Premium Chat 101

 

If you have opened the Otto Panel (fka Now Assist Panel) lately, you know it consists of only text based chats with maybe a hyperlink to a catalog item or knowledge article. Premium Chat, the newest version of the ServiceNow’s conversational experience, is built to change that. This post walks through what Premium Chat is, why it is worth turning on, and how to configure it in your instance.

 

What Is Premium Chat? 

Why It Matters 

Before You Start: Instance Requirements 

Turning On Premium Chat 

Common Issues and Quick Fixes 

What Is Next 

Try It and Tell Us How It Goes 

 

What Is Premium Chat?

 

Premium Chat is the next generation of ServiceNow’s conversational experience running on the new AI Services architecture rather the legacy Glide backend. It updates the architecture onto a modern, AI native stack, which unlocks two things platform owners care about immediately: richer visualizations directly embedded inside the chat window and a much faster release cadence for fixes/enhancements.

 

Premium Chat is applied to two familiar chat interfaces and can be updated in the Assistant Designer:

• Otto Panel in the fulfiller interface to support agents and process owners

• Virtual Agent in the Employee Slate portal side to support end users/customers

 

 

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Why It Matters

 

Based on your role, Premium Chat will provide the following value:

For agents and fulfillers:

• Response performance improves by roughly 25 percent or more in internal testing, which is noticeable on its own.

• The panel is now context-aware. If you are looking at an incident in the Service Operations Workspace, you can simply ask it to summarize the record instead of manually copying over the incident number.

• Search is unified. You are no longer limited to the knowledge base when you ask a question but can include Google Gemini based results all in one search.

For platform owners and system administrators:

• You can now build rich widgets embedding directly into the chats. Whether you want to build them independently, use a library like Chatkit, or pair with an AI assistant such as Claude Code to autonomously build them, there are many ways to get started.

• Since the architecture is decoupled from Glide, releases ship roughly monthly, so enhancements and bug fixes land much faster than the old quarterly cycle.

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Before You Start: Instance Requirements

 

Before turning anything on, confirm your instance meets these prerequisites.

• Zurich Patch 12 or Australia Patch 5 at the time of writing to take advantage of the latest bug fixes and enhancements.

• The latest version of your entitled Now Assist Store app, for example Now Assist for IT Service Management.

• A Pro Plus or AI Foundation license. Premium Chat itself does not require an additional SKU, though skills and agentic workflows do require AI Foundation or higher. Check with your account team for entitlement questions.

• Admin role access to configure the update.

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Turning On Premium Chat

 

Once your instance meets the requirements above, activation is a short process.

1. Validate that your instance is on Zurich Patch 12 or Australia Patch 5 via stats.do or navigate to support.servicenow.com to check your instance manager.

 

1. Upgrade to your latest entitled Now Assist Store app. This step may prompt you to also upgrade contributing applications, such as Otto in Virtual Agent. Go ahead and update those as well.

 

1. Navigate to Assistant Designer inside Conversational Interfaces. You will see two Now Assist Panels listed. This is the most common point of confusion, so pay attention here: select the one labeled Now Assist Panel - Platform, not Studio, and click Edit.

 

1. From the Settings tab, go to Display Experiences and click the pencil icon. Toggle the setting to Premium Chat and click Save. If you need to step back at any point, you can roll back to Enhanced Chat without losing your configuration.

 

1. Test the change by refreshing the home page and clicking the sparkle icon in the top right corner. Confirm that the panel now shows the Otto branding at the top.

 

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Common Issues and Quick Fixes

 

A handful of issues come up often enough during early adoption that they are worth calling out ahead of time.

• Conversation history disappears after the upgrade. This is expected behavior. History does not carry over from Enhanced Chat.

• Existing skills stop triggering. Re-publish the assistant, clear your browser cache, and validate the configuration from the Now Assist Admin console.

• The Premium Chat toggle is missing or greyed out. Confirm you are on at minimum Zurich Patch 9 or Australia Patch 3, and validate that you have repaired/upgraded to the latest Now Assist suite and the Generative AI Controller.

• Otto Panel cannot find information on a record (ex. Incident). Check the Now Assist Panel – Platform assistant in Assistant Designer and review the selected Knowledge Graph

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What Is Next

 

Premium Chat regulated market versions such as GCC and NSC are planned for Q4 2026. Given the monthly release cadence, expect this feature set to keep expanding quickly, so it is worth checking back regularly rather than treating this as a one time rollout.

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Try It and Tell Us How It Goes

 

The biggest takeaway here is that this is ready to try now, and getting started does not take long. If you run into something not covered above, or you want to see more on the Virtual Agent side, comment below. Several deeper dive articles are also in the works, so keep an eye on the community for that.

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