ServiceNow Otto vs Now Assist: What Changed and What It Costs

If you have been running Now Assist for the last two years, or if you signed a Moveworks contract before ServiceNow bought the company, the Otto announcement raises one practical question: what did I actually buy, and what is it called now? This is a naming and consolidation change more than a product replacement, but the consolidation is real and it changes how you should scope your next renewal.

Here is what Otto is, how it relates to Now Assist, what happened to Moveworks, and what to check before you plan a rollout around it.

What is ServiceNow Otto?

Otto is ServiceNow's unified AI experience, announced on May 5, 2026 at Knowledge 2026. ServiceNow's own newsroom describes it as "a new AI experience that combines the intelligence of Now Assist, Moveworks, and AI Experience to complete work across every department and system." The framing is deliberate: Otto is positioned as a front door, one place where a person states an intent in plain language and the platform figures out which systems have to be touched to resolve it.

The search capability is part of the pitch, not an afterthought. ServiceNow says Otto can "search across documents, wikis, databases, and SharePoint, delivering direct answers personalized to role, location, and department." That is a real enterprise search claim, and it is the reason Otto now shows up in evaluations that previously only contained pure-play search vendors.

The distinguishing feature against most of that field is fulfilment. Otto is not only meant to tell you what the travel policy says, it is meant to file the exception request, route it, and close it. That is what a workflow platform brings to the table and it is genuinely hard for a search product to match.

What is the difference between ServiceNow Otto and Now Assist?

Now Assist was the generative AI feature set embedded inside individual ServiceNow products: summarize this incident, categorize this ticket, draft this knowledge article, assist this agent in the workspace. It was capability, sold and enabled per product family, and it lived where you were already working.

Otto is the layer above that. It takes Now Assist's intelligence, adds the conversational interface that came with Moveworks, and adds the AI Experience interaction layer ServiceNow had been building separately, then presents all three as one thing. The practical effect is that Now Assist stops being a brand your users encounter and becomes part of the engine behind Otto.

Does ServiceNow Otto replace Moveworks?

Functionally, yes. ServiceNow announced its intent to acquire Moveworks on March 10, 2025 at $2.85 billion and closed the deal on December 15, 2025, with ServiceNow's FY2025 10-K putting the actual consideration at $2.407 billion. Moveworks brought a mature conversational front end with a strong employee support track record, and that is exactly the piece Otto needed.

Moveworks has not been switched off and no end-of-life has been published. But the branding, the roadmap and the investment now run through Otto, and that is what matters when you are signing a three-year agreement. If you are a Moveworks customer, the question to ask your account team is not whether the product still works. It is which Otto capabilities your contract entitles you to, and on what timeline. We keep a fuller picture of that transition on the Moveworks alternative page.

Is ServiceNow Otto available yet?

Partially, and this is the detail most coverage glossed over. At the May 2026 announcement ServiceNow said Otto was available in ServiceNow EmployeeWorks and AI Control Tower, and that it would be rolled out across all products in the year ahead. So Otto is real and shipping, but whether it has reached the ServiceNow products your organization actually runs is a question with a specific answer that depends on your instance and your entitlements.

Before you build a plan around Otto, get that answer in writing. A rollout schedule described as "the year ahead" is not a date you can put in a project plan, and the gap between announcement availability and your availability is where deployment timelines quietly slip.

How much does ServiceNow Otto cost?

ServiceNow does not publish list pricing for Otto, and it does not publish list pricing for its platform generally. Everything is negotiated, and what you pay depends heavily on your existing footprint and how much of the platform you have already committed to. Reporting through 2026 indicated ServiceNow restructured its commercial model in April 2026 so that AI capability ships with products rather than as a separate SKU, which is good news for anyone who was buying Now Assist as a line item, though you should confirm how that applies to your specific agreement.

For a sense of scale on the conversational piece, Moveworks listed roughly $150 per user per year on AWS Marketplace in the 1,000 to 2,500 seat band, which put mid-size deployments comfortably into six figures annually. Otto pricing is not that number, but it tells you which order of magnitude this category sits in when it arrives attached to a platform.

Can Otto search apps outside ServiceNow?

To a degree. ServiceNow's own language mentions documents, wikis, databases and SharePoint, which is broader than the ServiceNow instance alone. What ServiceNow has not published is a connector list on the scale that pure-play enterprise search vendors compete on, and the depth of coverage for tools like Slack, Notion, Google Drive, Gmail and Jira is the thing to press hardest on in a demo.

This is the honest dividing line in the whole evaluation. Otto is designed around the assumption that ServiceNow is your system of record and that the valuable outcome is the completed action. If that assumption holds at your company, the platform gravity works in your favor and Otto is a strong option. If it does not hold, if your knowledge is scattered across a dozen SaaS tools and ServiceNow is one system among many, then you are looking at adopting a workflow platform in order to get a search experience, and that is an expensive way to buy search.

What should I check before committing?

Five things, in order of how often they cause problems later.

Entitlement. Which Otto capabilities does your current agreement actually include, versus which are new purchases. The April 2026 commercial change helps here but does not answer it for you.

Timeline. Which of your ServiceNow products has Otto reached today, and which are scheduled. Get product names and quarters, not "the year ahead."

Coverage. Which non-ServiceNow sources can Otto index, at what depth, and who maintains those connections. Ask for a demo grounded in your own Slack or Confluence, not a canned dataset.

Permissions. How access control is enforced at answer time and how quickly a revoked permission takes effect. Any system that reads across your whole company inherits your whole company's access control problem, and the lag between revoking access and the search index reflecting it is the window that matters. If you are also standardizing how requests get to the right owner, it is worth looking at how you route each incoming request to the right person automatically, because search answers and request routing tend to be bought to solve the same complaint.

Citations. Whether answers link to the exact source document so a person can verify them. An unverifiable answer about a benefits policy is worse than no answer, because it gets acted on.

When a focused search product is the better buy

Otto is a good product for a specific shape of company: ServiceNow-centric, employee-service-heavy, already committed to the platform, and needing the answer and the action in the same breath. For that buyer the consolidation is a genuine simplification and Otto is worth the evaluation.

For everyone else the calculus is different. If your actual complaint is that people cannot find the answer, and the answer lives across Drive, Slack, Notion, Confluence, Gmail, Jira and Salesforce, then a focused product gets you there without a platform program. That is what InSearch does: one query across all of it, a written answer with inline citations to the exact source so anyone can verify it, item-level permissions inherited from each app and enforced live at query time, and one transparent per-seat price. If you want the full side by side, the ServiceNow Otto alternative comparison lays out where each option wins. Or just ask a question in the box above and see what comes back.