--- title: Dataset guidelines for AI Skill Kit description: A representative, appropriately sized, and isolated dataset gives you a reliable measure of how your skill prompt performs. locale: en-US canonical_url: https://www.servicenow.com/docs/r/australia/intelligent-experiences/now-assist-skill-kit/creating-a-dataset.html release: australia product: Now Assist Skill Kit classification: now-assist-skill-kit topic_type: reference last_updated: "2026-09-10" reading_time_minutes: 1 breadcrumb: [General guidelines for AI Skill Kit, Exploring AI Skill Kit, AI Skill Kit, Enable AI experiences] --- # Dataset guidelines for AI Skill Kit A representative, appropriately sized, and isolated dataset gives you a reliable measure of how your skill prompt performs. ## AI Skill Kit dataset creation A data-driven approach to skill development relies on the collection of a high-quality dataset to develop and test the skill. When you use AI Skill Kit, you can also use the existing capabilities of the ServiceNow AI Platform to create a high-quality dataset. When collecting data for this purpose, create datasets that are: 1. Representative of the skill’s intended deployment environment. The data should: - Seek to reflect the expected distribution of inputs in the deployment environment. - Capture variance along several identified axes, for example, input length, urgency. - Include any examples of inputs that are known to be important to the use case. - Consider edge cases that might be rare but are suspected to cause problems, for example, long inputs. 2. Sized appropriately for the team’s risk appetite. - It’s possible to develop and deploy a skill with little data. However, a lack of data creates more uncertainty about how the skill performs in deployment. - Produce confidence intervals for any associated performance scores and prompt comparisons. 3. Isolated from the data used for developing and writing the prompts. - Split the collected data into development and testing sets so that some data is reserved for evaluation. - If you use all the data during the process of developing the prompt, your final evaluation of the skill is biased, meaning that it over-reports performance. This bias is because of a phenomenon known as prompt overfitting.