How Bill McDermott’s ‘underdog desire’ drives ServiceNow

At 64 and six years into his role as CEO of ServiceNow, Bill McDermott says he is still powered by the “underdog desire” that pushed him to buy a Long Island delicatessen when he was 16. Back then, he would spend every morning before school buttering rolls for commuters and every evening waxing the floors. “I had to win the crowd. If I didn’t have happy customers, I didn’t survive,” he explains. “I’ve never, ever lost that edge. I never take anything for granted. I know anything can be taken away from you in an instant. And I live with that edge and that chip on my shoulder every day. I walk into every room as the underdog.”

McDermott’s drive has become the stuff of industry legend. Having talked his way into a sales job at Xerox in his early twenties, he became its youngest corporate officer at 36, before success in roles at Gartner and Siebel Systems led him to SAP. And when a near-fatal accident cost him an eye 10 years ago, he carried on running Europe’s largest software company through months of recovery and surgeries.

McDermott is no longer the underdog, but he is now focusing that energy on reshaping ServiceNow for an AI revolution that he thinks will take its clients on “a magic carpet ride of growth” — if their early experiments with AI tools don’t create more problems than they solve.

Since McDermott became CEO, the enterprise software company’s revenues have grown by 20% or more each year. Its margins have also grown, with almost nine in 10 companies in the Fortune 500 using its cloud-based platform to automate their workflows. And it boasts a renewal rate of 98%.

“You have to have a cause,” says the executive, who earlier in his career oversaw a quadrupling of SAP’s market value. His cause now is to turn the $170 billion-plus business into the defining enterprise software company of the century, and the fastest-growing player in an industry that includes the likes of Salesforce, Zendesk, and BMC Helix.

“That’s what we’re going to do,” he pledges, adding with a salesman’s flourish: “I want you to come back and remind me of my words: I guarantee it.”

Controlling AI-fueled complexity in the new economy

McDermott is unabashedly bullish on AI’s potential. ServiceNow began building a native AI platform with engineers from Nvidia soon after he arrived, and he says he can envision a day when Jensen Huang’s chipmaker is valued at $15 trillion, more than three times its value today. “It is an AI world. It’ll never go back,” he says. “This is the new economy.”

But he pushes back on the idea that the developers of large language models will claim the enterprise software market that ServiceNow seeks to dominate. The enterprise is a deterministic place, he explains, where data has to be secure, auditable, and controlled. But AI models are indeterministic, forming patterns and suggesting ideas from data: “Every time you source an AI for insight, it’ll give you a different answer. You cannot have an indeterministic world in the enterprise.”

That, he thinks, is where ServiceNow’s opportunity lies. Legacy enterprise systems have “multiplied like rabbits” inside companies over recent decades, he says. Now, he sees CEOs making the mistake of adding a glossy AI layer on top of those poorly integrated systems. “What you’re going to get is a new layer of chaos, a new layer of complexity, lots of mistakes, and lots of breaches,” McDermott says. “People are about to get a big wake-up call.”

His pitch is that ServiceNow can be “the AI control tower for business reinvention” — a partner that can help clients make sense of the data sitting in all those legacy systems of record while integrating with large language model builders who don’t, he implies, understand the demands of the corporate world.

ServiceNow’s stock rallied strongly through 2023 and 2025, but it has slipped by 21% this year, even as the valuations of AI leaders like Nvidia have powered higher.

That will change when investors see sustained performance and a growth curve that is accelerating because of AI, he predicts. “We’ve already got 2,000 companies out there running our AI. We give them the AI with the platform, and they have lots of generous use cases for free. But once they’ve consumed all of those, a net new hockey stick of growth kicks in along with our traditional licensing model, so we are building a tsunami of opportunity and shareholder value creation.”

Building human intelligence in an agent-filled workforce

McDermott differs from some of his peers in his belief that AI efficiencies need not mean massive cuts to corporate headcounts. The technology has provided a useful cover story for some CEOs looking to boost profits by slashing their wage bills, he suggests.

“If you’re not growing, you’re looking for any productivity source that you can get to help you be profitable with less revenue,” he notes. “A lot of CEOs, as you can see, are getting comfortable with that conversation. I, on the contrary, take a completely different view of it. [CEOs should] put AI to work for people. What good is AI, or all this technology, if it doesn’t improve people’s lives?”

AI agents are already doing “90% of the soul-crushing work” that people in ServiceNow’s support teams for customers, IT, and HR used to do, but it hasn’t laid them off. Instead, each of its 28,000 employees has undergone an AI skill assessment and begun learning what they will need to be more competitive in an agentic workforce.

“I believe the true measure of greatness in a company is going to be the knowledge level of its workers,” McDermott says. “There is no artificial intelligence without human intelligence.”

And companies will not earn the loyalty of their customers, without earning their employees’ trust first, he adds. “Your people will not be loyal to you if they’re worried every day that AI is going to destroy their lives. So instead of soft-shoeing it, assess them, train them, reskill them, retool them. Do it. Don’t talk about it.”

Pumping fists at the all-hands meeting

McDermott is an outlier. Most 16-year-olds do not buy the local deli, and few employees have the same ambition that has powered him for decades. As he talks about building a corporate culture that gives innovators the autonomy to anticipate what clients will need, his challenge is to convey some of that energy to thousands of people around the world.

Great leaders “provide air cover for the troops,” he says. “I ask a lot of the company, but the company sees me give everything I’ve got.” And what he has found works best in getting comparable effort from the people who report to him is overcommunicating.

“Anything worth communicating is almost always undercommunicated,” he observes. McDermott errs on the side of sharing “every idea, every thought, every concept,” so the company is constantly getting feedback and “the will is constantly being reinforced.” Not everything that he shares is good news, he adds. “I put the facts on the table. If we’re not doing something right, I’ll come to the table with the problem statement, but I also have an idea on what the solutions might be. I think it’s depressing to bring a problem without a proposed solution.”

That transparency builds trust, he says, “and if people trust you, they’ll go through hell and back for you. But if they don’t, there’s no deal.”

He also channels his extrovert energies into splashy corporate get-togethers after each quarterly earnings statement. These “ServiceNow Live” events, which gather thousands of staff in person and beam in others from around its global network, feature pop performances, executives’ assurances that ever greater heights are within reach, and McDermott’s own fist-pumping rallying cries of “Let’s go, ServiceNow!”

“Most companies couldn’t get a person to the all-hands meeting because the all-hands meetings are so boring,” he says. His events, by contrast, “are on fire with entertainment, excitement, dreams, passion, goals, a winning spirit, and everybody wants to win. Above all else, I think we have created a winning culture.”

The boast is true to form for the self-styled relentless optimist, who seems to have believed for 50 years that the best days are still ahead.

“It’s exciting, man, it’s really exciting,” he says of his job now. “You have to love speed. You love adrenaline. You love the action. You love the nonstop nature of it, because the pace of change has never been this quick.

“But also,” he adds, “it’ll never be this slow again.”