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...