Creating Your First AI Agent in ServiceNow

Agentic AI in ServiceNow is the solution your business needs if it wants to boost productivity and enhance its performance. Where else could you find an employee who wants to ask for a pay raise but will do their job autonomously and perfectly? This is actually how AI agents work! And you can create your own! Here is a quick step-by-step guide on how to build AI Agent in ServiceNow.

Setting up the Environment

First and foremost, when going to the ServiceNow AI Agent studio, you need to clearly identify your goal and realize what you expect to have from your agent at the end. In your studio, you will first see the page where you will be asked to describe the agent. 

For example, you are going to create a Homework Assist agent. In this case, you should clearly define the delivery time and the Subject and describe the subject. Also, in our specific example, you need to specify that the role of your AI Agent will be the following: “The student seeking to get homework done”. By completing this step properly, you clearly specify the role of your agent and define that it should be done by a “student”, not by a robot. 

Configuring Intents and Training Data

The second step is to provide well-defined instructions on what you expect your AI Agent to do. Once the role is defined, your AI Agent requires quite specific intents that will set the framework of operations. 

In the case of the “Homework Assist” AI Agent, we can configure the following instructions:

If other instructions are provided, the AI Agent will act accordingly. Thus, the instructions should be quite specific, and they might include several clearly understandable points.

Adding Now Assist Skills

The third step is to add some tools that will help your AI Agent perform its functions autonomously. You can add your previously created Now Assist skill to leverage the potential of Agentic AI through the capabilities of Generative AI. When adding the Now Assist skill, make sure that it will run autonomously and don’t forget to specify the output strategy.

You might also need to add the record operation. To do this, complete the following:

• Create a homework calendar table.
• Add a record operation tool in the agent to query that table.
• Configure it to fetch only records with today’s due date.
• Limit results to a specific number to optimize testing speed.
• Return the description field (the actual homework task).

Defining Guardrails & Compliance Rules

Once skills and record operations are added, you can get down to defining guardrails and compliance rules. The importance of this step lies in the fact that clear limitations will help your AI Agent avoid potential risks related to compliance with ecosystem rules, as well as ethical issues. You also need to set constraints so the agent only processes defined tasks and makes sure that no free exploration outside the scope is possible. Guardrails will ensure that personally identifiable data or unrelated records are excluded. It’s also important to conduct a compliance check. Its task is to confirm that the agent only accessed the “Homework” dataset and the Now Assist skill.

Testing and Debugging the AI Agent

• Run the agent in AI Agent Studio.
• Step-by-step logs will show which tools were used, what outputs were generated, and where issues could occur.
• If a step failed, fixes could be applied directly in the studio without restarting the build.
• Verify that the agent:
  • Found today’s homework.
  • Retrieved capitals + fun facts.
  • Combined answers correctly.

Publishing to End Users

Finally, when the ServiceNow AI Agent setup, training, and testing are run successfully, you can publish it to an end user. For this specific “Homework Assist case”, you need to Mel then create a use case called Complete My Homework, combining the Homework Assistant and Update Homework Agent. Then, add an automatic trigger to make it run in a well-defined period of time. After that, configure outputs to update homework records and make results available for emailing/beautification.

Once the Agent is published, all platform users will be able to access it through the Now Assist panel.

We hope that this ServiceNow AI Agent tutorial was useful for you because Agentic AI from ServiceNow can be used in multiple use cases. Get down to creating your own AI Agent and forget about tiresome basic manual tasks — an Agent will execute them for you!

Kostya Bazanov, Managing Director, Oct 16, 2025