This may involve the creation of new database views and updates to reports, especially if reporting involves the integration of external data or reporting platforms for CSAT surveys, etc. 

➡️ Coming Next: Agentic AI Implementation 

The vision for Agentic AI goes far beyond the content generation capabilities of Now Assist to deliver autonomous automation of end-to-end business processes. With Agentic AI, agents are designed to go beyond simple task automation, making decisions, executing workflows, and learning from data to improve performance over time. 

Agentic AI promises to deliver value, orders of magnitude greater than the AI process assistance provided by Now Assist today. However, the work and complexity involved in implementing such capabilities will be much more complex than enabling the turn-key features in Now Assist. As with a Now Assist implementation, Agentic AI will require a strategy, roadmap, and organizational change management. However, an Agentic AI implementation will also require extensive workflow design and configuration, data integration, AI agent design, customization and training, and testing. Consideration will need to be given to how AI-driven automated workflows engage human agents when unexpected situations arise. 

ServiceNow is scheduled to release a suite of tools this month to enable Agentic AI, including the AI Agent Orchestrator to design, manage, and deploy AI agents to automate workflows, and the AI Agent Studio, a no-code/low-code tool to create custom agents for specific business needs. 

At Astrica, we look forward to this release and sharing additional insights as we work with clients to implement Agentic AI in their journey to maximize the value of the ServiceNow platform. 

Please feel free to reach out if you would like to discuss Now Assist or Agentic AI. We would also love to connect at the ServiceNow AI Summit in Boston later this month on Thursday, March 20, 2025.