Scaling Global Organizations in the Age of AI with ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott
Episode publishedPodcast: No Priors: Artificial Intellig...No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups
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The cost to replace an enterprise platform in this SaaS apocalypse 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
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 SaaSpocalypse 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 want to talk about your career and leadership and what's going on with ServiceNow. But I want to start at the beginning. I read Winter Stream last week. 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's such an amazing story. Can you tell me a little bit first about your thought process, and then we can talk about how you manage it?
Yeah. 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. 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 kind of 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
I learned a great deal not managing a deli, but at least being a hostess in an Outback Steakhouse. See? Yeah.
You can relate, right?
Well, you just, you know, the repeats of dealing with a lot of different types of people So, is it's still like amazing and strange to me. You talk about this set of customers that you, you know, understood and tried to serve. Like, were you just sitting there in the deli observing them before you bought the thing? Like, how did you even figure out
that I these were worked there first, you know. And what happened was the owner was going through some personal divorce circumstances and wanted out. And I was the guy that was always there anyway. So he tried to sell it. It was only a one year lease. You never owned the land or the building. So he was selling a one year lease. The lease was owned by Sunmark Industries, which is Sonoco gas station. And they could throw you out anytime they wanted. So only a kid who didn't know any better would pay anything for it. So eventually that's how the deal got put together. I said, I don't have any mon
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