Playbook recommendations

  • Release version: Yokohama
  • Updated January 30, 2025
  • 3 minutes to read

    • Get AI-generated recommendations for placeholder activities. The system generates recommendations based on an activity’s name and description.

    Activation

    Now Assist Recommendations is a skill installed with the Now Assist for Creator (sn_now_creator) application. You can install this application from the ServiceNow Store website.

    Benefits

    Activating the Now Assist Recommendations skill helps to search through all available activity definitions, flows, subflows, and actions on the instance, which enables quicker configuration of placeholder activities in your playbook outline, which then reduces the total time to playbook activation.

    Supported user interfaces

    Access the Now Assist Recommendations skill from the Playbooks user interface.

    Figure 1. Example Now Assist recommendations
    Five sample playbook recommendations for a placeholder activity

    The Now Assist Recommendations skill uses the name and description of the activity to generate one to five recommendations for the activity definition to use for a placeholder activity. If there are no recommendations listed, then no activity definitions are considered relevant to the activity name and description.

    The system can only recommend activity definitions, flows, subflows, and actions that are available from ServiceNow. Recommendations can’t include user-created activity definitions, flows, subflows, or actions.

    Generative AI model training

    This Generative AI large language model was pre-trained with internal ServiceNow playbooks to learn playbook creation patterns. The goal was to understand what playbook activities are most relevant for a certain position in a playbook given the trigger and previous activities.

    Playbook preference

    By default, Workflow Studio shows playbook recommendations as you configure placeholder activities in a playbook outline. You can hide these recommendations on playbook by playbook basis by turning off the Show recommendations playbook preference. See User preferences for flows for more information.

    AI limitations

    This application uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, which are rapidly evolving fields of study that generate predictions based on patterns in data. As a result, this application may not always produce accurate, complete, or appropriate information. Furthermore, there is no guarantee that this application has been fully trained or tested for your use case. To mitigate these issues, it is your responsibility to test and evaluate your use of this application for accuracy, harm, and appropriateness for your use case, employ human oversight of output, and refrain from relying solely on AI-generated outputs for decision-making purposes. This is especially important if you choose to deploy this application in areas with consequential impacts such as healthcare, finance, legal, employment, security, or infrastructure. You agree to abide by ServiceNow’s AI Acceptable Use Policy, which may be updated by ServiceNow.

    Generate playbook recommendations

    Select the activity definition for a placeholder activity from a list of AI-generated recommendations. The system generates recommendations based on an activity’s name and description.

    Before you begin

    • Make sure the playbook recommendations skill is turned on. To learn how to turn on the recommendations skill for playbooks, see Turn on playbook recommendations.
    • You can only generate recommendations for placeholder activities in a generated playbook outline. To learn how to generate a playbook outline, see Generate a playbook.
    • Role required:
      • admin, playbook.admin, pd_author, or a delegated developer permission
      • now.assist.creator

    Procedure

    1. In your playbook outline, hover over the placeholder activity and select the recommendations icon (Now Recommendations icon) in the mini-picker.
    2. Select one of the recommended activity definitions, if appropriate.
      Note:
      If there are no recommendations listed, then no activity definitions are considered relevant to the activity name and description.
    3. Optional: Try updating the Label and Description to improve results.
      1. Open the placeholder activity.
      2. Update the Label and Description.
      3. Under the Activity definition field, select the recommendations button (Recommendations button) to try to generate recommendations again.
      4. Select one of the recommended activity definitions, if appropriate.
    4. Continue on with activity configuration from Step 8.e of the Generate a playbook procedure.

    Result

    When your playbook's trigger conditions are met, your playbook runs. As a result, the system creates a Process Execution record and renders user-facing configurations for Playbook Experience. For an example of how to digitize a manual business process that renders as a playbook, see Design an automated process.

    What to do next

    Design the Playbook Experience for your agents and fulfillers in UI Builder. To learn how to design and customize the runtime playbook experience in UI Builder, see Customize the Playbook Experience.