Exploring Now Assist for Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM)

  • Release version: Australia
  • Updated March 12, 2026
  • 7 minutes to read
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    Summary of Exploring Now Assist for Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM)

    Now Assist for Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) integrates generative AI capabilities directly into multiple SPM workspaces to enhance decision-making, resource optimization, and investment strategies. It empowers product, project, portfolio, and demand managers to automate routine tasks, gain actionable insights, and streamline portfolio and project management processes through AI-driven skills and agents.

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    Key Features

    • Epic Health Assessment: Automatically evaluates epics across six risk dimensions (story health, blocked stories, dependencies, progress, timeline, ownership), providing a color-coded status with clear reasoning to help portfolio managers quickly assess risk without manual reviews.
    • Portfolio Insights Skill: Delivers AI-generated insights on planning items, highlighting delays, misalignments, root causes, and recommended actions to improve portfolio plan management.
    • Quick Story Generation: Enables rapid creation of well-structured user stories from epics with AI-generated titles, descriptions, and acceptance criteria, reducing manual effort and maintaining consistency in Agile Development 2.0 and EAP applications.
    • Goal Insights Skill: Provides predictive and actionable visibility into goal health, including AI forecasts, confidence levels, risks, stalled work, and improvement recommendations for proactive goal management.
    • Demand Summarization: Creates concise summaries of demand records by analyzing relevant fields and related lists, simplifying demand review and communication.
    • Acceptance Criteria Generation: Helps product managers generate clear, testable acceptance criteria for user stories, accelerating planning and improving backlog quality.
    • Target Generation: Automatically populates measurable targets aligned to goals, streamlining target creation and clarity in Strategic Planning Workspace.
    • Identify Similar Records: Detects similar demand records with high contextual similarity to avoid duplication and improve data accuracy.
    • Content Refinement: Offers AI-powered text elaboration and shortening for multiple record types (e.g., product ideas, epics, projects), enhancing content clarity and quality.
    • Feedback Summarization: Summarizes lengthy customer feedback into concise insights, helping product managers quickly understand feedback context and convert it into actionable items.
    • Document Generation and Insights: Supports summarizing, elaborating, or shortening content within Project, Planning Item, or Enterprise Agile Planning Docs to highlight key information efficiently.
    • Project Insights Generation: Enables project managers to monitor progress and changes across projects, tasks, milestones, resources, risks, and finances, with customizable email cadence for updates.
    • Conversational Demand Creation: Simplifies demand creation in the Employee Service Management portal and supported platforms (Microsoft Teams, Mobile) by using chat-based contextual questions to auto-populate demand forms.
    • Project Status Generation: Automates creation of project status reports with AI-predicted health metrics, executive summaries, and rationale, streamlining reporting in Project Workspace.
    • Now Assist Admin Console: Provides administrators with tools to activate and manage Now Assist features and skills within Strategic Planning Workspace.
    • AI Agents: Utilize Large Language Models (LLMs) to handle a range of tasks from simple responses to complex problem-solving, enhancing live agent workflows within SPM.

    Key Outcomes

    • Enhanced Efficiency: Automates manual and repetitive tasks such as story creation, acceptance criteria drafting, and status reporting, allowing teams to focus on value delivery.
    • Improved Risk Management: Provides consolidated, AI-driven risk assessments and insights at portfolio, project, and goal levels, enabling proactive issue resolution.
    • Data-Driven Decisions: Generates actionable recommendations and root cause analyses to optimize planning, resource allocation, and investment strategies.
    • Better Collaboration and Communication: Summarizes complex feedback and documentation clearly, fostering alignment among stakeholders and accelerating execution.
    • Streamlined Demand and Goal Management: Simplifies demand creation and goal target definition, improving accuracy and reducing cycle times.
    • Customizable Administration: Offers administrators control over AI skill activation and management, ensuring tailored deployment to organizational needs.

    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.

    Assess the status of an epic using Now Assist for Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM)

    Use Now Assist to automatically evaluate epic health across six risk dimensions: story health, blocked stories, dependencies, progress, timeline, and ownership. The skill returns a red, yellow, or green status with plain-English reasoning, giving portfolio managers a consolidated risk view without manually reviewing stories, timelines, and assignments.

    Trigger the skill by selecting the Epic status button on the epic record page. The assessment is displayed in an AI-generated summary card at the top of the Details tab.

    Epic health assessment card showing status indicators in Enterprise Agile Planning.

    Portfolio insights skill

    Gain AI-generated insights for planning items within a portfolio plan using the Portfolio insights skill. Identify planning items that are delayed beyond their planned end date, have delayed starts, or have misalignments between planned and approved dates. View AI-generated top root causes and recommended actions for each insight category to help address delays and misalignments.

    Select the Portfolio insights button on the planning page of a portfolio plan. The insights for the portfolio plan are displayed in an AI-generated summary card.

    Portfolio insights summary card displaying AI-generated root causes and actions.

    Quick story generation

    As a product manager or agile team member, generate complete user stories directly from an epic using the Quick story generation skill, without lengthy conversations or manual authoring. Available in both Agile Development 2.0 and EAP applications, this Now Assist feature removes the friction of story creation so your team can focus on delivery.

    To generate a story, open an epic and select Generate Story from the Stories related list. Enter one or two lines of context to guide Now Assist, then select Generate. Now Assist generates a story title, description, and acceptance criteria based on the epic and your input. Review and refine all fields inline before saving the story directly to the epic's related list.Stories related list of an epic in Enterprise Agile Planning, showing the Generate Story button.

    By using the Quick story generation skill, you can:
    • Create well-structured stories instantly, reducing the time and effort spent on manual story authoring.
    • Generate complete stories including title, description, and acceptance criteria, maintaining consistency across your backlog.
    • Maintain full control with inline editing of all AI-generated fields before saving, preserving human oversight throughout the process.
    • Use a fast, non-conversational option in both Agile Development 2.0 and EAP. In EAP, you also have access to the conversational Agile story generation agent for creating multiple stories for an epic.

    Stories related list of an epic in Agile Development 2.0, showing the Generate Story button.

    Goal insights skill
    Generate insights for goals to gain predictive, actionable visibility into goal health using the Goal insights skill. The skill analyzes the goal, its targets, subgoals, and aligned work, then delivers concise, data‑driven insights—including AI forecasted status, confidence of achieving the goal, targets at risk, delayed or stalled aligned work and recommendations—helping goal owners and contributors proactively manage risks and improve goal outcomes. You can trigger the skill by selecting the Goal insights or Show insights on the grid view or goals' full details page respectively.
    Note:
    When you generate insights for a goal, insights are also generated individually for each of its targets.
    Generate goal insights in Strategic Planning Workspace using Goal insights skill.
    Summarize demands with the demand summarization skill

    Generate a concise, structured summary of any demand using the demand summarization Now Assist skill. The skill reviews the demand fields and related lists and helps create a clear summary of the demand. You can trigger the skill by selecting the Summarize button on the demand form.

    The generated summary is displayed in a summary card in the demand form.

    Summary generated by Now Assist.
    Generate acceptance criteria skill

    As a product manager, generate clear, comprehensive, and testable acceptance criteria for your user stories, instead of spending hours writing and refining them manually.

    Review and refine the suggested options to ensure they meet your story requirements without slowing down planning. By helping you streamline generating acceptance criteria as a process, this skill helps save time, improve quality, and speed up delivery with cleaner backlogs and better collaboration.

    Generate acceptance criteria for an EAP Story using Now Assist.

    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.

    Multi feedback summarization or Feedback summarization

    Provides 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 generation and insights, Planning Item doc generation and insights, or EAP doc generation and insights

    Provides product managers with a concise and informative summary of the selected or complete text by using Now Assist in Docs. 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 generation and insights (Project Workspace), Planning item doc generation and insights (Strategic Planning), or EAP doc generation and insights (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 project, project task, milestone, resource assignment, ridac, and financial. 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 email template.
    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.

    Project status generation

    Generate an AI‑assisted project status report using project status generation skill.

    With project status generation skill, Now Assist predicts overall and dimension‑level project health (such as schedule, cost, resources, and scope), generates an executive summary using weekly project data, and provides a rationale for each prediction. Project Managers can generate a status report where AI pre-populates key fields:
    • Overall project health
    • Health by dimensions (schedule/cost/resources/scope)
    • Executive summary
    • Rationale/analysis for each predicted health value

    This skill streamlines the process of status report creation in Project Workspace.

    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 Overview tab in Now Assist Admin.

    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 Use AI agent or agentic workflows in Now Assist for Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM).