Understand the Now Assist AI agents

  • Release version: Australia
  • Updated October 24, 2025
  • 2 minutes to read
  • Summarize
    Summarized using AI
    This content was generated using new OpenAI-powered functionality. Results are provided on an as is basis and are not guaranteed to be accurate or complete.

    Summary of Understand the Now Assist AI agents

    The Now Assist AI agents application enables secure and dynamic use of your data, workflows, and integrations within the ServiceNow AI Platform. These AI agents adjust their actions based on incident or case progress, ensuring focus on achieving defined objectives. Central to this functionality is the AI Orchestrator, which manages collaboration among multiple AI agents to complete complex workflows efficiently.

    Show full answer Show less

    Key Features

    • AI Agent Studio: Provides guided usage of AI agents for effective deployment and management.
    • AI Orchestrator: Acts as a central coordinator to ensure AI agents work together seamlessly, managing task sequencing, dynamic decision-making, and communication.
    • Dynamic Orchestration: Optimizes performance by selecting the appropriate agents for workflows, especially when many agents are available.
    • ReAct Prompt & Route Scheduling: Enhances execution efficiency by combining reflection and planning prompts, enabling asynchronous, parallel tool execution to reduce latency.
    • Integration Capabilities: Works with ServiceNow workflows, Configuration Management Database (CMDB), and third-party APIs to provide end-to-end automation.
    • Policy & Governance Enforcement: Ensures AI agents comply with conformance and security policies.
    • User Impersonation: Executes AI agent actions as the logged-in user, supporting accurate audit trails and accountability for agentic workflows.
    • Logging and Accountability: Administrators can review logs by AI agent names for tracking approvals and troubleshooting.
    • Virtual Agent Integration: Can be enabled for AI agents to handle interactions, with visibility of transactions performed by AI agents.

    Practical Implications for ServiceNow Customers

    Customers can leverage Now Assist AI agents to automate complex, multi-step workflows dynamically and securely while maintaining compliance with governance standards. The AI Orchestrator ensures that multiple agents communicate and collaborate effectively, improving workflow accuracy and performance. User impersonation and detailed logging provide transparency and accountability, crucial for enterprise environments. Integration with core ServiceNow systems and third-party APIs enables seamless automation across the enterprise ecosystem, enhancing operational efficiency and response times.

    The Now Assist AI agents application is designed to securely leverage your data, workflows, and integrations directly within the ServiceNow AI Platform. AI agents can dynamically adjust their actions based on the progress and changing conditions of incidents or cases to help verify that they stay focused on achieving their objectives.

    Now Assist AI agents Orchestrator

    The AI Agent Studio guides users in using AI agents effectively, while AI Orchestrator verifies seamless collaboration among them. The AI agent Orchestrator is a central management system that coordinates AI agents to verify that they collaborate effectively to complete complex workflows. It can also retrieve missing context from users when needed. AI agents operate iteratively, seeking assistance from the Orchestrator if they encounter difficulties. The Orchestrator enhances inter-agent communication and centralizes coordination. The Orchestrator allows AI agents to share information effectively and transition tasks seamlessly, regardless of where the process originates. As a result, the Orchestrator is essential for managing intricate workflows, facilitating real-time adaptability, and efficient task delegation among agents.

    The role of Orchestrator in AI Agent Studio:
    1. Task Coordination & Execution: manages the interaction between multiple AI agents, ensuring that tasks are executed in the correct sequence.
    2. Dynamic Decision-Making: Can invoke AI models dynamically based on the scenario.
    3. Seamless Integration with Enterprise Systems: Works with ServiceNow workflows, CMDB, and third-party APIs to enable end-to-end automation.
    4. Handling Multi-Step Workflows: Enables chained execution of AI-driven tasks among multiple AI Agents.
    5. Policy & Governance Enforcement: Enforces governance rules to verify that AI agents adhere to conformance and security standards.

    The Orchestrator works with ReAct prompt, where the previous reflection prompt has been merged with the planning prompt for a streamlined execution experience improving the efficiency and visibility of planner actions. With the ReAct prompt, a scheduling mode called Route has been introduced that enables asynchronous, parallel tool execution within agents to reduce latency and improve performance when an agent needs assistance from another agent during the execution process.

    Dynamic Orchestrator for agentic workflows

    The dynamic orchestrator helps map the right agents to the user's agentic workflow to provide better performance and accuracy. When there are more than the ideal 8 to 10 AI agents available for an agentic workflow, then the dynamic orchestrator helps identify the agents that need to be considered for executing that agentic workflow in the planning phase.

    User impersonation in Now Assist AI agents

    The agentic workflow executes tools as the logged-in user in the Now Assist panel. Any operations that are performed within the tool in this flow are also executed as the logged-in user. After impersonation is enabled, testing an AI agent uses the instance-level impersonation.

    Administrators can see logs with individual AI agent names as a record of who approved the agentic action in an agentic workflow. The logs help when determining a point of contact if there’s an issue with the approved agentic action by the AI agent.

    With impersonation, the fulfiller in the Now Assist panel and the requester in Virtual Agent can see the transactions recorded in the name of the AI agent that performed the agentic workflow execution.
    Note:
    Virtual Agent can be turned on only for AI agents at the Define availability section in the AI agent guided setup. For more information, see Create an AI agent.