Now Assist on ServiceNow: An Honest Look at What Actually Works in 2026
A head of platform at a European insurer emailed me last month with a screenshot. It was a Now Assist summary of a P2 incident, generated inside the agent workspace. The summary read like it had been written by a competent junior analyst. Concise, factual, decent grouping of the timeline. He wanted to know two things. First, was the platform team crazy to be excited about it. Second, why the SecOps team was still refusing to enable it on their queue. Both questions have the same answer, and it is the answer that anyone actually working with Now Assist ServiceNow deployments in 2026 already knows. The technology works. The rollout does not. Set the marketing to one side. Now Assist is a set of generative AI capabilities baked into the ServiceNow platform, powered by NowLM and, where the customer chooses, by third-party frontier models routed through ServiceNow's own inference layer. The four capabilities that customers touch most often are case summarization, resolution note drafting, agent chat sidekick, and virtual agent topic generation. There are more. Flow authoring assistance, code generation for scripted actions, playbook suggestion, and a growing set of domain-specific...