Welcome to the Cloud Wars Minute — your daily cloud news and commentary show. Each episode provides insights and perspectives around the “reimagination machine” that is the cloud.
In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I share some key moments from my CEO Outlook conversation with Bill McDermott.
Highlights
00:13 — Bill McDermott said ServiceNow, through its AI offerings, is helping customers this year boost productivity by 20%, and next year that’s going to go up by 50%. I think the goofy way to go would be to say, “Wow, this is great. We can save a lot of money, cut costs, and get rid of a lot of people.” McDermott says, think new opportunities, ideas, new revenue streams, etc.
01:23 — I think two things are happening here as we look out into 2025, which this series is all about. One of McDermott’s points was that productivity is going to be astonishing. The other side of that is, how do business leaders get ready to make use of that productivity in ways that go beyond just doing what we’ve always done a little more efficiently?
02:18 — McDermott said ServiceNow is positioning itself as the control tower for AI transformation. Central to that is the notion that while ServiceNow itself is coming out with lots and lots of its own solutions and its platform and services, it’s also helping its customers work across all of their existing applications. This is a time for big, bold, new thinking.
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03:41 — This is step one. Get more efficient, get people away from doing what McDermott calls “soul-crushing work,” and unleash the opportunities for them to do the highest-value work —high-value things — which leads to growth for these companies. The second thing: “This year we’re going to save people a day a week. Next year, we’ll save them two and a half days a week.” Think of the implications of that.
04:10 — What do you do with these people that suddenly have, you know, 20% extra time, 30%, 40%, 50% more time than they had only very recently? How do companies deploy those? Later today on Cloud Wars, I’ll have a full-length article offering a more analysis on my conversation with Bill McDermott, and you can see the full interview here.
