ServiceNow’s AI agents are currently “saving workers a day a week” and in 2026 will “save them 2-1/2 days a week,” CEO Bill McDermott told me in a recent interview for our ongoing CEO Outlook 2025 series.
That’s an extraordinary forecast even for someone of McDermott’s bullish persuasion, and it raises again the very big question around what CEOs will do with this productivity dividend created by AI and the nascent Agent Revolution.
I believe that is the #1 issue that business leaders must address aggressively in 2025 as they sift through their options that I hope will transcend the goofy notion of simply saving lots of money and firing lots of people.
McDermott, whose company has been among the fastest-growing of the Cloud Wars Top 10 for the past couple of years, had some much more valuable suggestions. (You can see my full CEO Outlook 2025 interview with Bill McDermott here.)
“By next year, we’ll save them 2-1/2 days a week, meaning the companies can start to reimagine what their people do. They could start to think of new ideas, new business models, new ventures, new ideas to change their business and create new value, instead of just keeping the trains running on time, and agentic AI will be front and center in this,” McDermott said.
AI to Create ‘$20 Trillion in New Value‘
For those business leaders willing to push for the new ideas and approaches and opportunities advocated by McDermott, the possibilities are staggering.
“We also have to re-skill the talent out there, and we have to look at people and the exciting journey and adventure they’re on so that positive things can happen for them and for the world,” McDermott said with great enthusiasm.
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“In the next five years, $20 trillion in value will be created in the global economy with AI, and for every dollar that’s wisely invested in AI, companies will get a $5 return on their invested capital,” he said.
To help ensure ServiceNow’s customers can be part of that explosive growth, the company has created the ServiceNow University and the AI Institute “because we want to create a renaissance of learning and knowledge where people can rise up,” McDermott said.
But those same executives will want to see clear plans around ROI.
“I think in the end, CEOs are going to be willing to embrace this. They’re looking for this, but they want us to show them how to do this, and that’s what we’re prepared to do at mass scale.”
To achieve that “mass scale,” McDermott said, ServiceNow has positioned itself as the “control tower for AI transformation” allowing businesses to monitor fully integrated AI deployments and analyze their effectiveness in real time.
“I think it’s clear that agentic AI is the big idea. And the idea is customers are going to use these agents to serve their customers, to serve their employees, to better run their operations, to take over tasks and processes where computers can actually do it better than humans, and it’s a very understandable thing,” McDermott said.
“But the fact of the matter is, the participants in the market today have inherited the problems of the last half century, meaning organizations who architected around silos — the functions of sales, the functions of HR, the functions of service, the functions of engineering — will want to work with good companies that bring agents to the equation.”
McDermott then offered a claim about who’s leading the AI agent revolution, and I think that claim’s open to some very vigorous debate from Salesforce, Oracle, Workday, Microsoft, SAP, and others.
“Right now I haven’t seen agentic AI agents except from ServiceNow — but there must be some out there.”
Yes, there certainly are — and while the competition surrounding AI agents and how they’ll engage with enterprise applications is just beginning, it will surely become incredibly intense in 2025 and beyond as that $20-trillion opportunity outlined by McDermott becomes very real.
ServiceNow’s unique opportunity in that space will be its ability and ambition to help business customers work across all types of applications and all types of agents.
“Even for customers using agentic AI, they’re going to be serving a specific department or use case,” McDermott said.
“Beyond that, there needs to be a solution in the world where our agentic AI agents of the ServiceNow platform are not only serving those silos, but we also look at the enterprise holistically on an end-to-end basis, and we actually integrate our agents with other people’s agents.
“So now you have the agents working together to accomplish something, as opposed to just doing something for one function,” McDermott said.
“And remember: the agentic AI world is only good when it goes north to south, up and down the stack, and east and west across all the departments.”
Final Thought
Before closing, I want to return to the idea that 2025 represents not just a step-change powered by some new iteration of existing technology but rather a massive new opportunity for business leaders to use the power and potential of AI and AI agents to aggressively re-imagine what is possible in a fast-changing world that will value business innovation like never before.
“We’re entering into an exciting new world, one that is really built for customer success and business outcomes,” McDermott said.
“And that’s why we have so many customers all over the world literally generating millions of hours of productivity savings already, and so many of them driving growth in the ServiceNow business model because we have been at the forefront of this now for many years.”
You can see my full interview with McDermott here.
