As business customers struggle to reap AI’s enormous potential while smoothly navigating the widespread disruption it’s causing across their enterprises, Bill McDermott is positioning ServiceNow as the all-inclusive AI antidote to CEO anxiety.
Interlocking ServiceNow’s established “AI Control Tower” position with a significantly enhanced focus on cybersecurity, McDermott has staked out a strategic and highly valuable sector that’s surged toward the top of customers’ priority lists as the specter of data vulnerabilities, rogue agents, obscenely expensive token bills, and ungoverned AI have become all too real.
The twin themes of rigorous end-to-end security and governance were top of mind for McDermott on ServiceNow’s recent Q2 earnings call and provided some compelling context for the company’s impressive quarterly results.
“The path to value isn’t just making AI, it’s deploying AI securely across the enterprise,” McDermott said in his opening remarks, which always give a clear indication of what’s top of mind for him and his company. “Whichever chip wins, whichever lab wins, whichever price-per-token regime prevails, the enterprise needs one governed layer of record for work.”
McDermott then demonstrated once again — as he’s done every three months since taking over as ServiceNow CEO seven years ago — how he uses quarterly earnings calls to inextricably connect customer priorities with ServiceNow’s latest innovations.
“ServiceNow offers needed certainty in an uncertain stack. Our platform is optionality on all AI outcomes, not a bet on any one. We’re in the bullseye of AI, cybersecurity, workflow orchestration, integration, and automation.”
That’s a very big promise — and explicit within it is McDermott’s belief that ServiceNow is fully ready to move up the business-value ladder from workflows to a core and must-have provider of security-plus-governance that span the enterprise while helping customers move from being freaked out to being freakin’ awesome.
“Risk at scale is why CEOs are losing sleep right now,” McDermott said.
“They read all these threat headlines, they see all these platforms and token invoices, and they don’t know what to do.
“This is the gap — and ServiceNow is the bridge. We’re in the control business. One platform, one system of action, any cloud, any agent, any workflow, any model, governed, secured and accountable. This is the AI Control Tower enterprise leaders now know is mission-critical,” he said.
While McDermott has discussed this control-tower concept in some detail, he used the Q2 earnings call to go into more detail about:
- how ServiceNow is uniquely qualified to deliver on that promise, and
- why the deep and inseparable infusion of cybersecurity into the equation is not only timely for customers but also absolutely essential to their success in the AI economy.
“Enterprise execution with cybersecurity at the core of the platform, and cybersecurity is growing really fast … We’re in command of the agentic enterprise from workflow to cyber,” McDermott said, claiming that his company is now both “the rules and the rails of the enterprise.”
To support his contention about ServiceNow’s viability in the security space, McDermott tossed out a series of impressive claims:
- “ServiceNow already was a $1 billion-plus cybersecurity business. Today, our risk and security business is the fastest-growing of the top 10 cyber companies in the enterprise.”
- “We’re building the world’s most integrated end-to-end security platform across cyber risk and compliance, agentic incident response, exposure management, identity and access security, cyber, physical security, and continuous vulnerability detection.”
- “The security stack sits on top of our ITSM and ITOM core infrastructure,” McDermott said in describing how the security business — including recent acquisitions of Armis and Veza — meshes elegantly with ServiceNow’s existing products. “Think about it: AI Control Tower plus Armis plus Veza. Our customers want every AI in the enterprise to be visible, governed, and secured in one command center, native or third party — they don’t want any blind spots.”
- “There’s 2.2 billion agents entering the enterprise globally. That’s 2.2 billion new identities — one-quarter of today’s human population. Veza maps access across human, machine, and AI identities. We’ll have 40 billion connected devices in the world in the next four years. Armis already tracks 7 billion of those devices in real time. Many customers, especially in the public sector, seek out Armis because government policies require state-of-the-art visibility. The attack surface is exploding. Every ungoverned asset and identity multiplies the blast radius.”
Final Thought
When McDermott joined ServiceNow seven years ago, he very quickly pushed the company into new market segments including security, and that move is paying off nicely here in the early security-starved days of the AI Revolution.
He also pushed ServiceNow to think about not only the CIO but the entire C-suite — and with this new focus, McDermott clearly believes ServiceNow’s security-plus-Control-Tower play is aimed at the corner office per his claim that “Risk at scale is why CEOs are losing sleep right now.”
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