Exploring Now Assist for IT Service Management (ITSM)

  • Release version: Xanadu
  • Updated August 1, 2024
  • 3 minutes to read
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    Summary of Exploring Now Assist for IT Service Management (ITSM)

    The Now Assist for IT Service Management (ITSM) application leverages generative AI to help service agents efficiently manage incidents and chats. It enables agents to quickly understand incident context, generate resolution notes, and summarize chat interactions, improving collaboration and speeding up resolutions.

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    Key Features

    • Incident Summary: Provides a concise summary of active incidents, including issue details, actions taken, and resolution context. Agents can refresh, post, copy, and give feedback on these summaries.
    • Chat Summarization: Summarizes Virtual Agent chat histories and entire chat interactions, helping agents grasp conversation points and handoffs for better troubleshooting.
    • Sidebar Discussion Summarization: Summarizes Virtual Agent Sidebar discussions with options to post summaries to incident work notes for ongoing troubleshooting.
    • Incident Assist: Offers conversational access to common incident-related information like caller assets, recent incidents, on-call experts, and similar resolved incidents directly within the incident record.
    • Change Request Summarization: Summarizes change requests by outlining objectives, plans, risks, and other key details to accelerate understanding and processing of change requests.
    • Change Request Risk Explanation: Clarifies the risk rating for change requests by providing explanations based on risk factors and related incidents or changes.
    • Resolution Notes Generation: Automatically generates resolution notes to document incident outcomes, facilitating knowledge sharing among agents.
    • Knowledge Generation: Enables agents to create and review knowledge articles directly from resolved incidents to enhance organizational knowledge bases.
    • Chat Reply Recommendation: Provides agents with AI-generated reply suggestions for chat interactions, streamlining communication with requesters.
    • Now Assist Panel: A conversational interface in the Service Operations Workspace that allows agents to request chat or incident summaries and generate resolution notes seamlessly.

    Practical Benefits for ServiceNow Customers

    By integrating Now Assist for ITSM, ServiceNow customers empower their agents to:

    • Accelerate incident resolution by quickly understanding context and history.
    • Enhance collaboration through automatic and clear documentation of chats, incidents, and change requests.
    • Improve knowledge sharing via easy generation of resolution notes and knowledge articles.
    • Reduce manual effort in drafting responses and notes with AI-generated recommendations.
    • Utilize a unified conversational interface within Service Operations Workspace for efficient access to AI-driven assistance.

    This application streamlines ITSM workflows, reduces resolution times, and fosters better communication among support agents.

    With the Now Assist for IT Service Management (ITSM) application, your agents can summarize the chat conversations and incident details, generate the incident resolution notes to share with other agents.

    Now Assist for IT Service Management (ITSM) overview

    The following generative AI capabilities are available for an agent:
    • An incident summary enables your agents to understand the incident context.
    • The incident resolution notes provide the context to other agents who might encounter similar incidents.
    • An interaction chat summary provides the context about the chat conversation to an agent by specifying all points of the handoff, including the Virtual Agent conversation.

    Now Assist for IT Service Management (ITSM) skills

    The Now Assist for ITSM application includes the generative AI skills and features that enable your agents to understand the chat and incident context so that they can propose quicker resolutions to the requester.

    Chat summarization
    Provides an agent with a summary of a requester's Virtual Agent chat history. An agent can also generate a summary of the entire interaction when the chat ends or when an incident is created for further troubleshooting before or after the chat ends.

    Chat summarization for an interaction.

    Sidebar discussion summarization
    Provides an agent with a summary of a requester's Virtual Agent Sidebar discussion history. An agent can also post the summary to the incident work notes for further troubleshooting before or after the chat ends.

    Sidebar discussion summarization.

    Incident summarization
    Enables an agent to expedite the incident troubleshooting process by reviewing its summary that includes the issue, actions taken, and resolution. Your agent can generate an incident summary for active incidents to understand the incident context. Your agent can also refresh the summary, post the summary to the incident work notes, copy the summary, and provide feedback about the summary.
    The incident summary includes the information that an agent enters in the following incident record fields:
    • Short description
    • Description
    • Work notes
    • Additional comments
    • Email

    Incident summary that specifies the issue and actions taken.

    Incident assist
    Enables an agent to quickly obtain common incident related information conversationally within the incident record by asking questions related to the supported topics in the Now Assist panel.
    Incident assist topics supported in the Now Assist panel include:
    • Caller's assets
    • Caller's recent incidents
    • On-call experts from support groups
    • Similar resolved incidents

    Incident assist panel in Service Operations Workspace in an incident.

    Change request summarization
    Enables an agent to expedite the change request process by reviewing its summary that includes objective, plan, and risk. Your agent can generate a change request summary for active change requests to understand the change request context. Your agent can also refresh the summary, post the summary to the change request work notes, copy the summary, and provide feedback about the summary.
    The change request summary includes the information that an agent enters in the following incident record fields:
    • Short description
    • Description
    • Work notes
    • Additional comments
    • Risk
    • Impact
    • Justification
    • Implementation plan
    • Risk and impact analysis
    • Test plan
    • Backout plan
    • Close code
    • Close notes
    • Configuration item
    • Service
    • Service offering
    • State
    • Conflict status
    • Type

    Change request summary in Service Operations Workspace.

    Change request risk explanation
    Enables an agent to understand the change request risk by reviewing the explanation for the risk rating. Your agent can generate a change request risk explanation for change requests that have a risk rating (high, med, low). Your agent can also copy the summary, and provide feedback about the summary.
    The change request risk explanation includes the information that an agent enters in the following incident record fields:
    • Short description
    • Implementation plan
    • Assignment group
    • Risk

    Additional inputs include: similar change requests and the incidents caused by those changes, and risk condition that was met.

    Change request risk explanation in Service Operations Workspace.

    Resolution notes generation
    Automatically generates the resolution notes for an incident using the Now Assist icon and provides context to the other agents who might encounter similar incidents.

    Resolution notes for an incident.

    Knowledge generation

    Enables an agent to generate a knowledge article from an incident after proposing a resolution or closing the incident.

    The knowledge generation skill displays a pop-up window that an agent can use to generate a knowledge article and review it before publishing the knowledge article draft.

    Figure 1. Knowledge article generation pop-up window
    Now Assist in ITSM knowledge article choice modal.
    Chat reply recommendation

    Enables an agent to generate a reply recommendation from a chat using the Now Assist icon.

    The chat reply recommendation skill displays a pop-up window that an agent can use to generate a recommendation and review it before sending it as a reply to the requester.

    Write with Now Assist chat reply recommendation.

    Now Assist panel in Service Operations Workspace for ITSM

    An agent can use the Now Assist panel in Service Operations Workspace for ITSM. This conversational interface enables an agent to request a chat summary or incident summary and generate the incident resolution notes. For more information about the Now Assist panel, see Now Assist panel.