ServiceNow CEO on AI: Not a moment to think incrementally, this is a 'shift in the enterprise'

ServiceNow announcing new collaborations today in generative AI with Microsoft, with IBM, with NVIDIA also knowledge 2024 here in Las Vegas. ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott joins me now exclusively. Bill, I want to start with Microsoft here because we, we’ve been hearing Satya Nadella talk about copilots and what’s interesting to me is that you’re getting different approaches to AI now combining for the enterprise and for the customer. Talk to me about this now Assist and Copilot first. It’s wonderful to be endorsed by Satya and a great company in Microsoft. They’re wonderful friends of me personally in our company and it’s really delightful. And Microsoft Copilot is really a standard today in the enterprise. They’ve done such a great job with Azure and Copilot and really lifting up companies to a new level of productivity and to have them partner with now assist. So just think about a person literally in an enterprise today having an integration between Copilot and Now Assist. So for example, you’re a person that wants to order a new computer and you’re operating in Microsoft, you seamlessly integrated into ServiceNow where we have all the IT data and information on the employee. You get your computer, everything is seamless. You don’t even know you’re in a Microsoft or ServiceNow. The engineering is that tight and better yet a lot of people know service now from OK, I’ve ordered something maybe I need a new phone, maybe I need a new laptop. I think you’re saying you can ask Copilot. Where’s my laptop? And Copilot checks with now assist and where it is in the process. So how much of those integrations of different data sets within the enterprise is what’s going to drive where AI goes? You’re 100% right, John. AI is only again as good as the platform that it is built on and we’re putting AI to work for people. So from every corner of the enterprise, from IT to the employee experience to how you care for your customers and how your innovators build net new software, we’re going to every corner of the office. This is the AI platform for business transformation. And this is not a moment to think incrementally. This is an exponential shift in the enterprise and we intend to redefine it. What I’m not used to is an enterprise software transformation that’s getting this much, I’ll say hype, right, because normally we see that with consumer. You saw it with smartphone, you know, we saw it with the Internet and some of the web stuff. But normally with enterprise, even with cloud, Amazon was pushing for a long time before people started to say, oh, same with software as a service. We’re at this inflection moment. To what degree, what might some people be going too far in their near term excitement about it? Well, you aren’t a good point. We have in service now 250 tools from different companies right now pitching some AI product. We’ve actually created a new product we’re about to launch, which is a control tower to study the productivity not only of what our system is doing, but what all the other tools are doing. And what we’re finding, John, is some of them are pretenders and we’re not. And the reason we’re not is we’ve been working on this for well over five years now building models with Jensen and NVIDIA. And we have first mover advantage in the enterprise and the enterprise is going to be completely rethought with generative AI. So the reason you’re feeling that hype cycle right now is it’s real. You’re seeing a $7 trillion industrial complex in the data center and in cloud computing and the enterprise be completely reinvented by Gen. AI. So it’s really nice to have the first mover advantage. I don’t know how you catch up.