ServiceNow Now Assist Negotiations: From Strategic Preparation to High-Impact Deal Tactics

ServiceNow shows no signs of slowing down its GenAI campaign in 2025. Per the vendor’s Q1 2025 earnings call, Now Assist deals “more than quadrupled year-over-year, including 39 deals with three or more Now Assist products”. But for all this growth, a critical question remains: Are customers truly realizing the value from their Now Assist investments?

When building your AI roadmap, it can be difficult to tell what makes a “good deal” amid an explosive market. This guide covers how to effectively prepare for a Now Assist negotiation and how to unlock the greatest value through your purchase.

Preparing for a Strategic Now Assist Negotiation

1. Verify Demand and Validate the Use Case

Before negotiating with ServiceNow, customers must run due diligence to understand not only the Now Assist offering itself, but how and where it aligns with your business needs.

ServiceNow touts Now Assist as a revolutionary solution that will fully transform customers’ Now Platform experience. However, some may find the effects to be less transformative. Perhaps your business is not ready to fully deploy Now Assist or does not need some of the product’s various GenAI capabilities. Taking the time to understand your organization’s needs and building a realistic deployment schedule is critical leading up to negotiations.

Customers who are confident in their appetite for Now Assist can easily push back against any superfluous assumptions made by ServiceNow that effectively inflate solution costs. This includes aggressive deployment schedules, excessive license counts, and the assumption of 100% utilization of Now Assist features. In doing so, these customers successfully take control of the conversation, forcing ServiceNow to center the conversation around what Now Assist can do for your business specifically and set the expectation of a creative, value-based approach to incentivize adoption.

Why it matters: A well-scoped business case empowers you to push back against inflated assumptions, like excessive license counts or overly aggressive timelines, that drive up costs unnecessarily.

2. Understand the Now Assist Licensing Model

On the surface, Now Assist appears to follow a straight-forward per user or per subscription unit model, much like core ServiceNow offerings such as ITSM and ITOM. However, upon closer inspection, customers will find a “hidden” consumption-based fee in their Now Assist order form language, with all Now Assist licenses including a set annual volume of GenAI “assists”. This aligns with ServiceNow’s overarching market initiatives for 2025 per the FY24 earnings report.

“In 2025, we will begin shifting more of our business model to include elements of consumption‑based monetization across our AI and data solutions. For instance, we will include our new AI Agents in our Pro Plus and Enterprise Plus SKUs, forgoing upfront incremental new subscriptions to instead drive accelerated adoption and monetize increasing usage over time.”

Naturally, ServiceNow’s standard language does not detail what happens when customers exceed the included assist allotment, or the cost of purchasing additional volumes in-term. Getting ahead of these red flags during exploratory conversations is an effective way to show ServiceNow that you have done your homework and require full deal transparency before negotiations even begin.

Action: Raise these red flags early. Make it clear you expect transparency around overage costs and a pricing model that scales with measured (not theoretical) adoption.

Negotiating Your Now Assist Purchase

Once you’ve scoped your need and built a defensible position, it’s time to negotiate. When it comes to ServiceNow negotiations, not all products carry the same weight. Based on ServiceNow CEO, Bill McDermott’s, extensive focus on AI during the vendor’s Q1 2025 earnings call, Now Assist weighs the most.

“We are leading the AI race because we ourselves are running it. You’re all very familiar with ServiceNow NOW on NOW. The ServiceNow team is raising the bar by innovating on our own platform…”

For customers interested in Now Assist, clearly communicating and holding firm on expectations that must be met for adoption to become viable can result in tangible savings not just on Now Assist, but across your entire Now Platform portfolio.

1. Leverage Now Assist to Cut Now Platform Costs

When considering a Now Assist purchase, customers need to set the expectation that any level of adoption is contingent on ServiceNow’ viewing your business’ entire Now Platform commitment holistically. Key areas for customers to focus on during Now Assist negotiations include:

Reduced or Eliminated Renewal Price Increases

According to ServiceNow CFO, Gina Mastantuono, Now Assist/Pro Plus “maintained a greater than 30% price uplift over Pro in Q4 [2024]”.  Between aggressive pushes for Now Assist and unit price uplifts, customers are looking at significant increases in product spend at renewal. In a time when many organizations seek to optimize their SaaS budgets, this presents a roadblock for strategic investments.

We recommend you emphasize that for Now Assist to be viable, ServiceNow must reduce (or better yet, eliminate) renewal price increases applied to carried over products. Highlighting your organization’s historic dedication towards building a strategic partnership with ServiceNow, including examples of “good-faith” or early adoptions of net-new products and recent upgrades/expansions, can be highly effective at driving deal improvement. Messaging should position that ServiceNow can either get creative and build a partnership-driven deal or risk missing out on a willing Now Assist customer.

Lower Impact Fees

Growing support fees related to Impact’s percentage of net spend pricing model are a consistent area of concern for ServiceNow customers. Customers may be looking at support premiums as high as 30% above their negotiated subscription spend, which can make meaningful, strategic investments like Now Assist cost prohibitive.

Customers need to reiterate that Now Assist adoption is not feasible under the current Impact support structure. The current model penalizes organizations for further investing in the Now Platform and is counterproductive to facilitating Now Assist adoption (i.e., against ServiceNow’s own motivations). If ServiceNow wants to encourage adoption, there is an expectation that the effective Impact percentage fee must be improved.

2. Leverage Now Assist to Achieve Non-Pricing Concessions

Pricing aside, customers can leverage their new Now Assist commitment to drive improvements beyond ServiceNow’s standard commercial terms.

1. Tiered discount structures
   • Flat add-on rates are not sufficient when it comes to costly, high-motivation products like Now Assist. Customers should push for tiered volume discount structures that incentivize increased adoption during the contract term. Effective messaging can position that once leadership is aware of how much value Now Assist (and other portfolio products) brings to the table, the business will be eager to roll out more licenses without having to reopen the sales process.
2. Renewal price protections
   • With SaaS costs rising across the market, customers must prioritize future price certainty during negotiations. For customers who do not already have caps in place, we recommend communicating that renewal price protections across your entire Now Platform portfolio are required to keep strategic investments, such as Now Assist, on the table.
3. Swap rights
   • Now Assist customers should secure the unconditional right to swap Now Platform products throughout the subscription term to ensure the current product mix is effectively meeting your organization’s needs. ServiceNow may initially push back, as swap rights pose a risk of Now Assist removal down the line, conflicting with the vendor’s GenAI market initiative. However, customers can double down on this not being valid concern if Now Assist truly performs and delivers as ServiceNow promises.

Final Takeaways: The Strategic Edge in ServiceNow Negotiations

Now Assist is ServiceNow’s GenAI crown jewel—but that doesn’t mean you need to overpay or overcommit.

By leveraging potential Now Assist demand, customers can achieve real savings across their entire ServiceNow portfolio. Holding firm on what needs to happen for Now Assist adoption to occur will ensure you are receiving a competitive, value-driven offer from both a pricing and commercial terms perspective.

Get a Customized Now Assist Negotiation Strategy

Let our ServiceNow advisory team help you navigate complex ServiceNow negotiations and achieve optimal pricing and commercial terms. Book a strategy call today.