A guide to ServiceNow AI Now Mobile: Features, limitations, and alternatives

Let's be real: trying to get IT or HR help on your phone can be a nightmare. We’ve all been there, trying to navigate clunky portals that were clearly built for a desktop computer. In today’s world where work happens everywhere, that just doesn’t cut it. Waiting for help is frustrating, and it slows everyone down.

ServiceNow’s answer to this problem is to combine its powerful AI tools with its Now Mobile app. This guide will walk you through what ServiceNow AI Now Mobile is all about. We’ll cover its main features, what it takes to get it running, where it falls short, and how some nimbler alternatives might get you the same (or better) results without all the heavy lifting.

What is ServiceNow AI Now Mobile?

First off, "ServiceNow AI Now Mobile" isn't a single product you can just go buy. It’s really a team-up of two different things.

On one side, you have Now Mobile, which is ServiceNow’s app for employees. It’s meant to be a one-stop shop for getting help from different departments like IT, HR, or facilities. Think of it as the mobile-friendly front door to the company's services.

On the other side, you have ServiceNow AI. This is the collection of smart features baked into the main platform, including their generative AI engine (Now Assist), predictive tools, and machine learning that helps automate work behind the scenes.

Put them together, and ServiceNow AI Now Mobile is what you get when those AI smarts are plugged directly into the mobile app. The idea is to turn a basic request portal into a helpful assistant that lives in every employee's pocket, helping them get answers and solve problems on their own, fast.

Key AI features in ServiceNow AI Now Mobile

ServiceNow focuses its mobile AI on a few key areas: better self-service, chatbot support, and a more personalized experience. Let's take a look at what that means in practice.

Smarter search for finding answers fast

One of the biggest improvements is the search function. They’ve moved from their old search tool to a much more powerful AI Search. This isn't your average keyword search; it’s built to figure out what you’re actually asking. It uses natural language understanding (NLU) to interpret questions and adds helpful features like auto-complete, typo correction, and understanding synonyms to make finding stuff less of a chore.

On top of that, Now Assist provides what they call "Genius Results." Instead of just getting a list of links to articles, employees can get a direct, AI-generated answer to their question, pulled from the company's knowledge base or service catalog.

A look at the Now Assist feature in ServiceNow AI Now Mobile, which provides agents with AI-powered summaries and solutions.

But here’s the catch. The quality of those AI answers completely depends on having a perfectly organized and up-to-date knowledge base. If your internal documentation is a mess, and let's face it, whose isn't?, the AI’s answers will be unreliable. This puts a huge amount of pressure on your team to constantly write and maintain content.

This is a huge headache, and it’s where tools built differently, like eesel AI, can really help. Instead of just relying on a polished knowledge base, eesel AI learns from your team's past support tickets. It analyzes thousands of real-world resolutions to understand how your team actually solves problems, and it can even generate a knowledge base for you based on that information.

Chatbot support for everyday tasks

ServiceNow's Virtual Agent in the Now Mobile app is a chatbot designed to handle common, repetitive requests. It can walk users through simple things like resetting a password, ordering a new keyboard, or checking the status of a ticket. With Now Assist, the chatbot gets a bit smarter, allowing it to summarize long articles and have more natural-sounding conversations.

The conversation builder for the Virtual Agent in ServiceNow AI Now Mobile, which requires technical expertise to customize.

For example, an employee might ask the Virtual Agent how to reset their VPN password. The bot understands, gives a quick summary from a knowledge article, and then asks if that solved the problem. If they say yes, great, one less ticket for the support team. If not, the bot can create an incident and pass it along to a human.

The main issue here is the effort required to customize it. If you want the Virtual Agent to do anything beyond the pre-built examples, you’ll probably need a developer who knows their way around ServiceNow's workflow editors. Building conversations tailored to your business isn't a simple task.

In contrast, eesel AI is designed so anyone can use it. A support manager can get a powerful AI agent up and running in just a few minutes, with no sales call required. You can use a simple prompt editor to tell the AI exactly how to behave, what tone to use, and what it can do for your users, all without writing code or waiting for a developer to become available.

Personalized recommendations and alerts

Finally, the AI tries to make the Now Mobile app feel more personal. Features like "Recommended for You" and "Popular Topics" use AI to suggest articles and services based on an employee's role, department, or past requests. Push notifications for approvals and tasks also help keep things moving by pinging users when something needs their attention.

While ServiceNow has a good view of everything happening on its platform, its personalization is mostly limited to data that lives inside ServiceNow. If you want the AI to know about information in your other essential tools, like your CRM, project management app, or billing system, you’re looking at a complicated custom integration project that could take months.

This is another spot where a more flexible tool shines. eesel AI was built to connect all your knowledge, not just lock it into one platform. With over 100 one-click integrations, it can pull information from your helpdesk, internal wikis like Confluence or Google Docs, and chat tools like Slack to give complete answers, no matter where the information lives.

Getting ServiceNow AI Now Mobile up and running

Even with all the interesting features, rolling them out is another story. Here’s a look at what it actually takes to implement ServiceNow AI Now Mobile.

The implementation process

Setting up Now Mobile isn't as easy as flipping a switch. It takes a good bit of admin work inside the ServiceNow platform using tools like Mobile App Builder and Mobile Card Builder. While ServiceNow calls these "low-code," they still require someone with real ServiceNow expertise to use them effectively. It’s a full-blown project that needs planning, dedicated resources, and often a hefty budget for implementation partners.

This "months, not minutes" approach can be a major roadblock for teams that need to get things done quickly or don't have a ServiceNow developer on staff. The complexity can mean you're waiting a long time to see any value from your investment.

This is where the self-serve approach of a tool like eesel AI really stands out. You can connect your helpdesk and other knowledge sources with a few clicks and go live in minutes. Better yet, before you even turn it on for your users, you can run it in a simulation mode to test it against thousands of your past tickets. This gives you a real forecast of how well it will perform and how much it could save you, so you can launch it with confidence.

Branding and pricing

ServiceNow offers a Mobile Publishing feature that lets you brand the Now Mobile app with your company’s logo and colors. It's a nice touch for creating a consistent experience for your employees.

When it comes to pricing, though, things get murky. ServiceNow doesn’t publicly list prices for its platform or AI features. To get these capabilities, you typically have to be on an enterprise-level plan for products like ITSM Pro or HRSD Pro. Now Assist is a separate add-on that you have to pay for, and you'll need to talk to their sales team to get a quote. This lack of transparency makes it tough to budget and can drag out the buying process.

With eesel AI's pricing, you know exactly what you're getting. The plans are based on features and usage, and you're not hit with unpredictable per-resolution fees that punish you for successfully deflecting tickets.

You can even start with a month-to-month plan and cancel whenever you want, giving you the freedom to adapt without being stuck in a long-term contract.

Is ServiceNow AI Now Mobile the right fit?

For massive companies that are already all-in on the ServiceNow ecosystem, ServiceNow AI Now Mobile can be a great addition. It's good at pulling together different workflows that already exist within the platform and presenting them in a slick, branded mobile app. If you have the budget, the right team, and the time for a big implementation project, it can definitely improve the employee experience.

But all that power comes with a price: complexity, long setup times, and a big, opaque price tag. It also struggles to play nice with knowledge and data that live outside of the ServiceNow world.

For teams that need a powerful AI solution that’s flexible, easy to set up, and works with the tools they already use, eesel AI is a fantastic alternative. It was designed from the ground up to connect all of your knowledge sources, not just one. You can get it running in minutes, and its transparent pricing means you won't get any nasty surprises on your bill.

If you want to use AI to automate support and empower your team, without getting locked into one platform, give eesel AI a try today. You can simulate its performance on your own data in just a few minutes and see for yourself what it can do.