Scaling Global Organizations in the Age of AI with ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott

The cost to replace an enterprise platform in this SaaS pocalypse that people talk about is an extraordinary expense. Let's take that cost, and then let's take the cost associated with the human capital doing that instead of something else because the platform was doing the work for you, and then let's add up the cost of the GPU factory and the tokens that will materially affect their business model. And so for a simple application on our platform, it would be 10 times greater in cost to try to replicate it with a language model. People that run businesses understand that people make mistakes. They never will forgive software for making a mistake. Hi, listeners. Welcome back to No Priors. Today, I'm here with Bill McDermott, CEO of ServiceNow, and the closest thing we have to a rock star in enterprise technology. We talk about leadership in the age of AI, what enterprise customers actually want, the difference between SaaS platforms and the SaaS pocalypse theory, and the next ten years of ServiceNow. Welcome. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me, Sarah. Thank you. So, I wanna talk about your career and leadership and what's going on with ServiceNow, but I wanna start at the beginning. I read Winter Stream last week. Right. And you it's an amazing book. You talk about the deli you bought when you were 16. First of all, that's a very strange thing to do, but it is such an amazing story. Can you tell me a little bit first about your thought process, and then we can talk about how you managed it? Yeah. I don't, I don't deserve too much credit for, you know, doing a strange thing buying the deli because I was really trading in multiple part time jobs. Mhmm. At the time, I was stocking shelves, pumping gas, and bussing tables. And so I had a chance to consolidate all of that into the delicatessen and have one job where I could spend all of my hours. And for a kid going to high school, that kinda made a little bit more sense. So I got lucky. I bought the business for 5,500 notes, 7,000 with interest. If I make the payments, I keep it. If I miss a payment, they take everything away from me. So it was a pretty cut and dry moment. And I think the the biggest thing that I've learned in my life and especially there is it's all about the customer. In the end, the customer and the customer alone determines whether you win or lose. And it's a very simple equation. If you keep them coming back, you got a good chance. And if you don't, you lose. And, you know, back then, one of the most interesting parts about that store was knowing your customer and knowing your base. And I really had, you know, three main customers. You know, one was the blue collar worker. …