Over the past decade, ServiceNow has established itself as a global leader in AI-driven business transformation. With its integrated AI platform powering 65 billion workflows globally, ServiceNow delivers scalable cloud-based solutions across IT, customer service, HR, and beyond. This success reflects a deep commitment to customer centricity, operational excellence, and an AI-native culture.
As part of McKinsey’s C-Suite Growth Talks, Paul Fipps, ServiceNow’s president of global customer operations, sat down with McKinsey’s Richelle Deveau to discuss how the company’s culture, AI strategy, and relentless focus on customer experience fuel its rapid growth.
The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.
Fostering a growth culture
Richelle Deveau, McKinsey: When you reflect on your career, what experiences have most shaped your approach to leadership, service, and purpose?
Paul Fipps, ServiceNow: When I was 18, I served in the 82nd Airborne at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, which gave me the opportunity to see much of the world and engage with people from many cultures. That experience forever shaped how I lead.
One training exercise from those early days has stayed with me. After basic training and airborne school, we were put into scenarios to see how we’d respond. In one, they simulated that my entire platoon was gone; just me and my roommate were left. The question came: “What’s the mission?” I froze and forgot. My teammate stepped in immediately with the right answer and plan.
That moment reinforced a principle I’ve carried ever since: Mission first, team second, self third. It’s simple, but it changes everything. My role as a leader is to put the mission ahead of ego, elevate the team above myself, and create the conditions where people can do their best work. Because when the team thrives, the mission succeeds.
Another major influence in my leadership journey has been our current CEO, Bill McDermott, whom I’ve known for 17 years in various roles. He’s been a phenomenal mentor—probably my greatest sponsor in the corporate world. Bill has coached me many times, but one lesson stands out. Early in my career, when I began presenting to boards of directors, I called him to review my presentation. After listening, he said, “Here’s the deal with boards: They govern and guide, offering leadership their perspective. But they only know a little about every topic. They have breadth, not depth. Executives, meanwhile, often go too deep into their subject matter. What boards really want to know is do you understand your business and do they have confidence in you.”
That advice has stuck with me. It taught me that leadership isn’t about showcasing how much you know but about clarity, confidence, and connection. It’s about meeting people where they are and giving them confidence in the path forward.
Richelle Deveau: How do you, as a leader of a high-growth company, encourage your team to embrace that mindset across the portfolio you oversee?
Paul Fipps: High growth requires a culture of continuous learning. Just two years ago, the conversation was about generative AI. Today, it’s about agentic AI. The pace of change demands that everyone adapt fast.
That’s why we make learning a daily practice and foster a culture of curiosity. For example, one of our early-in-career team members showed our executives how he uses generative AI to build a full customer brief—context, trends, and suggested next actions—in minutes. At ServiceNow, everyone is both a teacher and a learner, regardless of tenure.
That mindset is core to our company and culture. Our chief people officer is also our chief AI enablement officer, ensuring that every function has AI learning plans in place. The results are real: $355 million in annualized value from our own agentic AI capabilities; over 20 percent productivity gains across customer, HR, and IT support; and faster innovation in R&D through generative AI.
For us, growth isn’t just about hitting numbers. It’s about creating an environment where people learn, adapt, and deliver impact together.
Richelle Deveau: What does being truly AI-native enable you to do differently to drive efficient growth across ServiceNow?
Paul Fipps: Being AI-native isn’t just about technology; it’s about how we work, how we sell, and what we sell. It helps us deliver experiences that are deeply human, radically simple, and powered by data. That’s how our sellers do more for customers and outpace the competition.
In sales, AI agents are prioritizing the right leads, boosting conversion, and cutting prep time by 80 percent, freeing our sellers to spend more time with customers.
In customer service, agents now resolve 90 percent of customer inquiries through self-service and automated workflows like routing and categorization. This means faster resolution, lower cost, and better experiences.
Our customers are realizing similar impact. A global telecom, for instance, unified 26 systems and 8,800 data silos on ServiceNow. With AI-powered virtual repair, the company eliminated 500,000 customer calls and automated 90 percent of dispatch tasks, freeing thousands of technicians to spend more time with customers.
Ultimately, being AI-native reduces friction, accelerates speed, and scales efficiency. The result isn’t just greater productivity, it’s sustainable growth. Because the real impact happens at the intersection of business and technology: Work gets simpler, service gets smarter, and outcomes improve for people everywhere.
Operationalizing AI at scale
Richelle Deveau: What makes ServiceNow’s AI platform unique, and why is a platform strategy critical today?
Paul Fipps: Most enterprises are stuck with hundreds of disconnected systems—islands of automation that don’t talk to each other. Seventy percent of their data never reaches AI, and every new tool only adds to the complexity.
AI needs to be orchestrated, like a control tower at a busy airport, so it works across departments and systems and eventually between businesses. ServiceNow does just that. We’re the only AI platform built for the enterprise—unifying AI, data, and workflows on a single system of action. We don’t bolt AI on, we embed it into the fabric of work—any model, any agent, any cloud, any system—connected in one platform.
And the scale is unmatched. We power 65 billion workflows globally, giving us unique insight into how work actually happens and how to make it better. For example, one federal program is using our AI platform to modernize public services, streamlining processes and cutting costs. The result: projected 30 percent efficiency gains across agencies, resulting in faster services, significant taxpayer savings, and better outcomes for millions of citizens.
A unified platform is the difference between isolated pilots that stall and enterprise-wide transformation that accelerates growth.
Richelle Deveau: Given this platform advantage, where are you seeing the most immediate and measurable ROI from AI in customer engagements?
Paul Fipps: We are seeing the most immediate ROI in three fundamental areas: reinventing business models with AI on the ServiceNow platform, driving productivity and efficiency gains at scale, and unlocking entirely new ways of working.
The results are real. For instance, a global pharmaceutical company saved 30,000 research hours by automating manual tasks, giving scientists more time to develop lifesaving medicines. A major retailer cut software request times from days to hours with our autonomous IT solutions that provision the right software automatically, eliminating manual handling entirely. And in a proof of concept with one of the world’s largest consumer brands, we cut contact center handling times by 85 to 95 percent—delivering faster service for customers and freeing agents to focus on higher-value interactions.
Richelle Deveau: Which go-to-market AI capabilities are you most excited about accelerating customer engagement and value delivery?
Paul Fipps: We’re reimagining how sellers engage customers with AI. One example is our new AI sales dashboard, which uses our own AI agents to surface customer-specific insights and nudge action at the right time.
AI also helps us understand how customers are using our products and where we can deliver even more value. With generative AI, that insight turns into tailored content in minutes, making every customer engagement faster and more meaningful.
Another differentiator is helping customers navigate one of their toughest questions: what to build versus what to buy. They want a platform that can solve enterprise-wide challenges while still enabling them to create unique capabilities that set them apart in their industry. That’s where ServiceNow comes in. We bring both the platform and the thought leadership to help them move with clarity and confidence.
Enhancing customer experience
Richelle Deveau: Employee and customer experience are at the core of your strategy. How are you integrating feedback across sales, customer success, and product, and what KPIs matter most in measuring customer impact?
Paul Fipps: Our customer journey really begins after the sale. Customer success teams work side by side with clients to accelerate adoption, generate ROI, and identify the next high-value use cases. These teams provide direct, critical feedback on what’s working, where we can improve, and where we can innovate—often through co-creation. That input flows straight back into our product and sales teams, creating a closed loop between customer experience and innovation.
When it comes to measurement, we start with the value customers realize from their implementation, tracked at every stage of rollout. Adoption speed is critical. Are customers using the software as intended, and is it delivering the outcomes we agreed on? And ultimately, customer satisfaction remains our North Star, because nothing matters more than whether we’re making our customers more successful.
Richelle Deveau: Building on how you embed customer feedback to drive adoption, CRM is a significant growth lever. What’s driving the opportunity?
Paul Fipps: Our CRM business is about $1.4 billion today and on track to reach nearly $2 billion by year-end. Customers pulled us into this space because our customer service management already extends the platform front to back. From order placement through delivery, we manage the entire process, integrating complex architectures to create a seamless experience for both agents and customers.
And we’re scaling fast. With our acquisition of Logik.AI, we’ve added AI-native configure-price-quote capabilities into the platform, and we’re also building out full sales order management. This means customers can handle complex configuration, pricing, quoting, and fulfillment with native AI all on ServiceNow, without bolting on another system.
Customer feedback has been very positive so far. They see the ROI quickly, and through our advisory boards, they’re shaping where we take the road map next. That’s why we’re confident this will be a sustained growth engine—projected to grow by 31 percent over the next three to five years.
Richelle Deveau: Human ambition is often the driving force behind purpose. What’s your next bold move in this role?
Paul Fipps: For me, it always comes back to the customer. My job is to help them reimagine how they operate, how they serve their own customers, and how they evolve their business from top to bottom. In the age of AI, the opportunity to rethink every process, in every industry, for every persona is enormous. The bold move is helping them get there—and doing it faster than they thought possible.
Our ambition is clear: building an AI-native go-to-market engine that puts the customer at the center. By deeply understanding their pain points, we can show how AI delivers real, measurable outcomes—transforming technology, elevating experiences, boosting productivity, and enabling entirely new business models.
We’re also doubling down on industry-specific use cases, because every customer’s journey is different. That’s where our teams excel—combining expertise with execution to help customers grow and innovate on their own terms.
At ServiceNow, success means creating an environment where every part of our company is unlocked and aligned around one thing: the customer and their success. When our customers win, our people thrive, and together we’re redefining how business works in the AI era.