Now Assist for Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) release notes

  • Release version: Store
  • Updated June 11, 2026
  • 8 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 Now Assist for Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) Release Notes

    Now Assist for Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) leverages Generative AI to enhance project, portfolio, and demand management within ServiceNow SPM environments. It streamlines communication, improves project visibility, and accelerates demand processing by providing AI-driven insights, automation, and conversational capabilities directly within the strategic portfolio workspace.

    Show full answer Show less

    Key Features

    • Project Q&A and Conversational AI: Ask natural language questions about projects and receive instant AI-generated answers within the project workspace, eliminating manual data analysis.
    • Portfolio and Project Insights: AI analyzes portfolios and projects for execution delays, scope creep, budget fluctuations, dependency issues, and critical path changes. It provides root cause analysis and recommended mitigation actions.
    • Project Risk Detection: AI automatically identifies, drafts, and proposes project risks with detailed rationale and mitigation plans for project manager review and approval.
    • Demand Management Automation: The Demand Manager AI Specialist reads governance policies to autonomously validate and convert demands, drastically reducing processing time from weeks to minutes (requires ServiceNow approval).
    • Agile Story and Acceptance Criteria Generation: Convert epics and features into user stories and generate clear, context-aware acceptance criteria using AI-assisted conversational workflows.
    • AI-Generated Status Reports and Emails: Create structured, context-aware, and executive-level project status reports and summaries that can be scheduled or sent on-demand with improved accuracy and resource availability calculations.
    • Document Summarization and Content Refinement: Summarize entire documents or selected text, and refine planning item descriptions using AI-powered elaboration or shortening, enhancing content quality and consistency.
    • Task and Critical Path Monitoring: AI autonomously monitors critical project tasks and triggers summary emails highlighting key updates to project managers.
    • Enhanced User Experience: Animated Now Assist icons and improved UI elements across SPM workspaces provide a more engaging and intuitive interaction with AI features.
    • Multi-Model AI Support: Now Assist supports various AI providers including Google Gemini, AWS Claude, Now LLM, and Azure Open AI, giving customers flexibility in AI model selection.

    Practical Benefits for ServiceNow Customers

    • Accelerated Decision-Making: Instant AI insights and root cause analysis enable faster identification of project risks and portfolio bottlenecks.
    • Improved Project Visibility: Rich, in-context AI-generated insights within the project workspace reduce the need to navigate multiple modules or perform manual analysis.
    • Demand Processing Efficiency: AI-driven demand validation automates intake workflows, reducing administrative overhead and speeding up project initiation.
    • Enhanced Communication: Automated status reports and summary emails keep stakeholders informed with executive-ready content generated from live data.
    • Content Quality and Consistency: AI-assisted content creation and refinement helps product managers and agile teams maintain clear and actionable documentation.
    • Security and Access Controls: Enhanced granular permissions ensure appropriate control over AI skill and agent usage.

    Expectations and Next Steps

    ServiceNow customers can expect ongoing enhancements in AI capabilities to further streamline strategic portfolio management tasks. Some advanced features like the Demand Manager AI Specialist require ServiceNow approval and controlled availability. Customers should review system requirements and family compatibility on the ServiceNow Store before upgrading. Adoption of Now Assist features will enable project and portfolio teams to work smarter, reduce manual effort, and improve overall delivery outcomes.

    Version history for the Now Assist for Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) application on the ServiceNow Store.

    Important:
    For details on system requirements and family compatibility, view the application listing on the ServiceNow Store website.

    Version history

    Version 9.6.0 - June 2026
    • New:
      • IntroducedProject Q&A conversational capability to ask questions about your project in natural language and get instant, AI-generated answers directly from the project workspace, without having to manually analyze project data.
      • UsePortfolio insights to analyze planning items in a portfolio plan for execution delays, delayed starts, planned versus approved date misalignments, and projects at risk. View AI-generated root causes and recommended actions to mitigate identified risks and issues.
      • Get demands from Draft to Converted in minutes instead of weeks. The Demand Manager AI Specialist reads your governance policies and does the intake work for you.[Requires approval from Servicenow]
    • Changed:
      • Project insights now includes scope creep as an additional topic and considers work notes at the task level as additional context, providing richer and more actionable project visibility.
      • Updated formatting forin-app insight widgets to improve readability and presentation within the project workspace.
      • Project Risk Detection now includes clickable links in AI Rationale for quick navigation to referenced project records. Refined Mitigation plan formatting for a better reading experience.
    Version 9.4.0 - May 2026
    • New:
      • Portfolio Insights - Identify planning items which are delayed beyond their planned start/end dates auto-categorized by severity with insights into top root causes behind the delays generated by AI. Review recommended actions by AI to immediately take steps to mitigate the impact. Identify planning items with mis-aligned planned/actual dates to approved dates and review recommended actions to correct them.
      • Project Risk Detection - Automatically detect and create project risks using AI to reduce manual effort and improve visibility. AI analyzes project data and generates draft risk records with details such as title, description, impact, probability, AI rationale, and mitigation plan. These are then presented to the project manager for review, allowing them to accept and add them to RIDAC or reject them.
      • Demand manager AI specialist - Validates and converts operational demands autonomously. This feature is currently supported in the controlled availability mode, please contact ServiceNow to implement this specialist.
      • Epic health status: Use Now Assist to instantly assess epic health across six risk dimensions and get a red, yellow, or green status with plain-English reasoning, directly from the epic record page.
    • Changed:
      • AI Status Reports now computes overall project health (red/yellow/green), generate AI-powered status reports using templates, and produce enhanced executive summaries to create draft status reports for projects.
      • Project Insights now includes additional topics such as budget fluctuations, project delays, projects not started, dependency issues, and critical path changes to provide richer and more actionable project visibility.
      • Goal insights along with AI forecasted status are now generated automatically via a scheduled job ( shipped default inactive). Ai rationale can be viewed against the AI generated status for each of the goal and target .
      • Enhanced the demand summarization skill to include data from cost plans, monetary and non-monetary benefit plans, demand tasks, resource assignments and work notes to summarize demands.
    Version 9.1.0 - April 2026
    • Changed:
      • AI Project summary emails now reliably schedule the next send date after each delivery
      • Create Agile Story generation workflow and agent are now protected with stringent system security policies
      • Project Insights emails now fully support language translation, including all section headings. The skill admin experience is now clean and free of unrelated navigation menus.
      • AI Status Reports now accurately predict Schedule health using variance data, flag AI-generated reports in the Project Status table, and accurately calculate resource availability for role-based assignments.
    Version 9.0.1 - March 2026
    • New:
      • Demand summarization introduced
      • Goal insights introduced.
      • AI Project Status Reports - Generate structured, context-aware project status reports using live project data to keep stakeholders informed.
    • Enhanced:
      • Project Insights Generation - Insights now surface directly within the project workspace including financials and RIDAC insights, giving project managers a unified, in-context view of project health without leaving the workspace.
      • Agile Story Generation - Now available within the Agile Development module, enabling teams to create user stories directly in the context of their agile workflows.
    Version 8.0.0 - December 2025
    • Enhanced:
      • Project Insights Generation- Automatically track critical project signals such as delayed milestones, resource constraints, and task slippages and receive proactive insights either on a scheduled cadence or on-demand
      • Agile story generation - Convert epics into high-quality, actionable user stories faster and more intelligently through an improved, agentic, context-aware flow
    • New:
      • Acceptance criteria generation - Produce clear, consistent, and context-aware acceptance criteria using predefined templates and story-specific information
      • Target generation - Generate measurable targets from goals information and optional context and automatically populate key fields in the target creation form
      • Identify similar demands - Identify existing or related demand records during creation or editing to avoid duplication and ensure better demand hygiene
    Version 7.2.1 - October 2025
    Changed: Expand the Write planning item skill to additional records across SPM applications and additional rich or long text fields. As part of the update included additional context fields to the prompt for each form. Rename the Write planning item skill to Refine records.
    Version 4.9.2 - October 2025 (Xanadu)
    Changed: Implemented changes based on the P0 security directive to be XP10 compatible.
    Version 7.1.0 - September 2025
    • New: Ability to enter custom prompts directly in the Docs, alongside Summarize, Elaborate and Shorten options
    • Changed: Enhanced access controls that provide greater granularity at the Skill and AI Agent level
    Version 7.0.0 - August 2025
    • Updated:
      • Email Project Summary
        • The Project Summary can now be sent on-demand without having to wait for the set cadence to trigger
        • The Project Summary can be emailed to additional recipients along with the Project Manager
      • Monitor Project Tasks Agent
        • Enable the Project Task Monitor AI Agent from the UI by selecting the "Include critical path task changes" check box in the email project summary modal rather than enabling it from the backend
    • New:
      • New third-party AI model provider options for Now Assist
        • Google Gemini, AWS Claude are available for Now Assist skills and AI agents in addition to Now LLM and Azure Open AI
    Version 4.9.1 - June 2025 (Xanadu)
    • Changed:
      • Agile Story generation:
        • Product Managers and Team Leads can effortlessly break down Features, in addition to Epics, into a logical set of stories using the conversational interface within the Now Assist Panel.
        • The documents attached to the "Docs" tab of Epics or Feature will be considered as the context in addition to the 'Name' and Description' field and existing stories.
        • Users can now run multiple story creation conversations within the Now Assist Panel using the New chat option.
    • Users can initiate story creation conversation by entering the Epic or Feature number Visual Elevation for Now Assist:
      • Animated Now Assist icon is available on select buttons in the SPM workspaces, enhancing the overall user experience.
    • Updated Docs skill Name:
      • Project doc summarization (Project Workspace) Planning item doc summarization (Strategic Planning) EAP doc summarization (Enterprise Agile Planning)
    • New:
      • Write Planning Item:
        • Improve record quality by enabling AI assistance in the description field across these Strategic Planning Workspace forms: Product idea, Demand, Epic, Project, Capability, Feature, and Story.
        • Refine content using Elaborate and Shorten options on planning items to help product managers and agile team members in creating and editing content more effectively.
    Version 6.0.0 - May 2025
    • Changed:
      • Agile Story generation
        • Product Managers and Team Leads can effortlessly break down Features, in addition to Epics, into a logical set of stories using the conversational interface within the Now Assist Panel.
        • The documents attached to the "Docs" tab of Epics or Feature will be considered as the context in addition to the 'Name' and Description' field and existing stories.
        • Users can now run multiple story creation conversations within the Now Assist Panel using the New chat option.
        • Users can initiate story creation conversation by entering the Epic or Feature number
      • Visual Elevation for Now Assist
        • Animated Now Assist icon is available on select buttons in the SPM workspaces, enhancing the overall user experience.
      • Updated Docs skill Name
        • Project doc summarization (Project Workspace)
        • Planning item doc summarization (Strategic Planning)
        • EAP doc summarization (Enterprise Agile Planning)
    • New
      • Create Planning Item
        • Improve record quality by enabling AI assistance in the description field across these Strategic Planning Workspace forms: Product idea, Demand, Epic, Project, Capability, Feature, and Story.
        • Refine content using Elaborate and Shorten options on planning items to help product managers and agile team members in creating and editing content more effectively.
    Version 5.1.1 - March 2025
    • New:
      • Monitor project tasks
        • Autonomously monitor project tasks on the critical path of a project. Detect key updates and triggers a project summary email to the Project Manager, highlighting the specific updates that triggered the alert.
    Version 5.0.0 - February 2025
    • New:
      • Agile Story generation
        • Product Managers and Team Leads can effortlessly break down epics into a logical set of stories using the conversational interface within the Now Assist Panel
    • Changed:
      • Visual Elevation for Now Assist
        • Now Assist users will notice an animated loader and logo on select screens (Feedback and Doc Summarization), enhancing the overall user experience
    Version 4.0.0 - November 2024
    • New:
      • Project Summary Email
        • Project managers will receive a summary of the project by Now Assist in an email that covers the insights from project schedule, milestones, resources, and financials. They can click on the links in the email to directly navigate to the corresponding project records.
        • Project managers can choose the frequency at which they would like to receive these emails from the project workspace interface.
      • Full Doc Summarization
        • Project managers, portfolio manager, product managers can now quickly summarize their entire documents on a click of a button. Now Assist presents the summary of the entire doc that can be further shortened or elaborated.
    Version 2.0.1 - September 2024
    Fixed: The feedback record summarization feature produces identical summaries for all feedback records.
    Version 3.0.0 - August 2024
    New: Selected text within docs can be summarized, shortened or elaborated using Now Assist. Select multiple feedback records to quickly summarize and get insights using Now Assist.
    Version 2.0.0 - May 2024
    Now Assist for Strategic Portfolio Management drives customer value faster by utilizing the power of Generative AI (GenAI) to ensure that business demands and feedback are communicated clearly, efficiently, and effectively.