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John Licata

Innovation Officer

ServiceNow

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play_circle_outline Revolutionizing Tech Partnerships for Co-innovation: AI Agents' Human-Centric Potential by 2025

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John Licata, ServiceNow

John Licata

Innovation Officer ServiceNow

John Licata, the innovation officer at ServiceNow, discusses the company's momentum and customer commitments to Gen AI investments. ServiceNow's focus on AI, data fabric, and partnership with companies like Microsoft and AWS sets them apart in the industry. The discussion also touches on the importance of human involvement in AI processes and the need for responsible and secure AI implementation. Looking ahead, ServiceNow is positioned to lead in the transformative era of AI agents and business automation. The emphasis on domain expertise and vertical AI solu... Read more

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What are some key points regarding the momentum and customer commitments for Gen AI at ServiceNow? add

What are some ways to leverage data for strategic business transformation while keeping humans in the loop? add

What are some of the key reasons that make it an amazing time to be in the innovation side at this organization? add

What are some strategies for driving innovation in the business world? add

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John Licata, ServiceNow

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>> Hello, welcome back to theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, your host. We are at the NYSE. This is the theCUBE Studio, CUBE East, Palo Alto Studio, and Wall Street connecting tech and Wall Street, wall-to-wall coverage from Media Week, for Cyber Week, as well as AI innovators. John Licata is here, the innovation officer at ServiceNow Company. We've been covering really since their, I think their Series B round. We used to do the knowledge events and then it got so big and now you guys are just continuing to beat records, financial performance, the business that people always say, "I don't know if they're going to be able to scale. " Well, I think you guys have continued to blow past the skeptics. I don't think there's any skeptics anymore in ServiceNow. What a great company. Love the founding team. Just great engineers scaled up. Great to have you on.

John Licata

>> Oh, thanks for having me. And we don't forget our friends always come back to visit. So, thanks for having me.

>> Well, we should get back to that event for sure.

>> Again, one of the things that Dave and I talk about on our podcasts all the time, podcasts every Friday, by the way, for the CUBE Pod, check it out, . ServiceNow is just continuing to have the data, right? And forget the basic benefit of what you guys do from a value standpoint, but just you have set the workflows, you have everything involved in the companies that are perfectly set up for this next wave of agentic infrastructure and software and then the role of what agents will do with the human in the loop. It seems like a perfect opportunity for you guys.

>> Yeah, I mean, so I think building upon Q3,

John Licata

>> the momentum is continuing to carry into the end of the year as we start to look into '25, which I can't believe it's something two weeks away, we were just saying that. And having over 44 customers already spend commitments over $1 million on Gen AI and having six spend about $5 million. And two over 10, the enthusiasm is there. I think at ServiceNow, just everybody is extremely embracing the culture of what do we do, how do we make it tangible? And I think John, I think that's really the important question here is we've been happy, we've been working with the likes of EY, and EY is benefiting from, of course, automation but also freeing up their people so they can help really facilitate better customer service. And for us, I think it's important to get back to really the use cases and the customers to validate that. You mentioned agentic, we can talk about pure storage and the cool things we got going on, but it's really the driver. There's a transformation of AI happening on the enterprise level and I'm happy to be part of the team at ServiceNow that's really supporting this

>> Well, let's get to the agentic in a second.

>> Let's get into the Gen AI. re:Invent was last week. I spoke with Andy Jassy, we were talking about before we came on camera, and then Swami, Garmin, Dan, Dave Brown, just the infrastructure advancements are coming fast, one. Two, but a new paradigm around how software will be written and used is happening. You guys have a lot of Gen AI investments, you have customers investing in Gen AI. What is the current situation at ServiceNow internally as well as with your customers as they look at Gen AI today?

John Licata

>> Yeah. So look, I mean we are blessed to have a lot of great partnerships and customers and we ourselves actually test a lot of the AI innovation that comes through our Now on Now program. And I think that's important, but I think for customers, the fact that we have the single data architecture, it really is a single pane of glass to come in. And that is a huge differentiator to have that. The fact that we have AI built in right into the platform, they're very strategic advantage to do that as well. And I think the fact that we work with customers that we see enormous long-term value, Microsoft. We continue to build upon relationship with Microsoft, with Co-Pilot, now Assist. You mentioned Andy Jassy at AWS, big partner of ours, and we just announced last week that we're bringing multimodal agents onto the Now platform as well. And I think as you start to think about the things that we're doing and we're excited to see ... When you start to look at companies making big initiatives like British Telecom, they took 15 silo divisions across 14 categories and were able to bring them into a more harmony. And I think that's something that we're trying to do. How do you use AI in a way that's constructive and how can we turn intelligence into insights.

>> John, that's a great point. Harmonization has been one

>> of the top topics at the data layer as people start to think about how data can interact into the Gen AI harmonization, whether you call it harmonization layer or semantic layer has been a big topic. And that has to be set up. That's more, I won't say it's an IT. It's just a platform issue. So what is your view on that as you look at your customers? Because breaking down those silos is the goal. I mean, because what Gen AI can do. To abstract away, you don't have to kill the silos. You can actually abstract them into a service layer or some sort of data layer. Gen AI gives a lot of opportunities to start thinking differently. What's your take on that?

>> Yeah, truly. So thinking differently, of course,

John Licata

>> but I think leveraging data for strategic ways to motivate this business transformation that we're leading right now. But we just announced the workflow, Data Fabric, which is the data layer across. And I think to be able to have that layer of information and your agents be able to work with that in ways that always keeps the humans in the loop. I think sometimes we forget. We talk a lot about automation, but we have to remember that there are opportunities to clean things up from processes. But I think it's important to know that we should have humans in the loop. And I think that's one of the great things working at ServiceNow. We're trying to find new ways to augment humans, but we're trying to help people. We're putting AI to work and I think in ways that people are actually finding real, real value in it.

>> I was just talking to my new friend, John Mack, who's got this non-profit. He's been asking everyone this question, how do you preserve humanity in a digital age? And I'm not kind of on the thought leadership track around that, but I go, "I think about it from the human in the loop standpoint, if AI's not working for the human, that is a problem. " The technology's there to be leveraged, not be dictating terms to humans. So bringing that humanity aspect to it, this is where the value comes from. Getting the humans more creative. Craft is coming back, solving problems.

>> Absolutely. - This is kind of where that preservation is

>> because AI needs input.

John Licata

>> AI needs unbiased input. This is an opportunity.

John Licata

>> We're very laser-focused on how to be responsible in this new world that we live in. And let's call it for what it is, business is different. This is not the same business that we grew up in, John, and you know that. And so I think it's important for us to figure out how do we put technology on the right side of humanity to really solve some big problems. And I think that this is a muscle that we're pulling with AI and we need to figure out a way to leverage it in a way that it's complimentary. And it's not that, of course, certain jobs might evolve, but they did with dot-com and we've seen it through human history and I think new fields will emerge. And I think it's important to make sure that we are secure, we're responsible, and we're delivering outcomes that people can find. They can drive new processes with.

>> ServiceNow with the new management team, we've been following obviously for a long time. Obviously, very customer-oriented. Customer satisfaction is a big part of the executive team's vision, which is great.

>> Absolutely. - Now working backwards to the future,

>> I asked Andy Jassy this question.

John Licata

>> Gen one of the cloud was get the developers, swipe your credit card, get up and running and things evolve. Now you've got a SaaS ecosystem, great, check. Win. Cloud gen one, first half of the doubleheader, Amazon wins. In my opinion. That's my opinion, but okay, but that's now changing. That SaaS was a growth out of the mobile world and now you have an AI wave almost gen two cloud. So I asked him, "How are you going to build that out? Does it look the same?" Sounds the same. Matt Garment loves developers. So the question for ServiceNow is you guys have checked up Gen one ServiceNow, check, check, check. Went through all those iterations. Now you've got the AI wave coming. What's the thinking internally around how you using Gen AI to be competitive, one for against the competition and two, to add value to customers because it's a whole other world coming faster?

John Licata

>> And you're right. And speed is key. And I think the fact that we have the single data layer, the fact that we can have enterprise across the board, I think that's a huge differentiator, that I think is needed. I mean, we live in a world right now we are working cross org and eventually cross enterprise and we need to figure out ways that we can facilitate workflows that I think ... I think that's probably the future state with agents, maybe us with Microsoft, how we're using a Copilot agent and now Assist. I think we're really trying to understand is this is a different environment and I think we're kidding ourselves to think that, but we also have legacy systems and how do we work and orchestrate the legacy systems with the modern infrastructure and really help people to succeed at a time when ... You mentioned the word competitive. Customers want more and the contextuality. And AI is not something new to ServiceNow. I mean we have over a track record of, you know that, over a decade.

>> Great track record. - ... Of really putting in new

John Licata

>> functionality and that will continue. So I think for us is try to explore what comes next, driving the future and thinking of what comes next and understanding what does the future enterprise look like, exploring at face value, what does quantum look like, is that the new hybrid, is that working across classical computers and more complex computations to solve big problems. We have to at least start thinking like that. And I think this is pushing us because we hear with customers very frequently and we want to help them solve problems and not just use AI for the sake of using it. It has to be beneficial. We like to talk about in some cases if it's too siloed, you have a the complexity. But we're trying to make that easy. And that's really the workflow of the future.

>> I love your role as innovation officer because you have to connect the dots, but also you have to think about what comes next, the next big thing, but also the next practical thing too.

>> Absolutely. - And bring that back to the business.

>> It's funny, I'm looking at the pattern

John Licata

>> and we're seeing this in our observation space at theCUBE across the industry. It's back to the roots for ... I was certainly Amazon's theme. You see people go back to their core company as they settle in for this next wave. It's kind of like the old adage of your company's value proposition should be evergreen, right?

>> Right. - . I interviewed MyLine,

>> their tagline was storage for the internet.

John Licata

>> That doesn't go away. But again, so Amazon, back to the roots. So these value propositions are general. So AI's coming, everyone's kind of mapping back to their core north star.

John Licata

>> And I think that's why orchestration is so important today because you can bring ... Even with us at ServiceNow, we have our LLM, you can bring your own. We help orchestrate. And I think that's so needed. And here we are at the New York Stock Exchange, and I remember many years of my career has been spent behind us talking about specific industries. And that domain expertise I think is so important because it can allow customers to show us the problems and we could figure out how do we make it more tailored to them. So that going back to the roots I think is us with orchestration, looking into the transformation of agents and how do we help customers not just keep up with the trends, but be ahead of them.

>> You brought up something really I've been talking about a lot, and I love how you brought in domain expertise. One of the things we're seeing, and I want to get your thoughts on this because this ties into how agents may or may not play out. The domain expertise ... First of all, we've been looking at this as a business transformation era.

John Licata

>> Yes. - Digital transformation.

>> AI business transformation. - AI-driven business

>> transformation because it's business.

John Licata

>> Of course. - Cost, revenue, and capabilities.

>> The human aspect is huge.

John Licata

>> So if you look at the hot areas right now in AI, it's the end-to-end workloads that are defined or created and the shift of the old IT department, which serve the business, right? Technology serve. Now technology is the business.

>> It is the business. - And so what you're seeing is the

>> advances is horizontal scale,

John Licata

>> that's cloud distributed computing, data, but the domain expertise, the knobs and buttons to push in the enterprise become the power of the automation.

John Licata

>> And I think that's the- - And that's the new value.

John Licata

>> That's the vertical AI

>> that I think is really interesting today to build upon that horizontal layer of infrastructure. But now let's get deep into certain areas. And I think that's really important too. We need to solve problems. And they're real. They're real problems. Customers want better experiences. They want personalization. They also want, what does the future of finance look like? Can we help? Can we do things to create new experiences? This is an amazing time to be in the innovation side at this org when we're just getting started. And that's the both exciting and scary part.

>> Well, if the value will come from the domain expertise-

>> Yes, agreed.

>> And I think the agents will help the human not be in the

John Licata

>> loop, but be the lead. Creator. Productivity will go up.

John Licata

>> 24/7 too with the agents.

>> I mean, this is going to be phenomenal. Okay.

>> So we're totally aligned on that. That's a vision that I think everyone's agreeing on in the industry. I think everyone sees productivity as a killer app. The question for ServiceNow is, and folks might be interested in is what is your approach to partnering? How do I work if I'm a partner or want to be partner or customer? How does my relationship change to ServiceNow? What are you guys looking for? Obviously, customers, you want feedback and requirements, but as a partner, how do I partner with ServiceNow? Are there white spaces? Is there opportunities for me to bring my AI to you or can you consume my AI? Can I consume your AI and can I give you data?

John Licata

>> Yeah, look, I mean we are extremely fortunate to be working with some of the most innovative minds in the world. I mean, working with the likes of Microsoft, NVIDIA, AWS. So we are looking at ... but we know that co-innovation can really help drive us forward together. And I think sometimes we forget that we should be doing this together. When it comes to the world of agents, I mentioned earlier, we are thinking about how we work with Microsoft and expanding that relationship. And I also think we have to live in a day and age where it's okay to work with startups, not just the big players, but the startups. Why? Because the market's moving so fast. And I think we have the research, we have the customer's insights, and I think that it's amazing to leverage the power of the partnerships because I think that's how you really drive innovation.

>> What's the ecosystem strategy for ServiceNow? If someone asked you "What's your ecosystem strategy " what would you say?

John Licata

>> Look, I mean you already saw the benefits early on in 2024 of how we were implementing Gen AI. Now we're growing that ecosystem to see what we can do with agents. And I think that's going to be the focal point of '25. I was reminded before I came here today, that 2025 and the Chinese New Year is the year of the snake and it's the year of wisdom and transformation. And I do think in '25 you're going to see a transformative look at how the role of AI agents can play. And we're happy to be at the forefront of that.

>> Yeah, that's an awesome way to kind

>> of wrap up in a way we can preserve our humanity with wisdom.

John Licata

>> I think it's important. - And productivity and

>> craft and connection. I mean, I think when you free up people's time, I think we're going to live in an era of things we've never seen before. Certainly, with AI, if done right. If AI is being leveraged for human gain, we're going to see some new things.

John Licata

>> And that's exciting. - That's super

>> exciting. John, great to have you on theCUBE.

>> Thanks for having me, John. - Great to have you on. I love ServiceNow.

>> Happy holidays, everyone out there. Of course.

John Licata

>> We're breaking all. We're going to have agents soon in theCUBE. We got a lot of data sharing that here with you. We're firehose on a lot of content out of the NYSE. And today we're here for three days. It's day two of three days of coverage. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching.