Exploring Now Assist Skill Kit
Summarize
Summary of Exploring Now Assist Skill Kit
The Now Assist Skill Kit plugin empowers ServiceNow customers to create and activate custom prompts and skills within Now Assist, extending the generative AI capabilities beyond the base system skills. This flexibility allows organizations to tailor AI-driven interactions to better fit their unique workflows and use cases.
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To effectively build custom skills, users should have a solid understanding of prompt engineering and large language model (LLM) behavior, including the probabilistic nature of outputs and how to iteratively test and refine prompts using representative instance data.
Getting Started
- Update Now Assist plugins via the Application Manager to the latest versions, such as Now Assist for ITSM.
- Assign the snskillbuilder.admin role to users who will create and manage custom skills.
Roles and Responsibilities
- AI Developer: Responsible for creating new skills, writing and refining prompts, and configuring skill settings. Requires the snskillbuilder.admin role and prompt engineering expertise.
- Now Assist Admin: Reviews and activates published skills to make them available at configured touchpoints. Requires the admin role.
Skill Development Workflow
- Define the Provider: Understand the benefits and trade-offs of the chosen LLM for your skill.
- Build the Prompt: Leverage knowledge of your Now Assist instance architecture and LLM fundamentals to design effective prompts with appropriate input data sources.
- Test the Prompt: Use the Skill Kit’s editor to iteratively test and refine prompts against real data.
- Deploy the Skill: Publish skills to various touchpoints including Now Assist panel, Context Menu, Virtual Agent, Flow Action, or UI Action.
Benefits for ServiceNow Customers
- Create Custom Solutions: Build tailored generative AI skills or workflows that address specific business needs.
- Prompt and Data Configuration: Customize prompts and control the data inputs to enhance AI responses.
- Iterative Testing: Refine skills before activation to ensure reliability and relevance within your environment.
- Seamless Deployment: Integrate AI-powered skills directly into ServiceNow interfaces to improve efficiency and effectiveness of workflows.
Next Steps
To further leverage the Now Assist Skill Kit, explore detailed configuration and usage guidance available in the related documentation on configuring and using the Skill Kit.
Use the Now Assist Skill Kit plugin for Now Assist to create and activate custom prompts and skills for Now Assist.
Now Assist Skill Kit overview
Use Now Assist Skill Kit to create custom skills when base system Now Assist skills don't fit your needs. Custom skills enable you to have greater flexibility with Now Assist's generative AI capabilities.
Before you build a custom skill
Because you write and refine the prompts that drive your skills, you should be comfortable with the fundamentals of prompt engineering and with how a large language model (LLM) behaves.
- How an LLM produces output, including its probabilistic nature and the fact that the same prompt can produce different results on different models.
- How to write, test, and refine a prompt based on the output it produces, rather than on how you expect the model to interpret your wording.
- The use case you want to solve and the persona you're building the skill for.
Effective skill development depends on testing the prompt against representative data from your instance and refining it based on the results, not on a single example. For the full set of guidelines and the phases of building a skill, see General guidelines for Now Assist Skill Kit. For help defining requirements and outcomes before you build, see Scoping the skill.
Get Now Assist Skill Kit
To use Now Assist Skill Kit, you must update your Now Assist plugins in the Application Manager. For example, update your Now Assist for ITSM plugin to the latest available release.
You must also assign the sn_skill_builder.admin role to anyone who uses Now Assist Skill Kit.
Now Assist Skill Kit users
| User | Description |
|---|---|
| AI developer | Creates new skills, writes and refines the prompts, and configures the skill settings. This user must have the sn_skill_builder.admin role. Building an effective skill requires prompt engineering experience and an understanding of LLM behavior. |
| Now Assist admin | Reviews and activates published skills so that they're available at the configured touch points. This user must have the admin role. |
Now Assist Skill Kit workflow
The following diagram shows the user journey for Now Assist Skill Kit.
- Define the provider
- Understand the benefits and potential downsides of each large language model (LLM) that you're considering using.
- Build the prompt
- You must have an understanding of the architecture of your Now Assist instance and be able to define where input data should come from. You should also have an understanding of LLM fundamentals to build an effective prompt.
- Test the prompt
- Now Assist Skill Kit enables you to test your prompt from the editor.
- Deploy the skill
- Now Assist Skill Kit enables you to deploy your skill to Now Assist panel, Now Assist Context Menu, Virtual Agent, Flow Action, or a UI Action.
Now Assist Skill Kit benefits
Now Assist Skill Kit enables you to design your own custom generative AI functionality that is then easily deployed into the ServiceNow platform. Custom skills can augment workflows with generative AI to increase effectiveness and efficiency.
| Benefit | Feature | Users |
|---|---|---|
| Create custom solutions by building a custom skill or workflow. | Create a skill | AI developer |
| Create and edit prompts for skills and configure where you want to bring in data from to augment your prompt. | Create a prompt | AI developer |
| Test and iterate on your skill before activating it. | Test a prompt | AI developer |