ServiceNow Generative AI: The complete 2025 guide

If you're running your IT or customer support on ServiceNow, you've probably seen the buzz around their new generative AI features. They're promising a big leap in productivity and smoother workflows, which sounds great. But what does it actually mean for your team?

This guide will walk you through ServiceNow's generative AI offering. We'll cover what it is, its main features, the most common ways to use it, and, maybe most importantly, the limitations and costs you need to be aware of before diving in. While AI built into a platform is powerful, it’s not always the right fit for everyone.

What is ServiceNow Generative AI?

First off, ServiceNow's generative AI isn't just one tool. It's a whole suite of features baked right into the Now Platform. The biggest plus here is that it's deeply integrated, so it can tap into all the data you already have in ServiceNow. It's made up of two main parts that work together.

Now Assist: What your team sees

Now Assist is the brand name for all the user-facing AI features you’ll see across ServiceNow’s products, whether you’re in ITSM, Customer Service Management (CSM), or HR. It’s the part your agents, employees, and developers will actually use day-to-day.

Some of the key features include:

• Summarizing cases and incidents: Lets your agents get the gist of a ticket instantly without having to read through a long history of comments.

• Generating resolution notes: When a ticket is closed, it automatically drafts the notes, which saves time and keeps things consistent.

• Smarter self-service search: Helps service portals and knowledge bases understand what people are asking in plain language, deflecting common questions before they become tickets.

The Generative AI Controller: The engine behind the scenes

The Generative AI Controller is the backend system that makes Now Assist work. It’s the bridge between the ServiceNow platform and various Large Language Models (LLMs). This includes ServiceNow's own "Now LLM," which is trained on their data, as well as models from third parties like Azure OpenAI and Google Gemini.

While having options is good, let's be clear: this isn't a simple plug-and-play setup. Getting these connections configured and managed usually takes some real technical know-how.

Key use cases

ServiceNow has been using this tech on its own teams, and based on that experience, they’re focusing on three main areas where they believe generative AI can make the biggest difference.

Enhancing employee self-service

Let's be honest, a huge goal for any AI tool is to cut down on the number of tickets your team has to handle manually. ServiceNow uses its AI to improve search and virtual agents so they can better understand what users are asking for and give them a straight answer. According to ServiceNow, this led to a 14% increase in employee self-service and helped them avoid nearly 20% of cases on their own support portal.

The catch? This only really works if all your important knowledge is already neat and tidy inside the ServiceNow platform. If it's not, the AI won't have the full picture.

Increasing agent productivity

For the tickets that still need a human, generative AI can act like a really helpful assistant. By summarizing tickets, drafting resolution notes, and suggesting replies, it handles a lot of the repetitive work. This frees up agents to focus on solving the actual problem. ServiceNow says its internal agents are now closing incidents in half the time and saving about six hours a week each.

Accelerating development and administration

It’s not just for support teams. ServiceNow is also using generative AI to speed up its own development. Features like text-to-code and text-to-workflow let developers and platform admins build things faster using simple prompts. Inside ServiceNow, their developers have accepted 48% of AI-generated code suggestions, which shows it can genuinely speed up the process of building and customizing.

Setup, limitations, and pricing

The benefits sound pretty good, but getting ServiceNow's AI up and running isn't as easy as flipping a switch. This is a big, enterprise-level tool, and that comes with some serious things to think about when it comes to complexity, cost, and what it can't do.

The setup process

Unlike a lot of modern software you can try and buy online in a few minutes, setting up ServiceNow's generative AI is a major project. You'll likely need to bring in ServiceNow professional services or a certified partner to get it done. There’s no self-serve free trial, so you can't easily kick the tires with your own data without committing a good amount of time and money upfront.

Key limitations to watch out for

• Your knowledge is stuck in different places: The AI works best with data that lives in ServiceNow. But what if your team's real knowledge lives in places like Confluence, Google Docs, or Slack? Getting that information to the AI is a tough integration problem. Without it, the AI is basically working with one hand tied behind its back.

• Customization isn't simple: Now Assist comes with a lot of pre-built features, which is great for getting started. But if you want to tweak the AI's personality, set specific rules for when to escalate a ticket, or create your own custom actions, you’ll need to do some deep configuration work. It’s not as simple as editing a prompt.

• No love for on-premise: According to ServiceNow partners, the generative AI features are only available for cloud customers. If you’re running an on-premise version of ServiceNow, you’re currently out of luck.

How much does it cost?

ServiceNow doesn't list its AI pricing online. This is pretty standard for enterprise software, but it makes things tricky for buyers. To get a price, you have to engage their sales team, which usually means:

• A series of discovery calls and a custom quote just for you.

• Complicated enterprise contracts that lock you in for a long time.

• Pricing that might change based on how much you use it, making it difficult to predict your costs.

This makes it tough to figure out your budget or even compare its price to other tools out there without getting deep into a sales cycle.

Feature	ServiceNow Generative AI	What to Consider
Setup Time	Weeks to months	You'll likely need professional help or a dedicated internal team.
Knowledge Sources	Mostly ServiceNow data	Pulling in info from GDocs, Slack, etc., is a heavy lift.
Customization	Pre-built workflows	You don't get easy control over the AI's persona or custom actions.
Pricing Model	Not Public	Requires enterprise sales, has unpredictable costs, and no free trial.

A more flexible alternative: Supercharge ServiceNow with eesel AI

If all that sounds a bit too rigid, or if your knowledge is spread out all over the place, there are other ways to go. A more flexible AI layer like eesel AI can plug into ServiceNow without locking you into its ecosystem.

It’s designed to get around the common headaches of platform-native AI:

• It's built for a faster start: eesel AI is completely self-serve. You can connect it to ServiceNow, Zendesk, or another helpdesk with a single click and build your first AI agent in less than an hour. No mandatory sales calls or professional services needed.

A flowchart that contrasts with the complex ServiceNow Generative AI setup by showing eesel AI's simple, self-serve implementation process.

• It brings all your knowledge together: Don't let your AI miss the full story. eesel connects right away to your helpdesk, knowledge bases, and other tools your team uses every day, like Confluence, Google Docs, and Slack. This gives the AI the complete picture so it can actually solve problems correctly.

An infographic explaining how eesel AI, an alternative to ServiceNow Generative AI, connects to multiple knowledge sources for better answers.

• You can test it safely and control everything: With a simulation mode, you can test your AI on thousands of your past tickets to see how it would perform before it ever talks to a real customer. A straightforward prompt editor gives you complete control over the AI’s personality, how it escalates issues, and any custom actions you want it to take.

A screenshot of the eesel AI platform showing its simulation mode, a key advantage over ServiceNow Generative AI for testing performance.

• The pricing is straightforward: No more guessing games with enterprise contracts. eesel AI has clear, public pricing right on its website. The plans are simple, and you don't get charged extra per resolution. You'll always know exactly what you're paying.

A screenshot of eesel AI's public pricing page, highlighting its transparent model as a flexible alternative to ServiceNow Generative AI's opaque enterprise pricing.

Is ServiceNow Generative AI right for your service desk?

Look, there's no doubt that ServiceNow Generative AI is a powerful tool, especially for big companies that are all-in on the Now Platform.

But that power comes with some trade-offs: it can be complex to set up, it struggles if your knowledge isn't all in one place, and you have to go through a traditional enterprise sales process to get it. For teams that want to move faster, have full control over their AI, and pull in knowledge from all their different tools, a more modern solution like eesel AI offers a quicker, more flexible, and more transparent way to get great support automation.