"Enterprise software has long operated on a relatively stable hierarchy of power: The companies that owned the interface largely owned the customer relationship. Employees moved through dashboards, tabs, forms, and menus; software vendors sold more seats, expanded across departments, and steadily compounded recurring revenue."
"Agentic AI is beginning to destabilize that model. Increasingly, enterprise users no longer need to navigate software directly to complete routine work. AI agents can coordinate actions across multiple systems through natural-language commands alone."
""AI thinks," McDermott tells Fast Company. "It's got tremendous compute power. But it doesn't act.""
""When you're running a company, and you want the digital agents to work with the humans, or even in a lot of cases do the work that the humans are doing, they just have to execute along the lines of the business process so things actually get done," he say"
Enterprise software has relied on a stable hierarchy where interface owners control customer relationships and recurring revenue through seat expansion. Agentic AI challenges this by enabling users to complete routine tasks without direct navigation, coordinating actions across multiple systems through natural-language commands. Investors have questioned whether this will weaken sticky interfaces, compress seat growth, and erode long-term enterprise software economics. The key uncertainty is whether AI agents will eliminate enterprise software or change where value accrues. Bill McDermott argues investors misunderstand deployment inside large organizations, emphasizing that AI has compute power but must execute within business processes. ServiceNow’s strategy centers on orchestration, workflow governance, and operational execution so digital agents can work with humans and complete tasks reliably.
Read at Fast Company
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