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Now Assist › Sourcing and Procurement Operations › Finance and Supply Chain
Release: Australia · Updated: 2026-03-12 · Official documentation · View source

Use Now Assist for Sourcing and Procurement Operations (SPO)

For your requesters' purchasing needs, the Now Assist for SPO Virtual Agent searches against the existing products in the product catalog and displays the available products.

Note: Depending on your license, you will have access to certain application features, generative AI skills, agentic workflows, and AI agents. For more information, see ServiceNow product tiers.

If a product is found with or without a price in the catalog, the requester can then fill out the intake questions through a simple conversation, and then submit the purchase request after reviewing the summary of responses. They can also edit a response before submitting.

If a product or service isn’t found in the catalog, the chatbot gathers more information, such as checking for availability of quotes, and routes the requester to the corresponding off-catalog intake form. It also provides the requester with the option to submit a question to the procurement team about the required product or service, with relevant attachments, if any, all through a conversation.

Note: You can ask a question to the procurement team, and create a corresponding procurement case, only if you have the sn_spend_psd.requestor role. Ensure that you admin has assigned that role to you.

As a requester, you can start with viewing all the topics, and then selecting Buy a product.

You could also directly start typing what you need, in which case the utterance detection mechanism uses Genius Results to retrieve Virtual Agent topics, catalog items, and Q&A results, and displays them to the requester within a card carousel. For details, see Using Now Assist in Virtual Agent.

The Virtual Agent engages you in a guided conversation, asking you relevant questions along the way to help you submit your purchase, sourcing, and off-catalog requests, as well as procurement cases, independently, without the need to reach out to fulfillers. You can then review and track these request records from Shopping Hub, Employee Center, or Platform.

To learn more about quick checkout and sourcing checkout processes, see Order a product with quick checkout and Complete sourcing checkout respectively. For more information on off-catalog intake forms, see Requesting for products or services that you don't see on ShoppingHub.

Now Assist in Virtual Agent provides your users with an interactive generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) experience. A friendly, natural language conversation is easier to understand and makes requesters more comfortable with talking to a bot. To learn how a conversation powered by generative AI might look in Virtual Agent, see Using Now Assist in Virtual Agent.

As an administrator, you can use the Now Assist in Virtual Agent Analytics dashboard to monitor the performance of Now Assist in Virtual Agent as a self-service deflection tool. To learn more, see Using Now Assist Analytics. Now Assist in Virtual Agent Analytics calculates the conversation deflection rate based on the resolution status associated with Now Assist query responses.

For detailed information on Now Assist in Virtual Agent in general, and Now Assist for SPO in particular, see Explore Now Assist for Sourcing and Procurement Operations (SPO).

For information on configuring Now Assist for SPO, see Configure Now Assist for Sourcing and Procurement Operations (SPO).

Parent Topic:Now Assist for Sourcing and Procurement Operations (SPO)