If you have been following the ServiceNow AI story, you know the platform has gone through several phases — chatbots, Now Assist, AI Experience. Otto is the next step, and it is a significant one. It is not just a renamed product. It represents a fundamental change in how ServiceNow positions AI as the primary interface for enterprise work.
What is ServiceNow Otto?
ServiceNow Otto is a unified enterprise AI experience that combines three previously separate capabilities into a single product running on a new AI-native architecture:
- Now Assist — ServiceNow's existing generative AI feature set (incident summarisation, code generation, search)
- Moveworks — the enterprise AI assistant platform ServiceNow acquired, known for its conversational AI and cross-system capabilities
- AI Experience — the unified AI interface announced at Knowledge 2025
The result is a single AI experience that employees interact with across every workflow, department, and system — without needing to know which tool, team, or application owns the underlying process.
How Does Otto Work?
Otto is built around a simple concept: turn intent into enterprise work. An employee says what they need — in natural language, by voice, or through search — and Otto figures out the rest. It understands the context of the request, identifies which systems and workflows are involved, routes the work, executes it, and completes it end to end.
Otto operates across four modes:
1. Conversational AI
The most familiar interface. Employees submit requests in natural language — "I need access to the Salesforce sandbox," "My laptop keyboard is broken," "I want to book a desk in the London office for Tuesday." Otto understands the intent, determines which workflow handles it, and executes or routes it without the employee navigating a service catalog or filling out a form.
Unlike Now Assist, which lived inside specific ServiceNow applications, Otto is designed to sit across the entire enterprise — aware of the employee's role, location, and existing access, and able to route across systems beyond ServiceNow.
2. Enterprise Search
Otto searches across documents, wikis, knowledge bases, databases, and enterprise applications with personalised results based on the user's role and context. This is the Moveworks capability integrated at the platform level — search that returns the right answer, not just the right document.
3. AI Voice Agents
Otto supports natural, multilingual voice interactions. This matters most for frontline workers, call centres, and service desk scenarios where typing is not the primary mode of interaction. Voice requests go through the same intent understanding and execution layer as text requests.
4. AI Data Explorer
Query enterprise data in plain language and generate actionable insights — without writing a report, building a dashboard, or involving an analyst. "How many P1 incidents were resolved in under four hours last quarter?" is a question any manager can ask and get an immediate answer.
What Does Otto Replace?
This is the question most ServiceNow practitioners are asking. The honest answer as of Knowledge 2026: Otto is the direction, not an immediate replacement.
Now Assist remains the current GA product. Otto is where Now Assist is heading — the brand and architecture will unify under Otto over the course of the Australia release and beyond. If you are deploying Now Assist today, you are building toward Otto. Your configurations, activations, and use cases will carry forward.
Moveworks as a standalone product will gradually be absorbed into Otto. If your organisation acquired Moveworks separately, the integration path will be through the Otto architecture.
How is Otto Different from Now Assist?
Now Assist was built feature by feature, application by application — summarisation for incidents, code generation in Studio, search in the portal. Each capability was activated separately and lived within its specific context.
Otto is architected differently. It sits above individual applications as a unified layer that understands the user, their context, and the full set of available workflows across the enterprise. The difference in practice:
- Now Assist: "Use AI within this ServiceNow application"
- Otto: "Use AI to complete work, and let Otto figure out which application handles it"
Otto also introduces multimodal interactions — text, voice, and data queries through a single interface — which Now Assist did not support.
What Does Otto Mean for ServiceNow Admins and Developers?
For admins, the immediate implication is understanding how Otto's governance model works. Otto executes work on behalf of users — which means the permissions, approvals, and guardrails you have set up in your instance directly shape what Otto can and cannot do. AI Control Tower is the governance layer that controls Otto's actions.
For developers, the architecture shift matters. Otto is built on the same Action Fabric that allows external AI agents to execute ServiceNow workflows. Understanding how intents map to flows, catalog items, and business rules — and how those are exposed through the platform's system of action — becomes increasingly important as Otto adoption grows.
For both, the practical preparation is the same: ensure your workflows, catalog items, and knowledge articles are clean, well-structured, and correctly permissioned. Otto's quality is entirely dependent on the quality of the underlying platform configuration. Garbage in, garbage out applies just as much to agentic AI as to any other automation.
When is Otto Available?
As of Knowledge 2026, Otto was announced and demonstrated in preview. The full Otto experience is rolling out through the Australia release and subsequent platform updates throughout 2026. Specific GA dates for each capability vary by feature — check the ServiceNow release notes for the Australia release for the current availability status.
Now Assist remains the current GA product for AI capabilities. If you are planning AI deployments for 2026, build on Now Assist with the understanding that the architecture and brand will evolve toward Otto.
Key Takeaways
- Otto unifies Now Assist, Moveworks, and AI Experience into a single AI-native interface
- It is designed to sit across the entire enterprise, not inside individual applications
- It operates through conversational AI, enterprise search, voice agents, and data explorer
- Now Assist remains the current GA product — Otto is the direction, not an immediate replacement
- Platform quality (workflows, catalog, knowledge) directly determines Otto's effectiveness
- AI Control Tower governs what Otto can do — permissions and guardrails matter more than ever