Incident Summarisation
When an incident has multiple work notes, Now Assist can generate a plain-language summary of the incident history. This is most useful for:
- L3 engineers taking over a ticket from L2
- Managers reviewing a major incident
- End users who want a status update without reading every note
To trigger a summary: open any incident with work notes, look for the "Now Assist" icon or "Summarize" button in the activity section header. Click it. ServiceNow sends the work notes to the AI model and returns a summary within a few seconds.
What the summary includes
The summary typically covers: what the issue is, what has been tried, current status, and next steps. The quality directly depends on how well the work notes are written — vague or abbreviation-heavy work notes produce vague summaries.
Resolution Notes Generation
When closing an incident, Now Assist can suggest resolution notes based on the incident details and work notes. The agent sees a suggestion in the Resolution Notes field — they can accept it as-is, edit it, or ignore it and write their own.
// What Now Assist generates from the work notes:
// "Issue identified as corrupted Windows profile.
// Profile deleted and recreated. User able to log in successfully.
// No further action required."Configuration options
Administrators can configure: which users see Now Assist buttons (via role assignment), which incident states trigger suggestions, whether suggested text is auto-populated or requires a click, and the maximum length of generated content.
Limitations
Now Assist does not have access to information outside the work notes and incident fields. It cannot query related records, look up similar incidents, or access attachments. It is a text summarisation tool, not a knowledge base query engine.