Bill demanded his Xerox job mid-interview to keep a promise to his dad
“At the end of an interview, he said to me, Bill, it's a very interesting interview. You're interesting guy. The HR department's gonna get in touch with you in the next couple of weeks. And I said to him, you know, mister Fuller, I don't think you completely understand the situation, sir. And he looks at me with a tilted head, like, what's this kid up to? And I said, I haven't broken a promise to my father in twenty one years, and I guaranteed I won't come home tonight with my employee badge in my pocket. And he goes, you know, Bill McDermott, as long as you haven't committed any crimes, you're hired.”
2.2 billion AI agents will enter the workforce in coming years
“If an agent can do it as good or better, that's an easily easy economic decision to make, which is why, you know, there'll be 2,200,000,000 of these agents entering the workforce in the next couple of years. So, you know, there's gonna be a lot more agents than there will be people.”
Customers forgive humans for mistakes but never forgive software
“Now the other thing about that is if I give you the language model and it makes a mistake, you call me up and you say, hey, Bill. The language model made a mistake. And I say to you, the language model works. And you say, yeah. It works, but it made a mistake. Well, it's probably right, but it's not deterministic. And what we're learning too is people that run businesses understand that people make mistakes. They never will forgive software for making a mistake.”
When the tide goes out, you want to be fully dressed
“You know, this is the moment when leaders really matter. Because as the waters get choppy, you know, we see who's tough and who's not. And when the tide goes out, you wanna be fully dressed. And even if things don't look so good, you'll figure it out if you're fully dressed and you're ready for the battle.”
Customers no longer want discovery — they want prescriptive solutions fast
“Right now, I think it's just tell me what I need to know. It's not like, let me come in and discover your problems. Well, let me bring you a solution because I have one in my pocket, and I can't wait to share it with you. It's like, you know my business. If you don't know my business, there's no conversation. But let's assume you know the business. Be very prescriptive.”
Replicating an enterprise platform with LLMs costs 10x more
“Let's take that cost, and then let's take the cost associated with the human capital doing that instead of something else because the platform was doing the work for you. And then let's add up the cost of the GPU factory, the business model associated with the language model company, and the tokens that will materially affect their business model. We've actually done the math on this. And so for a simple application on our platform, it would be 10 times greater in cost to try to replicate it with a language model.”
Bill bought his deli at 16 by negotiating consignment with suppliers
“I bought the business for 5,500 notes, 7,000 with interest. If I make the payments, I keep it. If I miss a payment, they take everything away from me. What was really interesting about the story is I didn't have any money. But what I did have, because I worked there, is relationships with all the suppliers. So I got them to give me the first order on consignment. I said, I will always pay you back. This is not a favor. This is a chance for you to get your shelves filled up with your stuff that I'm gonna sell for you.”
90% of ServiceNow customer service cases are now handled by agents
“For example, you know, 90% of our customer service cases now are managed by agents. And, you know, that that means, like, only 10% are actually involving people. And so there's a lifting and a shifting and a changing of the guard in terms of what people do for the critical thinking and the judgment calls that they have to make instead of the tactical, you know, work of just grinding out details.”
ServiceNow integrated major acquisitions in just 20 days
“You know, you've seen what we did with Moveworks, the agentic front door to the enterprise, Inveso, which is human and nonhuman identity, and now the security move with Armis on top of an unbelievable core. By the way, we integrated these businesses in twenty days. Twenty days. So a lot of companies don't have the engineering power to say they can do hard things quickly.”
If two people share the same opinion, one of them is redundant
“And then you have to have a position that you take that brings something unique and variable to the equation. I always tell people, if two people are in the same room at the same time with the same opinion, one of them is redundant.”
