ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott interview: Saaspocalypse nonsense and trillion dollar ambition

Throughout all the tumult, McDermott has steadily grown ServiceNow’s business, which provides online software for companies to manage their HR, IT, and other internal functions. Annual revenue, which was $3.46 billion the year he joined in 2019, totaled $13.3 billion in 2025, and is on track to surpass $15 billion this year.

Impressive? Not according to Wall Street, which has punished the company’s stock. Shares of ServiceNow are down 39% this year, and off more than 55% from their 52-week high. On Monday, ServiceNow unveiled a new financial forecast that promised to double revenue to at least $30 billion by 2030. The stock rose less than one percent.

Blame it on the Saaspocalypse, the fear that AI will make software-as-a-service businesses like ServiceNow unnecessary in the eyes of customers.

To McDermott, it’s a false narrative that misunderstands the enterprise software market and ignores how AI is a tailwind, not a headwind, to ServiceNow’s business. “It’s nonsense,” he says of the Saaspocalypse concept. 

McDermott, 64, laid out his thinking in an interview with Fortune on Wednesday, phoning in from the company’s annual Knowledge conference in Las Vegas where ServiceNow rolled out a variety of new products.

The disconnect between Wall Street and “Main Street customers” is frustrating, acknowledged McDermott, a Long Island, New York native with the accent to match. Still, he maintained that the stock’s drubbing would not shake him. “I have walked over tougher challenges than that on my way to a fight. That’s the story of my life, man,” he said. “I ain’t going anywhere. I can take anybody’s blows and still come out on top.”

As evidence of his resolve, he pointed to his purchase of $3 million worth of ServiceNow shares in February; more than 90% of ServiceNow employees are buying the company’s stock too, he said.

“I explained very clearly to our company that when this thing breaks loose, it will break loose, and we’ll be a trillion dollar company,” he said. “It’s just a question of which day it breaks loose, it’s not a question of whether it will.”

‘The mystery will be over’

At its conference in Las Vegas this week, ServiceNow announced a raft of new initiatives, products, and partnerships that leverage AI. A new service called Action Fabric makes it easier for customers to let AI agents interact with their ServiceNow apps—and creates a new usage-based monetization model for ServiceNow as it continues to expand beyond the software business’ traditional seat-based licensing. 

Thanks to several recent acquisitions ServiceNow is pushing deeper into big markets like cybersecurity. The $7.75 billion acquisition of cybersecurity firm Armis, for example, officially closed in April, and fills an important piece in ServiceNow’s AI monitoring and security offering. And after nine months of regulatory review, ServiceNow completed its $2.85 billion acquisition of agentic AI startup Moveworks in December. “We’re where we need to be now. We have what we need to have,” McDermott said when asked if there were any more M&A deals on the horizon. 

On the subject of the Saaspocalypse, McDermott said that while ServiceNow has grown by more than 20% per year during his tenure, many of his peers in the Saas industry were beyond their high-growth days. “Before AI really took off they weren’t growth companies anymore,” said McDermott, who served as CEO, or co-CEO, of German enterprise software giant SAP for nine years before joining ServiceNow.

Nonetheless, McDermott stressed that AI is not a threat to enterprise software companies. That’s because businesses can only get real benefits from AI when the technology has access to a company’s trove of data. And the gateway to that data is via enterprise software companies. “These companies have a footprint in enterprises, and they’re not going away,” he said.

Without the context of an individual company’s data, AI models are just “expensive advice,” McDermott said, repeating one of his recent talking points.

Not that he’s not bullish about the AI model makers, particularly companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceXAI, all of which are believed to be preparing to go public. 

“They’ll go public, they’ll do fantastic, and I think the investors will do fantastic, and they’ll have very, very bright futures,” McDermott said. 

That will be good for everyone, he said, because of the transparency it will bring. “When you’re in a public market, everything is completely clear: What you’re great at. What your revenue projections are, but also what your profitability projections are.” 

“The mystery will be over,” he said, and as investors have a better understanding of the AI companies, they will be able to make more informed decisions about the broader market, including companies like ServiceNow. 

“I think that will help clear things up and make the market pretty rational,” said McDermott.