ServiceNow's Xanadu release represents a significant step forward for the platform, bringing meaningful improvements across artificial intelligence, configuration management, security operations, and user experience. For organizations already running ServiceNow, understanding what Xanadu delivers is essential for planning your upgrade strategy and ensuring your teams are prepared to take advantage of new capabilities. Here is a practical breakdown of the features that matter most.

Now Assist AI Capabilities

The most prominent addition in Xanadu is the expansion of Now Assist, ServiceNow's generative AI layer. Now Assist is no longer limited to summarizing incidents or generating knowledge articles. In Xanadu, it extends into workflow creation, code generation, and conversational search across the platform. Agents can use Now Assist to draft incident resolution notes, summarize long change request histories, and even generate basic scripting for catalog items and flow actions.

What makes this practically significant is the reduction in time spent on repetitive documentation tasks. Service desk analysts who previously spent minutes crafting resolution notes can now review and approve AI-generated summaries in seconds. However, teams should approach this with appropriate guardrails. Establish review processes for AI-generated content, particularly for knowledge articles that will be published externally. Now Assist is a productivity accelerator, not an autonomous agent, and human oversight remains critical for accuracy and compliance.

Enhanced CMDB Health Improvements

Xanadu introduces expanded CMDB Health scoring with more granular metrics for data completeness, compliance, and relationship accuracy. The improved CMDB Health dashboard provides clearer visibility into which configuration item classes have data quality issues and what specific attributes are missing or inconsistent.

For ITOM teams, this means better tools to identify and remediate CMDB gaps before they cause downstream problems in change management, incident correlation, or service mapping. The new audit capabilities also make it easier to track CMDB modifications over time and identify unauthorized changes. If your organization relies on CMDB data for impact analysis or compliance reporting, the Xanadu improvements should be a priority area for your upgrade testing.

Workflow and Flow Designer Improvements

Flow Designer receives several practical enhancements in Xanadu, including improved error handling, better debugging tools, and new integration spokes that simplify connections to third-party systems. The ability to create more sophisticated branching logic and parallel execution paths makes Flow Designer viable for increasingly complex automation scenarios.

Teams should pay particular attention to the improved subflow management capabilities, which allow for better reuse of common workflow patterns across different processes. If your organization has been relying heavily on legacy workflow editor automations, Xanadu provides a strong incentive to migrate to Flow Designer, as the gap in capability between the two has effectively closed. Plan your migration incrementally, starting with the workflows that would benefit most from the new error handling and debugging features.

Security Operations Enhancements

For organizations using ServiceNow Security Operations, Xanadu brings improved threat intelligence integration, enhanced vulnerability response workflows, and better correlation between security events and ITSM processes. The updated Security Incident Response module offers more automated enrichment of security incidents, pulling context from multiple sources to give analysts a more complete picture without manual investigation.

The practical impact is faster mean time to respond for security events and reduced analyst fatigue from context switching between tools. If your security team is not yet using ServiceNow SecOps, Xanadu's improvements make a compelling case for consolidating security workflows onto the platform alongside your existing ITSM processes.

UI and Experience Improvements

Xanadu continues the evolution of Next Experience with refined workspace layouts, improved list view performance, and enhanced personalization options for end users. The updated Agent Workspace provides a more streamlined interface for service desk analysts, with contextual side panels that surface relevant information without requiring navigation away from the current task.

These may seem like incremental changes, but they have a measurable impact on agent efficiency and user satisfaction. Organizations upgrading to Xanadu should invest time in evaluating the new workspace configurations and customizing them for their specific agent workflows. A well-configured workspace can reduce average handle time and improve the overall agent experience.

Preparing Your Team

Before upgrading, conduct a thorough review of your current customizations against Xanadu's new features. Some custom solutions you built in previous releases may now be available out of the box. Plan dedicated time for your administrators and developers to explore the new capabilities in a sub-production instance. At 4P Metric, we help organizations navigate ServiceNow upgrades with a structured approach that minimizes risk and maximizes the value of new release features.