How Amit Zavery will shape ServiceNow's AI plans

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Welcome to Runtime! Today: what Amit Zavery hopes to accomplish at ServiceNow, Nvidia continues to be the bellwether for AI growth, and the latest enterprise moves.

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Disrupt, yet ye be disrupted

No matter what happens in the end, this era of enterprise software will be studied forever as the dawn of a new era of corporate productivity or the most hyped money pit since the metaverse. Enterprise software veteran Amit Zavery has seen many of these cycles, and he believes the key to success this time around is making sure SaaS customers don't need to confront the complexity of AI models.

Zavery was recently named president, chief product officer, and chief operating officer at ServiceNow, which at many $215 billion companies is three separate jobs. But Zavery, who has spent the last 30 years building enterprise software products and teams at Oracle and most recently Google Cloud, acknowledged in a recent interview that while the role is "quite broad," he's planning to focus on three key goals.

"The core thing always comes down to, are we building the right thing? Are we delivering value? And are we innovating fast and disrupting ourselves before anybody else disrupts us?" he said.
Agentic AI and coding assistants threaten to upend the market for enterprise software applications to an extent that we haven't seen since the dawn of SaaS itself.
Zavery's progress toward those goals will determine the future of ServiceNow, which has grown steadily for several years on the strength of its IT and business management software.

Here are a few other excerpts from the interview:

On his plans for ServiceNow's AI strategy:

Zavery: Customers don't really care what happens underneath the covers, right? If I want to go on maternity leave as an employee, can I have the agent do all the tasks underneath? Which means changing things in one particular application, giving you all of the benefits associated with your leave, making sure you have an existing employee who will take over your role? All the parts of the workflow connect so many different pieces together, so the agentic AI can do all this task for you by just providing one prompt.

My goal, as we think about the future of all these things, is that agents are definitely the future of how people are going to work. Can we now do a very good predictive as well as integrated end-to-end system for that?

On consolidation among model providers:

Zavery: I don't think there's going to be a huge amount of model companies. I think the reality is setting that one, it is expensive to build models, and second it is harder to even monetize, right? If you look at most of the startups out there who are building the models, they might be getting into much more specific use cases, versus trying to be very generic. There's going to be three, four, very deep as well as generic models. You talk about OpenAI and Gemini and Anthropic, and I feel those will be the big, big providers.

I think having an open architecture where we can choose the appropriate thing — there is not going to be hundreds of them, for sure — but picking the right ones for the right use cases and making sure that it's not a customer's job to worry about. It is our job to really make sure we are finding the right technology — be it built by us or a third party — but providing them, as an end user, with the right outcome. And then eventually, if the underlying technology changes, we should be better adopted without, again, the customer, the user, having to deal with it.

On whether ServiceNow needs its own model:

Zavery: We are not there to be out there selling a model. We are not in the business of building and like growing and competing with Gemini or OpenAI, because it's not really our core business, right?

There are good engineers who know a lot of the stuff, a lot of research scientists in our organization, which really keeps us on our toes as well as keeps us ahead and understanding of when you compare things, we don't want to take a black box and try to use it. You have to understand inside of it, and that's really what our research and the engineering team will do.

We'll keep our eyes open to what makes sense as we go forward. As I said, what we do today is not what we'll do next year, for sure.

Read the rest of the full interview on Runtime.

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Settling for a double

It was always going to be hard for Nvidia to keep growing at a 200% clip, but its latest earnings report showed that demand for its AI chips is still quite strong. The company beat Wall Street expectations for revenue and profit, and projected revenue for the current quarter that came in above analyst estimates, according to CNBC.

For the three-month period that ended in October, Nvidia recorded $35 billion in revenue, which was a 94% jump. Just under two years ago, right before the generative AI boom took off in early 2023, Nvidia reported revenue of $27 billion for its entire fiscal year.

From recent conversations it feels that the model-training frenzy of 2023 and early 2024 is settling down, but that could change as Nvidia's Blackwell chip starts to reach production users over the rest of the calendar year and into early next year. Nvidia expects a 70% jump in revenue next quarter compared to the previous year, which briefly disappointed investors who have lost touch with reality in after-hours trading Wednesday.

Enterprise moves

Bill Welch is the new CEO of Sysdig, joining the cloud security company after serving as president and COO of Talkdesk.

Julia White is the new chief marketing officer at AWS, following a long career in marketing and operational leadership roles at SAP and Microsoft.

Kelly Steckelberg is the new chief financial officer at Canva, implying that the company is thinking about going public in hiring the person who led Zoom to its 2019 IPO.

Nikki Morello is the new chief transformation officer (that's a new one for me) at UserTesting, joining the company from Sinch in a role that will involve oversight of HR, generative AI, and operational activities.

The Runtime roundup

U.K. regulators are gearing up to announce possible remedies after a lengthy investigation of the cloud infrastructure market, which Runtime covered here.

Snowflake's stock soared more than 30% Thursday after it reported earnings that beat Wall Street expectations for revenue and profit by a sizable margin.