The Six Five team discusses ServiceNow Knowledge 2024.
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Transcript:
Patrick Moorhead: ServiceNow Knowledge 2024. We spent two and a half days there. What did you-
Daniel Newman: We’re going to try to summate this in four minutes as we are…
Patrick Moorhead: Yes.
Daniel Newman: Yeah, so look, one of the most charismatic CEOs on the planet is Bill McDermott. The guy legitimately said somewhere along, one of the days, “ServiceNow is an idea” and people cheer. The bottom line though is… I’ll go fast ’cause I want you to get your word in, but enterprise apps suck, enterprise apps suck. I absolutely hate using them all. So I’m not picking on anyone, I’m just going to pick on everyone when I say this. The idea of a single pane of glass where a CEO, CFO can basically use natural language and generative technology to interact with all of their software turning all these enterprise ERPs, SCM, HCM tools into a mere mortal database with a generative layer on top of it that can communicate is the best idea on the planet. Now, getting from Bill’s commentary of this is what we’re doing to reality seem to be found somewhere in the series of keynotes listening to CJ Desai, their president, and others saying, “It’s coming, but are we there yet?”
And that was my big takeaway was their vision is to revolutionize and change enterprise software, change the value proposition, minimize the number of vendors you have to work with and the amount of sprawl you have in your enterprise. The question mark is can they do it? Is their AI really capable of doing this at the scale that most enterprises need to? I was shocked to find out that companies have hundreds, if not thousands of instances of certain softwares, although we really should know this, Pat, but I left excited, encouraged, but questioning how quickly can they execute and how fast does this software sprawl change. I’m going to stop there. We may owe this more time, but I want to give you a couple of minutes knowing that we have to stop.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, I appreciate that. So my team has attended their event before, but this is my first event and I really came in to immerse myself and some of my takeaways, first of all, it is a bold and audacious plan to be the front end for every enterprise software app. Now, is there a need to have a better experience and going to a system of action versus just a system of record? There absolutely is. Does AI, generative AI provide the biggest opportunity to do this? Absolutely. Now, these enterprise software vendors are not just going to kick back and be stagnant, right? They’re all trying to kick up their game.
I think the puts and the takes are is that ServiceNow has shown that they could put a front end, let’s say, to Workday as an example, that is being used today, right? This is not fiction. This is not, “Hey, I want to do this in the future.” They are doing the on-ramping of employees as the front end for companies like Workday. And as I go down the list and whether it’s SAP, whether it’s Oracle, whether it’s Dynamics 365, choose your fighter here, there is this opportunity to do that. The even bigger opportunity is when you tie these systems together, right? We’ve talked about this on the pod and a lot of our research is generative AI can tie disparate systems together as long as you have access to the data. So getting insights from your ERP, your SCM, your PLM, connecting the front end of the back end, as I like to say, too much, that is where this incremental generative AI value add.
Now, I asked a lot of questions about the data platform. I’m not fully satisfied yet, but I’ve got my team digging in of how that happens ’cause data management when you’re crossing the streams is the biggest challenge out there for enterprises. I left impressed, I left enthused and having a keynote where people are excited and Bill fricking brought the heat. It was-
Daniel Newman: Jensen showed up.
Patrick Moorhead: Jensen showed up and literally said ServiceNow was the first enterprise software company to lean into generative AI. Jensen is very not into absolutes when it’s not his company, but this was an absolute black hole.
Daniel Newman: And he said he wants ServiceNow.
Patrick Moorhead: Now.
Daniel Newman: He was quite frank. I know he did the little Dell thing where he walked around and said, “Get your stuff at Dell.” This was probably the equal sort of endorsement of ServiceNow. Pat, if they can accomplish, but I want to leave it here ’cause I know we got to go, if they can accomplish what they are saying, they have a very bright future, not to mention growing from 3 to 10 billion since he came on board. That’s a pretty nice run rate.
Patrick Moorhead: That’s the number. That is another reason to believe why I think they could pull this off and whether-
Daniel Newman: Keynote speaker.
Patrick Moorhead: What’s that?
Daniel Newman: Keynote speaker, Six Five Summit.
Patrick Moorhead: That’s right. Bill McDermott is the keynote speaker for our Six Five Summit 2024. We’re really excited to have him on.
Author Information
Daniel is the CEO of The Futurum Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise.
From the leading edge of AI to global technology policy, Daniel makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology investments. Daniel is a top 5 globally ranked industry analyst and his ideas are regularly cited or shared in television appearances by CNBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal and hundreds of other sites around the world.
A 7x Best-Selling Author including his most recent book “Human/Machine.” Daniel is also a Forbes and MarketWatch (Dow Jones) contributor.
An MBA and Former Graduate Adjunct Faculty, Daniel is an Austin Texas transplant after 40 years in Chicago. His speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.
