If you searched for Now Assist and landed here, the short version is this. Now Assist still exists, but it is being renamed ServiceNow Otto, and Otto is bigger than Now Assist was. The branding change itself does not change existing entitlements. Access to additional capabilities depends on your subscription. Several things about your documentation, your training material and your governance register should.
What ServiceNow announced
At Knowledge 2026 on 5 May, ServiceNow introduced Otto as a single AI experience across the enterprise. It combines three things that used to be sold and configured separately: Now Assist, the generative AI skills inside each workflow; Moveworks, the conversational enterprise search and automation company ServiceNow acquired in December 2025; and AI Experience, the interface layer. Otto went live first in EmployeeWorks and in AI Control Tower, and ServiceNow said it would be rolled out across all products in the year ahead.
Then came the rename. From the August 2026 monthly AI release, the Now Assist name is being replaced by ServiceNow Otto in the product and in ServiceNow’s documentation, in stages, with the change completing in the Brazil release. ServiceNow’s own community has already moved its Now Assist spaces under the Otto name.
What does not change
- Existing entitlements. ServiceNow’s August 2026 Store release notes say it plainly: product entitlements remain unchanged, and there is no change to functionality or existing configurations. What the rename does not do is add anything. Otto’s newer capabilities, such as enterprise search from Moveworks or voice agents, depend on your subscription.
- The skills you have switched on. Incident summarisation, resolution notes, knowledge drafting, change risk summaries and the rest carry on working. They are Otto skills now.
- Plugin and role names, for the time being. The Store apps and roles still carry the old identifiers, for example the Now Assist for ITOM plugin and the now_assist_user role. Expect those to lag the product name.
- Now LLM. The model service keeps its name.
What does change
Otto is a different shape from Now Assist. Now Assist was a set of skills that appeared inside the workflow you were already in. Otto is meant to be the front door: one assistant that takes a request in natural language, works out which workflow or agent should handle it, and sees it through. That brings in enterprise search across documents, wikis and SharePoint from Moveworks, AI voice agents in several languages, and the AI Data Explorer for plain-language questions over your data.
For a customer who already runs Now Assist, three practical things follow.
- Your AI Control Tower register needs updating. Otto is a registered asset like any other agent. If you have the Control Tower switched on, and if your contract includes it you should, the entries for Now Assist skills and any Moveworks deployment need to be reconciled into the Otto entries ServiceNow creates. Our agentic AI article explains why we treat the register as the first job.
- Overlap with your existing search and chat. If you run Moveworks today, or a separate enterprise search product, or a Virtual Agent that your service desk has invested in, Otto now covers some of the same ground. Decide deliberately which one is the front door for employees before people find out by accident.
- Documentation and training. Runbooks, knowledge articles, onboarding decks and the service desk’s own scripts all say Now Assist. Users will see Otto. Update them in one pass rather than leaving a mixed vocabulary for a year.
Our view
The rename is overdue. Now Assist was a fine name for a feature and a poor name for a product strategy, and the Moveworks acquisition made a single assistant inevitable. What matters is not the name but the shift in where AI lives: from a panel in a form to the place a request starts. That raises the bar on the data underneath it. An assistant that is the front door for every department exposes every gap in your knowledge base, your CMDB and your catalog at once.
So treat the Otto rollout as a reason to do the unglamorous work: knowledge articles that are current, a CMDB that passes its own health checks, a catalog people can find things in. Those are the same prerequisites we set for any Now Assist activation, and they have not changed either.
If you want help working out what Otto means for your estate, our agentic AI service starts with a two-week readiness assessment.
