At your service: Bill McDermot says Australia is a land of opportinity
ServiceNow chief Bill McDermott says Australia is one of the tech juggernaut’s biggest growth markets, as artificial intelligence transforms the way we do business.
Bill McDermott, the celebrity chief executive of the $US147bn American digital workflow juggernaut ServiceNow, has a message for Australian tech trailblazer Atlassian.
While ServiceNow’s annual Knowledge 2024 conference was taking place at the Venetian Expo Center in Las Vegas this week, Atlassian advertisements were featuring on buildings and billboards up and down the casino city’s famous main strip.
They were emblazoned with the words “end bad service management now’’, with the ‘‘o’’ in “now” coloured green, mimicking ServiceNow’s logo.
“My mother once told me that you can learn more about a person by what they say about other people than what they say about themselves. I think that’s also true for how we conduct ourselves in business,” McDermott said during an interview in the plush temporary office he installed in a boardroom at the Venetian for the Knowledge2024 event, describing ServiceNow as a “much more successful global company” than Atlassian.
“So I understand the motive. But I think the means is just leaning into giving us more and more energy, more and more grit. It’s actually kind of, I think, not their best foot forward.”
Energy and grit are trademarks of McDermott’s persona, and they were very much on display as he strutted the main stage delivering his keynote address to the event, which at times felt more like a rock concert than a corporate conference.
Atlassian hosted its own annual soiree at The Venetian last week.
ServiceNow, which provides enterprise software for companies and governments across the globe, unveiled a number of innovations and initiatives at the Knowledge2024 event designed to boost productivity and enhance the customer experiences of its clients.
One with Microsoft saw the integration of their two different Gen AI platforms, creating what they claim was a more holistic, connected experience allowing employees to get the help they need, regardless of which platform they are working in.
But the most exciting segment showcased a bunch of new AI avatars – interactive virtual characters powered by artificial intelligence that can simulate human-like behaviours, emotions and interactions – developed for ServiceNow in partnership with AI chip giant Nvidia.
These stemmed from their landmark partnership announced last year where Nvidia’s AI R&D is being implemented into ServiceNow’s software solutions.
Its flagship product is called Now Assist, which uses generative AI (Gen AI) to improve customer and employee interactions across various industries, particularly where customer service, engagement, and personalised communication are key.
Nvidia founder Jensen Huang, who took to the stage at the conference in one of his trademark leather jackets chanting “I want Service Now!”, said the world was now poised to see the manufacturing of digital intelligence at scale, as it had “transitioned from instruction driven computing to intention driven computing”.
“At the moment AI is single shot … But in the future AI will be multi-shot, there will be reasoning-based systems. It will do planning itself,” he said.
“In the future AIs are going to be like employees in companies. AIs will work with other AIs. We will have consulting AIs, even journalist AIs.”
McDermott, who in 2014 became the first American to run German technology giant SAP and has spent nearly a quarter of a century in the enterprise software business, said ServiceNow was now totally focused on what he called “the renaissance in the enterprise software industry called Gen AI”.
“That is what is differentiating about us and probably why many competitors want to flatter us right now,” he said.
ServiceNow is currently on target to generate $US10bn in annual revenues this year and $US15bn by 2026, with an increasing proportion set to come from its AI applications, which have become the fastest selling products in its history.
McDermott singled out Australia as one of the firm’s six key global growth markets, where it now has a target of generating $US1bn in annual sales after signing the federal government and the Department of Defence as a key client earlier this year.
in November McDermott plans to make his first visit to Australia in five years, and earlier this month ServiceNow appointed former Telstra CEO David Thodey as a strategic adviser to the firm.
Dave Wright, ServiceNow’s chief innovation officer, said in a separate interview that the setting of a financial target for the Australian market was more than symbolic.
“When you get a region that’s achieved a financial target, then you might start designing products that are specific for something in the region, rather than just a line of business. So it makes it a lot more significant,” he said.
“There’s a lot more focus on what you do around government and federal type issues. That focus means that we can look at what the needs of the region are a lot more, so it gives you a louder voice.”
McDermott said his firm wanted to replicate in Australia what it had done with US public sector clients, where it has built cloud AI-enabled products specifically with the public service in mind.
“Most companies that are in a commercial headset don’t do that. They will give a public sector entity a commercial product. But those products are different. Governments are different to the private sector,” he said.
“The Australian public sector is seeing how you run this whole citizen relationship management model far more efficiently. You can really provide a first class digital experience and streamline the way government runs. Government should run like a best-run business. We see that interest in Australia to really lean in and go big with ServiceNow.”
Yet he acknowledges his firm is still largely perceived as simply another IT company in the Australian market, despite boasting big clients such as Deloitte, Qantas, the NSW government, Fujitsu, insurance giant IAG and some of the big four banks.
Its something he is determined to change.
“I’ve been to Australia and I recognise that we are a younger brand, or probably a less well known brand. We are working on it,” he said.
“I think between the brand, the conviction of our team, and the expansion of our ecosystem, we will not be denied. Because we are not only great at selling, but we have what the customer actually needs. Gen AI is the hot poker that is hitting people now and they know they have to do things differently.”
Gaining a superpower
A trademark of McDermott’s appearance for almost a decade has been a signature set of sunglasses that he wears everywhere in public.
They are the legacy of a freak accident in July 2015 when he was walking down the stairs at night at his brother’s house holding a glass of water.
When he slipped and fell, broken glass shattered his cheekbone, sliced his eye socket and cut the nerves of his left eye.
He was in surgery for over nine hours on the night of the accident – which saved his life – and had 13 operations before eventually losing his left eye. He now has a glass eye in its place.
Asked how the accident has changed him, he says his upbringing prepared him for the adversity.
It is now corporate folklore that he grew up in a poor family, losing his younger brother – who was born with congenital defects – at the age of five,
He worked his way out of poverty and at the age of 16 bought the Amityville Country Delicatessen in Long Island for $US7000, getting his first orders on credit. He even put in video games to beat off competition from the nearby 7-Eleven.
He succeeded because he gave customers what they wanted, and the business was successful enough to pay for his college education, which then set him up for a trailblazing corporate career.
His story is documented in his best-selling book released in 2014, ‘Winners Dream’, which is part memoir, part leadership strategy.
“As someone who is somewhat self made, all the strength that it takes to overcome adversity is built into you before the adversity happens. Therefore, the programming language in your system is built to withstand difficulties, because it wasn’t easy becoming you in the first place,” he said.
“So when you hit something tough, you kind of find a way to get up, get out and get on with it. So for me, it was an experience that I would not have volunteered for and I wasn’t so sure just how the whole thing was going to turn out. But in the end, I think it actually made me more human and even more empathetic, because compared to what other people have dealt with, it’s nothing.”
He recalls a story from the terrible day he finally lost the battle to save his eye. Upon leaving hospital, he stepped into the back of a black SUV with his wife Julie and took an unexpected phone call.
It led to him meeting two honour medal-winning American soldiers from the battlefields of the Vietnam War – one saved the other’s life – and they are now both Navy Seals. He says hearing their stories “lifted me up so much”.
“It gave me this unbelievable grit. There are so many people that have been through so many things. Somehow, you’re not perfect. You bleed like everybody else and you go through tragedies and difficulties just like everybody else,” he said.
“What is really super cool about my accident is I got a superpower from it. I always loved on people. But I actually think that my empathy for and my love for other people is now so heightened.”
These days McDermott’s trademark hugs for his male and female staff are legendary. His enthusiasm is infectious.
“What really matters to me is the cause,” he says of ServiceNow.
“It is absolutely what I’m here for, to make it the defining enterprise software company for the 21st century.”
One pane of glass
One of the greatest challenges of the AI revolution is ensuring there are robust governance practices around risk, security and data protection.
The Australian born and bred Ben de Bont, ServiceNow’s chief information security officer, is focused on keeping the company’s enterprise and customer data safe and secure at every level of the Now Platform.
“Gen AI is a powerful tool and it can be used for great benefit and also for other purposes. It is crucial that governance standards around it are strong. We focus on making sure that we rigorously test our Gen AI technology regularly,” he said.
The Australian privacy commissioner has recently expressed frustrations with the push by governments and companies to fast-track the roll out of artificial intelligence products without appropriate regulations to protect citizens.
But de Bont – who joined ServiceNow in July 2019 – was adamant that as the firm pushes Gen AI more into the Australian market, data protection would remain paramount.
“Countries like Australia and the US are continuing to increase their expectations and security requirements. But I don’t think Australia’s standards will be different to those in the US, that we rigorously comply with. We can learn from each other,” he said.
The Knowledge2024 forum also heard from executives of firms such as German retailer Schwarz Gruppe, Fujitsu, Infosys, British Telecom and even the Aston Martin Formula One racing team, about how using a single workplace solutions platform powered by AI was transforming their businesses.
But in the future Dave Wright envisages that as AI gets more and more advanced and people start to combine the different AI systems from different vendors into companies, firms will have the capability to ask artificial intelligence to actually help make better business decisions.
“It will be about being able to say to a system ‘Looking at my company that you know intimately, how do I improve productivity by 3 per cent? And then getting a list of 40 things you could do’.”
‘Every single workflow of every single company, in every industry, in every market around the world is about to be reengineered, with Gen AI at its core’
Bill McDermott, ServiceNow CEO
McDermott uses the phrase “one pane of glass” to describe the way ServiceNow’s platform “reduces the chaos” of the past – where people each day have swivelled between 13 systems in workplace technology – to “one common denominator”.
He believes 1 billion hours of productivity can be unlocked each year by clients using the ServiceNow platform powered by Gen AI.
“Or think about the idea of 70 per cent of the soul-crushing work that we all do now in enterprises being eliminated because of tech and Gen AI. So people can actually have a much more productive and prosperous life in the office,” he said.
McDermott met with 200 top CEOs in America over the past year. He said 93 per cent of them believed generative AI would add value to the way they ran their companies, and 82 per cent believed it would be a disrupter in their industry.
In a recent survey by EY, 100 per cent of the 1200 CEOs interviewed said that they intended to invest in generative AI because they knew they needed to, especially during the current period of sticky inflation, higher interest rates in complex global supply chains and geopolitical instability.
“You have higher prices, the effects of inflation and firms are looking for a deflationary force. There’s no bigger deflationary force than the Now platform powered by Gen AI. That’s why I call it the platform for business transformation,” McDermott said.
“Every single workflow of every single company, in every industry, in every market around the world is about to be reengineered, with Gen AI at its core.”
*The author travelled to Las Vegas courtesy of ServiceNow
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