ServiceNow, Inc. (NOW) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Why don't we -- if everybody could just grab a seat, we'll get underway here. Bill, let me just start by saying welcome. It's absolutely terrific to have you with us today.

Thank you so much, Paul. Great to be with you, my friend.

A real pleasure. This afternoon, you are in for a real treat with Bill McDermott, CEO, Chairman of ServiceNow. Bill is a one-of-a-kind, visionary leader, and his track record, I think, is as good as just about any CEO in the technology sector. So it's a real pleasure to have him with us. ServiceNow, I will say, is a great partner of Barclays. They are a very important investment banking client, and we are also very material users of ServiceNow technology. So we have this wonderful partnership. Before I get underway, I do just want to share a little bit of Bill's resume. I know many of you know Bill and his background very well, but just a couple of highlights. Bill joined ServiceNow in 2019. Under his leadership, he transformed what was an IT service management company into an intelligent platform. Whilst he has been here, he has doubled the revenues of ServiceNow. Prior to that, he spent time with Xerox in his formative years, Gartner, Siebel Systems and his role prior to becoming the CEO of ServiceNow was he was the CEO of SAP. During that time, as the CEO of SAP, he increased the market value a staggering $124 billion whilst he was in that role. He's the author of a national best-seller called Winners Dream. He's on the board of Zoom and Fisker, and it's just a real pleasure to have him with us this afternoon.

Bill, why don't we go way back? Let's start off, you were a prolific teenage entrepreneur. Talk to us a little bit about the lessons you learned during that time and how they shaped what is Bill McDermott today.

Well, thank you, Paul. That is a wonderful intro and I'm honored to be with you and your esteemed colleagues today. As a teenage entrepreneur with a start-up business, you learn quickly the most important thing in business is your customer. And if you get them in the door, you have to treat them well so they come back. It's not complicated. But I had to solve a little bit of a puzzle because I was in between finest supermarkets and 7-Eleven, which are national conglomerates. And I recognized quickly that the little one has to do with the big one is either unwilling to do or unable to do. So what we did is figured out who's our customer. There was a senior citizen complex close to the business, we deliver because they didn't. They were blue-collar workers like my dad. They'd come in on Friday night, they'd spend their paycheck and they'd be broke by Sunday morning. We gave them credit and they always paid me back. But the hard part was getting those kids at the high school to walk 1.5 blocks past 7-Eleven to come to my store. So one day, I go down there, all the kids were in line waiting to get into 7-Eleven. They're waiting 40 at a time. There's only 4 kids in the store. I said, "Why are you all waiting out here when there's a big store in there?" "They think we're going to take things." I said, "Don't worry about all that." By then, I had built a video game room on the side of the delicatessen and I let the kids in 40 at a time. And to really amplify the importance of treating your customer well, at the end of a long day, one of the young people said to me, "Bill, when we want to have good food, be treated with respect and play video games, we come to your store. And when we want to steal stuff, we go to 7-Eleven." It's all about the customer, man. All about the customer.

Bill, scrolling forward, when you left SAP, you went to ServiceNow. I think you surprised some corners of the market when you made that move, given it was a smaller company. What did you see? What opportunities were there at ServiceNow that attracted you to that opportunity and that caused you to make that decision?

Well, first, I had a great run at SAP. I'd been there 17 years, 10 as the CEO, and we had achieved our boldest ambitions. I had a choice. I could renew for another 5 years, and that deal was on the table. And at the same time, I realized when I had another opportunity that was called ServiceNow, I thought about it and I said, hmm, ServiceNow. We were a ServiceNow customer and we actually hired ServiceNow because I went on a little bit of a shop in spree when I was at SAP, I think we picked up about $40 billion in companies.

Including Qualtrics.

Including Qualtrics. Qualtrics was the last one. And I think that, that $8.2 billion we put into Qualtrics at the time was criticized as paying too much, I think. It's been resold and re-factored a couple of times now to the tune of about $24 billion. So we didn't do too bad. But the idea was when you buy different companies, they have different architectures, they have different cultures, they have different systems. And if you want to have complete visibility on a customer relationship, you have to fix that. So to get one view of the customer, no matter the culture or the architecture or the system where I knew, are they happy? What are they spending? Is their renewal data up? Are we upselling? Are we cross-selling? Is NPS good? I needed one system that could put it all together and that was ServiceNow. And when I asked the team that had recommended ServiceNow to me, so why can't we do it? We got 20,000 engineers right here. They said, "Bill, it's an architectural discussion. That platform enables this to happen." And I said, "Well, how long is this going to take?" And when they started talking about a few months, I realized this is a different company. This is a different platform. They can do things. And then I got to know them and I realized that I could fulfill a new dream to take one that is in size smaller, but in potential, perhaps greater than any enterprise software company of all time. So I came in with a dream to make ServiceNow the defining enterprise software company in the 21st century. I'm a guy that at heart is an entrepreneur and a dreamer. And when I think there's a market for something, and I believe in that platform and what it can do, not only what it can do today, but what it can be, I go for it. And I think life is all about never looking back and saying, should have, could have, would have. I felt it. I believed in it. I did it.

And Bill, I think because of the spectrum of capabilities you have at ServiceNow, you probably have a very unique view into what is happening in the demand environment across the technology sector. What are you seeing today? And how are you, from your vantage point, thinking about 2024?

The big shift, we've gone from a world in the 20th century where folks who are dealing with operating systems and databases and siloed applications. Because the applications that were built in the 20th century were focused on different departments, different personas. You had your finance applications. You had your HR applications. You had your sales applications. And they were all good, and they're still good but they're designed for a departmental function. And we have moved from the focus on departments, operating systems and databases to platforms. And this platform movement is changing everything because decision-makers can no longer afford to have 1,000 points of dim light. If it doesn't integrate, it doesn't matter. Because you could optimize for a department or a team, but at the corporate level, you're not seeing the ROI, you're not seeing the business judgment and value, and you're not inspiring lower cost, higher productivity and a growth on mindset. So platforms are taking over, number one. Number two, generative AI is the most transformative technology to hit the enterprise since the Internet. And what happens now since we've all had the iPhone moment in 2008, we have moved from a department object-oriented world to a mobile world. We're having consumer-grade experiences and massive computing power on your smart device is what everybody wants. And that radical simplification of the enterprise is here now. So if you think about self-service for employees, for customers, if you think about deflection of work that is soul-crushing that nobody wants to do, if you think about people working across those departments in teams where they collaborate and manage complex cases, you could have 1 customer case in Barclays and you might want to accommodate a client, that could involve legal, it could involve finance, it could involve sales, it could involve governance, it could involve tech. And so what happens is now all these cases can be managed simultaneously across teams using the power of AI and managing all these cases in a workflow automation on a consistent platform. Game change. You, Paul, deserve a lot of credit, and you are very kind to mention your use of ServiceNow, but you guys are brilliant. You started out with IT, then you said, oh, wait a minute, we have to give the employees a great experience. We onboard them properly. We give them their services properly. And what's happening now is customers in the market is saying, I have an order-to-cash process. I have a procure-to-pay process. I have a hire-to-retire process. The CEOs don't want to rethink what it took 50 years to mess up. That took a lot of money and a lot of human capital. They don't want to rethink it, but they want technology to fill the gaps. So those disjointed, non-integrated systems and those silos no longer become an impediment to getting business done. Platform, regenerative AI built in to deflect, empower people, drive customer value and inspire engineers to do their best work. That's what's going on. And for that, the budget environment will double in terms of the year-over-year increase that's available to invest in these kinds of platforms, I predict it will perhaps even triple. And I believe that because second-mover advantage or last-mover advantage is like saying, I'm willing to bet my company that status quo is going to be better than change. I wouldn't make that bet if I was running a company, and I don't think most CEOs are willing to. So they're going to invest.

Yes. Yes. A number of CEOs, I think, as we sort of head into what will hopefully be a soft landing are probably appropriately focused on their cost profile and productivity inside the organization. How do you think about your value proposition in terms of helping CEOs achieve productivity targets and take cost out of the organization?

You can improve productivity about 20% to 25% at the corporate level by deflecting soul-crushing work that humans don't want to do anyway, that's getting done in enterprises today. Second, the average worker, knowledge worker in an enterprise today swivel-chairs between 13 different applications in their workday. That is about a 20% to 25% drag on their productivity each and every day. Plus it's really aggravating, isn't it? And then when you put generative AI into a platform that can span an enterprise, there's very few of them, by the way. It's only a handful in the whole world. When you can do that, you can improve productivity. We have 15 gen AI initiatives going on in ServiceNow right now. 35% to 45% productivity improvement. So gen AI platform strategy, and everything becomes available on a self-service basis. How could it be that a company that makes a great product in Germany today, can't go direct-to-consumer in the United States? Why not? And CEOs are starting to see, whoa, I can come up with complete new business model innovation. How can it be that a company is running with separate instances of a system that is not integrated, that's important like finance, like supply chain, like manufacturing. All these disconnected, non-integrated systems are leaking huge amounts of money and productivity. So the business cases, Paul, for platform and gen AI are through the moon.

And Bill, how do you see -- just staying with AI for a moment. How do you see AI changing the competitive landscape in the software sector? Do you think we're going to see changes in adjacencies? Do you think we're going to see greater levels of partnership? And I know you have engineered a number of impressive partnerships for ServiceNow. How do you think about that?

Well, I think, again, I go back to the platform comment because platforms like ServiceNow are completely integrated in a seamless fashion with platforms like Microsoft. For example, Barclays uses Microsoft extensively. And we integrate seamlessly into Office 365, Dynamics, Teams, also Azure and AIOps. And AIOps and ChatGPT is actually a skew on our pricing model. So the big ones that are the best ones will integrate their platforms. And I think that's going to be a renaissance of productivity for companies. But again, they're going to be very discerning. Which platforms? So I think you're going to see great outcomes from all the hyperscalers. I think they'll all do well. And I think that there's a few, not many platforms with gen AI built into the platform where it's not a separate one-off. The idea of a 1,000 points of dim light is also happening in AI. And I think why we feel so confident in ServiceNow's position is we went live with our Vancouver product release on September 29, we released the product, which means we had 1 day of selling in Q3, which was September 30. A huge department in the government in the United States, one of the biggest real estate firms in the world, one of the great tech firms, led by one of the great innovators of all time and video with Jensen Huang, goes with ServiceNow for gen AI to run their company. Companies like Deloitte and Joe choose ServiceNow and our gen AI platform to run their operations at Deloitte. And you see this happening now as a complete new wave because CEOs are seeing a completely different future. I'm talking to a CEO in Paris, who runs a large insurance company, about reinventing the underwriting process. Talking to a health care company about rethinking health care, what if all the mistakes weren't made and we could create the perfect health care company? So you're into very strategic design thinking, complete automation review of what's possible. This is the moment. Like this is the iPhone moment for the enterprise. So if investors pick the handful of winners, they're going to do great. If they pick the ones that are pressing brochures and running commercials instead of building products, maybe not so great.

Yes. Yes. Bill, in the audience with us at lunch today, there are a number of investors. You have run 2 very, very successful companies. Whilst you were in charge of those 2 entities, they experienced terrific scale and growth. What are you -- what advice would you give to the investors in this room today to look for in companies that are about to experience the sort of growth that you led at both SAP and ServiceNow? What are the one or 2 things that you would point to as differentiators of your experience?

I will first point to culture. I look back on why I went to ServiceNow and in large measure, there's a guy named Fred Luddy, that invented ServiceNow. And when I met him for the first time, he told me the story about American Standard and how he had invented an order entry standard -- an order entry system for a woman named Phyllis, who was doing repetitive tasks each day over and over again, working this order entry system. And she said to Fred, "Hey, do you think you could help me out here and just give me a button to push, so I don't have to keep reentering all these orders over and over again." He went home, came back the next day with that button for Phyllis. Phyllis literally cries tears of joy. Fred cries back because he has such a great heart. And he realized that there's nothing more important than giving somebody a piece of technology that enables them to do something they could have never done without your innovation, without your invention. And that was the moment that I realized that if I were to come to ServiceNow to be the CEO, I was truly standing on the shoulders of a giant. And what I always believed, I believe in culture. ServiceNow was hungry, it was humble. It was confident but not arrogant. It was possessed, obsessed, driven by the customer-centricity it could offer. And those are all the values that connect with my personal DNA. So I think that I love that, and you've got to love what you do, you got to love these companies. And if you don't love it with your whole heart, you're in the wrong job, if you're running them. And so I think investors have a right to understand that. One of the things I was most proud of is Howard Schultz and his foundation, him and his wife, Sheri, along with MIT and Harvard, created something called the American Opportunity Index, and there was 400 companies in this index. It has nothing to do with surveys, nothing to do how much money you spend on ads. This is data-driven based upon how you hire, how you promote, how people do after they leave your company and perform elsewhere, how diverse you are, how equitable you are in the process of creating opportunities for workers. And ServiceNow came in 5 out of 400, but was the only one that showed up high on the list in the technology industry. And I think Howard was quite struck by this. And I commented on CNBC that we follow in the footsteps of great leaders like Howard Schultz and the wonderful company that he's built. But I think it was as much pride in that as being Fortune's best or most admired this or Glassdoor the other thing because this was based on people and pure data. So that pride and that culture and that commitment to putting people first is the driving force behind me and our company. Now second, you asked what else? It is really building a great product. You have to have a great product. In our case, Paul, you were very kind. We are now a platform company. We evolved from IT to employee experience, to customer experience, to what are we doing for creators and how we help engineers innovate and build the best version of their dream. And now we also are very active in the ERP space. Not to replace a transactional system but to fill the gaps on all the things 20th century architectures don't do. So that whole platform has evolved and gen AI is enabled in the whole platform. So this is going to enable a great service. It's going to enable us to continue to build a great team. It's going to enable us to build a massive ecosystem, which is going to create literally hundreds of thousands of jobs across the global economy. And it's all about that culture and the centricity of innovation, providing a great service, building that great team, expanding that ecosystem and driving every day with absolute passion for what you do. And we are running for the gold all the time. And we believe that the win is in the preparation. It's the details that support the dream and everybody caring. And so I will be very focused on culture and do they really have it together on the platform or the product.

So Bill, let me build on that. You are seen as an outstanding leader in the technology industry. ServiceNow wins all sorts of awards for being a wonderful place to work. I think the room would also sort of be very interested in terms of where is your thinking today around hybrid working? Where is your thinking today around the flexibility you need to afford your people? And how do you think about garnering trust, about maximizing collaboration and innovation in the environment that we're in today?

Trust is the ultimate human currency. So everything is pivoted on trust. And this whole situation has evolved, pre-COVID, COVID, post-COVID. So pre-COVID, I remember being with my leadership team in March of 2020. And we're in a conference room looking at each other when the news was just starting to break, something is going on here. And essentially, we were there to do blue sky thinking. I said, "Guys, look, let me help you out. There's not going to be a blue sky if we don't help solve for COVID. We'll never be a great brand unless we take control of the situation." So I was very proud that we were able to build solutions to help the world solve the COVID problem. How do you ship? How do you administer? How do you monitor? How do you give the patient experience to as many people around the global economy as possible? And then when they do return, how do you efficiently maximize all the rules, the laws, the processes to enable people to stay safe? And we were at the forefront of that, and we did it for the global economy, all while I sent everybody home and they absolutely nailed it. Doing their job on the ServiceNow platform because they don't even know what systems are underneath that in the basement with 100 feet of cement above it. They just look at that Now platform, and that's all they have to do. So we knew we had something. And we knew that keeping people safe and contributing to the world was our purpose. That enabled us to not get caught up in is it Monday, Tuesday, Friday. Do you stay at home? Do you come to work? We trusted the team to figure it out. Now there was an inflection point. And that inflection point took place, I'm going to say, about a year ago. where I got in front of the whole company and I said, "Look, I'm not asking you to do anything I'm not doing myself. I don't want to play let's mix up the calendar and spin the roulette wheel on when you want to come in and when you want to go home. You graduated from universities in most cases, some cases, colleges, some cases, high schools, some of you are just entrepreneur geniuses, but you all know what's right. And I'm telling you it's right to come back. I need you back. We need to do this for the world, for the customer to solve our purpose. There's not enough collaboration. There's not enough timeliness in decision-making. So much happens when we're just grooving and riffing on an idea and massive ideas and innovations come out of that." And it was that reasoning that turned the team right back on. So today, I was so proud because I started my day with Usain Bolt firing up the company. And as -- on my way into the office, there was a traffic jam of people at ServiceNow, scurring to get their parking spot. And it was packed, and I was like, okay, we're going places because it's one thing when the coach tells somebody to do something. It's another thing one of the players say, I'm doing it because I'm fulfilling my dream. I want to be here. We're doing something that's changing the world, and we're doing it together. And that is culture. So that's where I stand on it. I never went for this mixed bag. And yes, if people feel that they're doing 8 Zooms and they are a lawyer or they're an accountant, or they're doing something where customer support and service is better handled by jamming in a Zoom room on a Friday in their home. I've got no problem with that. Sales and marketing people need to be out in front of the customer anyway. Innovators do need to come in, they can collaborate, do their best work, design, think, figure out where they want to go with the code. And then if they want to go home and jam on it on their living room couch, and that's what makes them happy and productive, that's good. So I really think we have to level with people, be honest with people, lean in with people and just trust people that they'll help you solve the problem. And these top-down mandates, I never felt were the best way to run the railroad. But that's me, and ServiceNow is a different company than Barclays which is a different company than Walmart and so forth.

Yes. Bill, I'm very mindful of the time, but I just -- there's one last thing I wanted to ask you. So I've read your book and enjoyed it. One of the things that I loved about the book was your relationship with your grandfather and how you thought about your grandfather, and he was Bobby McDermott for the room who aren't aware, who was a Hall of Fame basketballer. I think he was considered to be the greatest basketballer until the time he stopped playing and was sort of something like the Steph Curry in terms of long-shooting point guard, yes. Talk a little bit about the influence that he had on you and how he shaped the leader that you are today.

Yes, I thank you so much, Paul. My grandfather, Bobby McDermott, played in the 30s and 40s and in 1950s was picked as the greatest basketball player of all time through that era. And that's what his Hall of Fame plaque says. So I always looked up to that and just said, wow. And my grandfather was killed in a car accident, he died too young at 49. And I lived through my dad, and him telling me stories as a young kid, and I would look at the pictures, and I would read the articles and my father, they call my dad Mr. Suitcase because he would travel all over with my grandfather from city to city across the United States with these great basketball matchups. And my father could recount the stories like verbatim! And I was always on the edge of my seat and winning and teamwork and the desire to do something that's never been done before, to be the best, the absolute greatest you can be like that was bred into my soul, into my DNA. And I owe my grandfather for his greatness a lot of credit. But my dad, my dad was a blue-collar worker in New York City. And I would remember like seeing my dad chisel ice off of his windshield so he can get into the car and work the midnight shift so he could put food on the table. And I always felt like my dad is my hero. Like that's my guy. So I think that role models and respect and appreciation for what came before you, whether it's your personal life or your business life is so important. And I fuel myself every day and never forget where you come from and just bringing that, bring it, just bring it. And for me, that kind of comes easy usually, I have to slow it down, but bring that energy, and that's what he did. George Mikan, which was considered the greatest big man through that era, Hall of Famer also tells the story how they would, in that era they grew up -- and he grew up in the Depression era, he played 3 games a day, barnstorming with the original Celtics across the United States. These players today, after they play 1 game, it's like they got the masseuse and the training team and can we give you an ice bath, we're sending up lobster to the room. It was a whole different ball game back then, and I learned a lot from that listening to George Mikan tell his story because my grandfather was his not only a great player, but he was the player-coach. So to be the player and the coach is very interesting. And I've got so many stories that I would really love to tell you, but I know your time is precious. I did -- suffice it to say in the book, I also started the book off with a quote and I closed the book off with a quote that might be interesting to you. And the great Robert Kennedy once said, "Some men see things as they are and say, why? I dream things that never were and say, why not?" And then I ended the book with a quote from his brother, Ted Kennedy. And Ted Kennedy had an interesting life, but in 1976, he lost the nomination from -- at the Democratic Convention to compete to be the President to Jimmy Carter. He got in front of his constituents on his toughest moment, probably the toughest day of his life almost, and he gets in front of them and he says, "To all those whose cares are our concern, the cause endures, the hope still lives and the dream will never die." And when he gave that speech, I don't think anyone would say that wasn't his greatest moment. And I think that the dream is huge but also the empathy and being able to be gracious in defeat and learn from them and come back and rise so much stronger the next day, the next month, the next year, never give up. And that's why I book-ended it that way. And if you'd like to listen to Winners Dream, I actually did the audio. Paul is very kind, he said that he listened to it. But I put a lot into that book around storytelling and actually giving people a piece of humanity as opposed to formulas or some business school thing, which you've already done. And it was really an honor to be with you today. And I hope that you felt it was a little bit from a heart and you got a little bit out of not just ServiceNow, but where the industry is going, but also for us personally. We live in interesting times. And I'd rather live in interesting times than uninteresting times, but the world really needs leadership. And every one of us can make a real difference, like leadership is the thing. And I can tell you, with your great company and Paul, I know you personally and you're a great leader. And it's been a lot of fun becoming a good friend of yours. And I hope today that I just made some more friends because it's just great hanging with you, and I appreciate your time very much. Thank you.

Bill McDermott, it's been a pleasure.

Thank you.