AI ‘the biggest opportunity of our lifetime’, says tech veteran

AI “second movers” and deniers are set to lose immensely, according to high-profile tech chief executive Bill McDermott, who has tapped former Telstra boss David Thodey to serve as a strategic adviser to his $US218 billion ($339 billion) workplace software company.

The technology veteran, one of the world’s highest-paid executives, who previously led enterprise software giant SAP, likened the advent of generative AI to Steve Jobs introducing the iPhone – and he issued a stern warning for businesses that fail to capitalise on the technology’s economic potential.

Bill McDermott, chief executive officer of ServiceNow, was visiting Australia.Credit: Bloomberg

“On a personal level and a business level, AI is the biggest opportunity of our lifetime,” McDermott said.

“There’s not too many $US20 trillion markets out there in the next five years. And if you look at how history has unfolded, from the internet to mobile to cloud computing and now the AI revolution, the thing that makes AI bigger than all of them is it includes all of them, and it embodies all of them.

“AI is the future and the future is now. And it won’t be kind to people who decide to get second-mover advantage. The deniers will lose big.”

McDermott has led the California-based Atlassian rival ServiceNow since 2019, and spoke to this masthead during his first visit to Australia in five years.

ServiceNow moved relatively early on generative AI, acquiring UK start-up Element AI in 2020 and partnering with booming tech giant Nvidia in 2023 to bring AI services into large workplaces. It rivals companies such as Atlassian and Zendesk, offering a cloud-based platform for customer service and business processes.

‘This whole thing is for people.’

Bill McDermott

Australian enterprise giant Atlassian regularly attacks ServiceNow in its ads, describing its software as “high cost” with “unused functionality”. McDermott has said those attacks give his company “more energy and more grit”.

McDermott said the average enterprise worker uses 17 different applications a day, and switching between those applications chews up to a third of their individual productivity.

David Thodey is advising ServiceNow.Credit: Louise Kennerly

“We have an AI platform for business transformation that is a clean pane of glass that resides above what is now more than 50 years of chaos, half a century,” he said. “ServiceNow has become the central nervous system for any well-run company or public sector entity that wants to drive transformation.”

The company recently tapped Australian business veteran David Thodey to serve as a strategic adviser as it chases $1 billion in local annual revenue. Thodey said he had been impressed with the ServiceNow platform as a way to drive digital transformation and automation quickly.

Amid a sea of competing visions for how AI might look inside the workplace, McDermott envisioned chatbots that deflect “soul-crushing work” that humans don’t want to do.

“If you take Australia as an example, there’s a major labour gap because there’s more jobs that are open than people to fill them. So we need to put these AI agents to work, but we’re putting them to work for people. This whole thing is for people,” he said.

“But these bespoke systems are siloed. If a company takes one of those approaches, and says let’s get sales agents, some HR agents, and some finance agents, you’re only going to make the half century of chaos worse… The digital agents still can’t go east to west, and they certainly can’t go north to south. You have to be able to go north to south and east to west to transform a company. And that’s our superpower.”

McDermott, who penned a memoir titled Winners Dream: A Journey from Corner Store to Corner Office, lost one of his eyes after falling down a flight of stairs while carrying water in a glass, which shattered into pieces and pierced his left eye. He wears sunglasses everywhere in public.

“When you have something like that, a pretty difficult accident, what you learn is two things,” he said. “One is going through the process of the accident itself. Because it’s easier to quit, it’s easier to say ‘I’ve done enough. Let me fold it up. Go to sleep. This is it.’ The hard part is having the courage to get back up again and find a way to survive.

“The second thing is to recognise with complete humility that everybody is going to get hit with a thunderbolt. Everybody. No one’s getting out of this life with a hall pass. So the question simply becomes, what will you do? How will you be when it’s your time to get back up again?”

McDermott said the accident made him more resilient, more positive about the world and ultimately more empathetic.

“It’s like a brand-new lease on life,” he said. “As crazy as it might sound, if I hadn’t had that, I don’t think I would have made as big an impact on the world.”

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