How To Build an AI-Ready ServiceNow Knowledge Management Framework

Here are the best practices to structure your knowledge base for Gen AI in the ServiceNow platform.

Nov. 3, 2025 | By Abhimanyu Behari

Diving into the world of generative AI (Gen AI) can be daunting for an organization, especially if you don’t know where to begin.

Fortunately, AI platforms like ServiceNow offer Gen AI tools to help you enhance productivity and efficiency across your organization. By learning how to optimize your knowledge base in ServiceNow, you can generate clearer data for Gen AI, resulting in more accurate and usable outputs.

What Is Now Assist?

Now Assist is ServiceNow’s proprietary Gen AI tool and features capabilities for most modules on the platform, including IT service management. While Now Assist originally began as a summarization agent, users can now use the tool to enhance productivity and efficiency.

By integrating large language models (LLMs) into the ServiceNow platform, Now Assist enables not just summarization but other language-related tasks such as text generation and notetaking from meetings and interactions.

Now Assist offers several features to enhance operational efficiency, including:

• Summarization
• Content generation
• Recommendations and solutions
• AI Search
• Code and flow generation

What Is Knowledge Article Optimizer?

In the ServiceNow platform, a knowledge article is a structured piece of information—such as user guides, policies or instructions—designed to help users find solutions, understand processes or perform specific actions efficiently. These articles are stored within a knowledge base, making them easily accessible and enabling users to quickly find answers to common questions and other essential information.

Built on Now Assist’s agentic AI capabilities, Knowledge Article Optimizer helps improve the consistency and quality of an organization’s articles. It also helps users determine whether a similar article already exists or has conflicting information within the knowledge base.

A well-structured and governed knowledge management program makes certain that critical information is available to the right people at the right time. The result: faster support, more informed decision-making and less time spent searching for answers.

As ServiceNow Now Assist gives the capability to generate knowledge articles from tickets or agent panels, it becomes crucial to check that end users or technicians are not getting confused with redundant or conflicting knowledge.

Best Practices for Knowledge Management

With a clear strategy in place, you can focus on applying best practices to structure your knowledge articles for Gen AI. It is essential to follow best practices when setting up taxonomy for your knowledge articles.

• Use concise language and avoid jargon: Your articles should use clear, simple language that’s easy for AI and humans to understand. Avoid using complex terminology and limit your use of abbreviations, writing terms out in their entirety instead.
• Maintain content consistency and quality: Establish and carry the same writing style and formatting across all articles in your knowledge base. Doing so keeps your generated content consistent. In addition, take time to implement a quality assurance process to confirm data quality and integrity.
• Use actionable feedback: User feedback helps improve the quality of generated content. By rating content or marking it as helpful or unhelpful, your team can find areas for improvement and ensure articles remain effective and valuable. 
• Create a clear governance strategy: Define, document and implement detailed governance processes and standards for knowledge management. This includes article format and structure, consistency, and publication review processes.
• Diversify knowledge to avoid bias: Make knowledge management an enterprise-wide responsibility that isn’t dominated by any particular department or team. Solicit input and feedback from all levels of knowledge consumers to avoid skewing the content toward a particular user.
• Make sure content is well-structured and relevant: Arrange knowledge bases for an intended audience, such as IT staff or end users. Institute appropriate categories for organizing articles and a clear taxonomy and set up a cadence for review to eliminate outdated content.

Embracing Gen AI With ServiceNow

With ServiceNow’s Now Assist tool, organizations can implement Gen AI capabilities and features within their existing ServiceNow platform. However, it’s essential to do so thoughtfully and strategically to ensure that your data and outputs are of the highest possible quality. Follow best practices to get the most out of this powerful tool and set your organization on the path to successful AI implementation.