Bill McDermott

Bill McDermott (born 1961) is an American executive who bought a Long Island delicatessen as a teenager, climbed Xerox’s sales ranks, and rose to sole CEO of the German software giant SAP before taking over ServiceNow in 2019. Under him, ServiceNow transformed from an IT-ticketing vendor into one of the world’s most valuable enterprise software companies — and, in the generative-AI era, into an all-in bet on agentic AI.

Selling the agentic enterprise

McDermott has positioned ServiceNow as the orchestration and governance layer for fleets of enterprise AI agents, telling customers at Knowledge 2026, “You don’t have to imagine what an Agentic business looks like. You are actually inside one.” His pitch is distinctive for pairing maximal enthusiasm with control systems: as models commoditize, he argues, the differentiator is the rules, rails, and workflow around them — ServiceNow has even marketed itself as the “kill switch” for runaway agents.

On jobs, McDermott has staked out an anti-layoff position among AI-first CEOs. At Davos he described automating ServiceNow’s own IT department without cutting anyone, retraining and redeploying employees into new roles through the company’s in-house reskilling university. By 2026 he acknowledged the flip side: AI productivity means ServiceNow will not need to backfill many open roles — the softer edge of the same displacement other executives announce with pink slips.