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Now Assist, NowLM and generative AI on the platform.

Now Assist ServiceNow: What Actually Works and What Doesn't After a Year of Real Deployments
Aug 23, 2026 AI on ServiceNow

Now Assist ServiceNow: What Actually Works and What Doesn’t After a Year of Real Deployments

A head of platform at a European insurer calls me on a Tuesday. They have bought Now Assist as part of a Pro Plus bundle. The executive sponsor wants a demo in six weeks. Sales has been shown a video with a chat window that resolves incidents in one sentence, and the CIO has already told the board that AI will cut ticket handling time by forty percent. The head of platform reads the release notes, opens the Now Assist configuration, and realises he has no idea which of the twenty-plus skills to enable, in which order, or whether any of them will survive contact with the messy reality of his instance. That call is the reason I am writing this. There is a large gap between the marketing story around Now Assist and what actually lands in production. After a year of watching real Now Assist deployments across mid-market and enterprise customers, I can tell you which capabilities are genuinely worth turning on this quarter, which ones need six months of data cleanup first, and which ones you should quietly skip until the next release.

Now Assist on ServiceNow: What Earns Its Keep and What Quietly Doesn't
Jun 10, 2026 AI on ServiceNow

Now Assist on ServiceNow: What Earns Its Keep and What Quietly Doesn’t

A CIO at a European insurer called me last month with a problem that is becoming familiar. They had switched on Now Assist for ITSM eight months earlier, paid for the SKU, sat through the keynote demos, and asked their service desk leads to "use the AI." The dashboard told them adoption was high. The MTTR numbers had barely moved. Customer satisfaction was flat. Two of the agents were quietly turning the summarisation feature off because it kept hallucinating the wrong impacted CIs into resolution notes. The CIO did not want a vendor pitch. He wanted to know which Now Assist features actually pay for themselves on a real instance, and which ones the platform team should leave alone until the next release. That conversation is the post. Most ServiceNow customers I work with treat Now Assist the way they treated Predictive Intelligence in 2019. They flip the toggles, run a demo for the steering committee, and assume that because the model produces output, the output is valuable. It is the same mistake people made with chatbots in 2017. The output looks confident. The screenshots are great. Whether anyone is actually faster or more accurate is a separate question, and almost nobody...