Bill McDermott: Now is the time to put AI to work for people

“AI is civilisation’s greatest opportunity of this century,” declared ServiceNow Chairman and CEO Bill McDermott in the opening keynote session of Knowledge 2025. “It’s the only $22 trillion global market opportunity between now and 2030,” he added, citing IDC research.

Speaking to 25,000 Knowledge attendees in Las Vegas, McDermott noted that only one in four enterprises has seen a return on investment from digital transformation programs, according to HFS Research. “The cost of this legacy inefficiency is killing us,” he added. “It’s a $10 trillion tax on the U.S. economy alone.”

The solution? Put AI to work for people. ServiceNow is uniquely positioned to do just that with its one platform, one architecture, and one data model that spans every function, McDermott continued. “We’re leading the AI revolution, and we’re built for this moment.”

During his opening keynote, McDermott unveiled the new ServiceNow AI Platform to put any AI, any agent, any model to work across the enterprise.

This next ServiceNow chapter introduces new innovations across the platform, along with deeper integrations with strategic partners such as NVIDIA, Microsoft, Google, and Oracle to accelerate enterprise wide orchestration. Global leaders including Adobe, Aptiv, the NHL, Visa, and Wells Fargo are already using ServiceNow AI to drive measurable outcomes.

In addition, McDermott announced groundbreaking customer relationship management (CRM) designed to disrupt an industry long dominated by outdated, overbuilt systems. In a bold move to challenge the status quo, ServiceNow reimagines CRM for the AI era to sell, fulfill, and service on one unified platform to drive exceptional end‑to‑end experiences.

ServiceNow CRM delivers “real-time empathy at mass scale by putting agentic AI to work,” McDermott said.

McDermott also announced the launch of ServiceNow University, our new skilling and education program. Unlike other learning environments with static, one‑size‑fits‑all programming, ServiceNow University builds skills for the future, flexes with the world’s needs, and unlocks full talent potential through a customised learning toolkit—no matter an individual’s needs and interests.

The AI revolution is now

Amit Zavery, president, chief product officer and chief operating officer at ServiceNow, walked attendees through the benefits of combining AI, data, and workflows on a single unified platform, backed by live customer testimonials from Aptiv, UKG, Pure Storage, and AstraZeneca.

Zavery stressed the importance of AI Agent Orchestrator to ensure AI agents handle the right tasks at the right time, and AI Agent Studio, a no-code solution that makes it possible for anyone in an organisation to build and scale AI agents.

During his talk, Zavery introduced AI Control Tower, a centralised command centre designed to manage, govern, and secure every AI agent, measure AI value, and align AI and enterprise strategy. He also unveiled AI Agent Fabric, a solution that integrates and orchestrates AI agents so that they work together at scale from any platform, not just ServiceNow’s.

Zavery stressed that the ServiceNow AI Platform is uniquely positioned to bring intelligence to every corner of the business. It’s the platform for:

• Any AI model: ours, yours, any—no limitations
• Any cloud: private, on premises, government, or sovereign
• Any data: structured, semi-structured, unstructured, and streaming data from both inside and outside ServiceNow for real-time, instant insights and action, thanks to Workflow Data Fabric
• Any workflow: billions of workflows, automations, and knowledge interactions

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella joined the keynote by video to announce how AI agents developed with Microsoft Copilot Studio and Azure AI Foundry are interoperable with AI agents built on ServiceNow, a capability that he said will accelerate the agentic ecosystem.

This integration is the next step in a joint effort by ServiceNow and Microsoft to help our mutual customers improve productivity, enhance collaboration, and streamline business processes.

AI business transformation in action

ServiceNow Chief Customer Officer Chris Bedi took the stage next to interview Cindy Hoots, chief digital officer and chief information officer at AstraZeneca. Hoots shared how ServiceNow has helped the pharmaceutical company transform its business by automating hundreds of processes across many business functions, including IT, HR, risk, finance, and research and development (R&D).

AstraZeneca has saved more than 90,000 hours by streamlining its employee onboarding process and is able to respond to each of more than 60,000 R&D requests in seconds—something that used to take 20 to 30 minutes each, Hoots said. This will help the company deliver its ambitious goal of delivering 20 new medicines by 2030.

A new class of agentic AI

Before wrapping up, McDermott welcomed Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal, co-founders of the “Acquired” podcast, to the stage, along with special guest Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA.

Huang announced a new Apriel Nemotron 15B AI reasoning model developed by NVIDIA and ServiceNow that allows AI agents to understand what they are being asked to do, break down the request, read PDFs, peruse websites and research, and come back to provide answers and solve problems.

“Every product, every service, every solution in the world will be AI-enabled,” McDermott concluded. “The smartest products will be the best products.”

Find out more about how ServiceNow helps organisations put AI to work for people, now.