Automated Incident and Request Management in ServiceNow

Who’s it for

This workflow is designed for IT teams, service desk agents, and operations managers who use ServiceNow. It reduces manual effort by automatically classifying chat messages as Incidents or Requests, creating/updating them in ServiceNow, and summarizing ticket updates.

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What it does

• Receives incoming chat messages.

• Classifies the message as one of:

  • Incident (something broken, unavailable, or a complaint)
  • Request (access, provisioning, product/order related)
  • Follow-ups (incident or request update checks)
  • Update action (user wants to add info to an existing ticket)
  • Everything else (knowledge search / general query).

• Creates Incidents in ServiceNow via the ServiceNow node.

• Creates Requests in ServiceNow using the Service Catalog API.

• Updates existing Incidents with new work notes when the user provides an update.

• Pulls existing incident/request work notes for summaries.

• Optionally uses SerpAPI for general queries (if enabled).

• Returns a concise summary back to the user through the webhook.

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Requirements

• ServiceNow account with API access (Basic Auth)
• OpenAI API key (used by the classifier and summarizer)
• SerpAPI key (optional – for general web lookups)

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Credentials needed

You will need to set up the following credentials in n8n:

1. ServiceNow Basic Auth (username, password, instance URL).
2. OpenAI API (API key).
3. SerpAPI (optional – only if you want web search enabled).

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How to set up

1. Import the workflow JSON into your n8n instance.

2. Create the credentials mentioned above and assign them to the corresponding nodes:

   • Create an incident → ServiceNow Basic Auth
   • HTTP Request1 (for Service Catalog requests) → ServiceNow Basic Auth
   • OpenAI Chat Model / OpenAI Chat Model1 / OpenAI Chat Model2 / OpenAI Chat Model3 → OpenAI API
   • SerpAPI node (optional) → SerpAPI key

3. Adjust the ServiceNow instance URL in the HTTP Request node to match your environment.

4. Deploy the workflow.

5. Send a test chat message to trigger the workflow.

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How to customize

• Update the classification rules in the Text Classifier node if your organization uses different definitions for incidents vs. requests.
• Edit the summary prompt in the Summarization Chain to include or exclude specific fields.
• Add additional notification nodes (Slack, Teams, or Email) if you want updates pushed to other channels.

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Notes & Limitations

• This workflow creates general requests in ServiceNow using the catalog API. For production, update the Service Catalog item ID to match your environment.
• “Everything else” category uses SerpAPI. If not configured, those queries will not return results.
• This workflow requires OpenAI GPT-4.1 mini (or another supported model) for classification and summarization.

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