Exploring Now Assist for Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM)

  • Release version: Yokohama
  • Updated July 31, 2025
  • 4 minutes to read
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    Summary of Exploring Now Assist for Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM)

    The Now Assist for Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) application enhances decision-making and resource optimization through AI-driven tools within ServiceNow. This application streamlines processes for product, project, portfolio, and demand managers, enabling them to achieve continuous value delivery in their strategic initiatives.

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    Key Features

    • Target Generation Skill: Automatically populates target creation forms based on goals, ensuring clarity in measurable outcomes.
    • Identify Similar Records Skill: Identifies demand records with at least 85% similarity, helping managers streamline data management.
    • Refine Records: Offers AI-assisted content refinement options for various record types, improving record quality and effectiveness.
    • Agile Story Generation: Generates story recommendations for epics or features, facilitating story creation and enhancing productivity.
    • Multi Feedback Summarization: Summarizes lengthy customer feedback for quick comprehension, allowing feedback to be converted into actionable items.
    • Project Insights Generation: Automates project progress monitoring and sends insights via email, helping managers stay informed on key project elements.
    • Conversational Experiences for Demand Creation: Streamlines demand creation using a conversational interface within the Employee Service Management portal.
    • Now Assist Admin Console: Enables admins to activate and manage Now Assist features in the Strategic Planning Workspace.

    Key Outcomes

    By leveraging Now Assist for SPM, organizations can expect enhanced efficiency in project management, improved data quality, and faster decision-making processes. The integration of AI-driven tools allows teams to focus on strategic activities, leading to better resource allocation and smarter investments. Overall, this application empowers managers to continuously deliver value and optimize their portfolio management efforts.

    Use ServiceNow® Now Assist skills and AI agents in multiple SPM workspaces to transform Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) into a continuous value engine-embedding intelligence across every stage and to provide optimize resources and smarter investments resulting in delivering continuous value.

    Skills

    The Now Assist for SPM application includes the generative AI skills and features that enable your product, project, portfolio, and demand managers to leverage Now Assist skills so that they can streamline their processes and workflows.

    Target generation skill

    Generate measurable targets from goal's information and optional context with the Target generation skill in Strategic Planning Workspace. The skill automatically populates key fields in the target creation form, ensuring precision and alignment to the goal. This enables teams to define clear and measurable outcomes and accelerate the target creation process.

    Generate targets in Strategic Planning Workspace using Target generation skill.
    Identify similar records skill

    Detect similar demand records using the identify similar records Now Assist skill. The skill identifies similar demand records based on contextual similarity in the name, description, and business case content, with a minimum 85% similarity threshold. It also excludes the outdated and irrelevant records. You can trigger the skill by selecting the Identify similar demands button on the demand record page.

    The similar demand records identified by Now Assist are displayed in the Similar Demands related list as well as in a message banner at the top of the record page.

    List of similar records identified by Now Assist.
    Refine records

    Improve record quality by enabling AI assistance in the rich and long fields of Product idea, Demands, Epic, Projects, Capability, Features, Stories, Project tasks, Risks, Strategic priorities, Goals, Targets, Initiatives, Feedback, Milestones, and Story forms. You can enable text refinement with the Elaborate and Shorten options on the records to support portfolio, project, product, demand managers, and agile team members in creating and editing records content more effectively.

    Refine text using Refine records skill.

    Agile story generation
    Generates high-quality story recommendations for an epic or feature using the Agile story generation skill in the EAP workspace. Now Assist uses the name, description, Docs content, and any existing stories of the epic or feature to provide story recommendations. Based on the recommendations, you can ask Now Assist to perform one of the following:
    • Split a story recommendation into multiple stories.
    • Combine multiple story recommendations into one story.
    • Generate stories according to its original recommendations.
    • Remove any story recommendation.
    • Suggest modification of details within the recommendation such as story title, persona, and description.
    • Suggest generating a new story recommendation.

    List of stories created by Now Assist.

    Thus, by using the Story generation skill of Now Assist, you can:
    • Remove initial roadblocks to create stories for an epic or a feature.
    • Save time and increase productivity by automating the story creation process.
    • Ensure completeness of stories by covering personas, outcomes, and acceptance criteria.

    The Agile story generation skill is supported starting with the Yokohama patch 3 release and Strategic Planning v4.5.0. If you are on earlier versions of the Yokohama release, you can activate the Story generation skill, which generates stories from Epics only.

    Multi feedback summarization or Feedback summarization

    Provides your product managers with a concise and informative summary of the lengthy customer feedback comments. The product managers can generate a summary from the name and description of one or multiple feedback records so that they can quickly understand the feedback context. The generated summary can be directly converted to an execution item. Now Assist can generate a summary from the feedback only if the feedback has at least 60 words in the fields that are used for the input data. The 60-word minimum optimizes the experience by verifying that there’s enough information to make a summary.

    The following example shows a summarization of multiple feedback records by using the multi feedback summarization skill.

    Figure 1. Multi feedback summarization skill
    AI-generated summary for multiple feedback records using the multi feedback summarization skill.
    Project doc summarization, Planning Item doc summarization, or EAP doc summarization

    Provides your product managers with a concise and informative summary of the selected or complete text by using Now Assist in Docs. Your product managers can summarize, elaborate, or shorten the selected or complete content on Docs to quickly understand the key information by using the Project doc summarization (Project Workspace), Planning item doc summarization (Strategic Planning), or EAP doc summarization (Enterprise Agile Planning) skill.

    Figure 2. Now Assist in Docs
    Now Assist generated summary of text in Docs.
    Project insights generation

    Monitor the progress and changes in each project through the Project insights generation skill. With minimal effort, your project managers can schedule a cadence for generating project insights and receive it via email. They can track key elements such as the milestones, resource assignments, projects, and project tasks. They can also prioritize key elements to focus on. They can also decide the cadence of receiving project insight emails.

    Figure 3. Now Assist Project insights generation skill
    Now Assist generated project insights in Project Workspace.
    Conversational experiences for demand creation

    Simplify the process of creating a Demand within the Employee Service Management (ESC) portal by using the Now Assist conversational catalog creation capability.

    • Avoid searching through the list of catalog items to find the right item for demand creation.
    • Answer contextual questions in the chat to auto-populate the relevant fields in the Demand form.
    If Microsoft Teams and Mobile are enabled as a display location for Now Assist in Virtual Agent, users can use the conversational experience to create a demand in those applications too.
    Note:
    This skill is available within the Platform category of the Now Assist Admin console.

    Now Assist Admin console

    An administrator can use the Now Assist Admin console in Strategic Planning Workspace to activate and manage Now Assist features and skills in Workspace. For more information about the Now Assist Admin console, see Now Assist Admin console.

    AI agents

    The ServiceNow AI agents use LLMs (Large Language Models) to process tasks, from basic responses to complex problem-solving and optimize the live agent workflows. For more information on Now Assist AI agents, see Using AI agent or agentic workflows in Now Assist for Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM).