RR011: ServiceNow Knowledge 2026: SaaSpocalypse and the CRM Paradigm Shift with Hannah Datz, ServiceNow

The SaaSpocalypse marks the end of traditional CRM with manual data entry, rigid interfaces, and seat‑based software no longer make sense in an AI‑driven world. Success now depends on outcome‑focused plumbing: intelligent orchestration that delivers results, not screens.

This week, Dave, Esmee, and Rob are joined by Hannah Datz, Americas Vice President of CRM at ServiceNow, to unpack the major announcements from ServiceNow Knowledge 2026 in Las Vegas and explore how AI is accelerating the SaaSpocalypse and driving a fundamental shift in the future of CRM.

 

TLDR

00:34 – Introduction 
00:54 – Hang out: Happy Password Day and emerging threats 
06:46 – Conversation with Hannah Datz 
57:20 – From tennis excitement to the best burger ever

 

Guest

Hannah Datz: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hannahdatz/

 

Hosts

Dave Chapman:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/chapmandr/

Esmee van de Giessen:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/esmeevandegiessen/

Rob Kernahan:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/rob-kernahan/

 

Production

Marcel van der Burg:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcel-vd-burg/

Dave Chapman:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/chapmandr/

 

Sound

Ben Corbett:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-corbett-3b6a11135/

Louis Corbett:   https://www.linkedin.com/in/louis-corbett-087250264/

 

'Realities Remixed' is an original podcast from Capgemini

Creators and Guests

Host

Dave Chapman

Chief Cloud Evangelist with nearly 30 years of global experience in strategic development, transformation, program delivery, and operations, I bring a wealth of expertise to the world of cloud innovation. In addition to my professional expertise, I’m the creator and main host of the Cloud Realities podcast, where we explore the transformative power of cloud technology.

Host

Esmee van de Giessen

Principal Consultant Enterprise Transformation and Cloud Realities podcast host, bridges gaps to drive impactful change. With expertise in agile, value delivery, culture, and user adoption, she empowers teams and leaders to ensure technology enhances agility, resilience, and sustainable growth across ecosystems.

Host

Rob Kernahan

VP Chief Architect for Cloud and Cloud Realities podcast host, drives digital transformation by combining deep technical expertise with exceptional client engagement. Passionate about high-performance cultures, he leverages cloud and modern operating models to create low-friction, high-velocity environments that fuel business growth and empower people to thrive.

Producer

Marcel van der Burg

VP Global Marketing and producer of the Cloud Realities podcast, is a strategic marketing leader with 33+ years of experience. He drives global cloud marketing strategies, leveraging creativity, multi-channel expertise, and problem-solving to deliver impactful business growth in complex environments.

What is Realities Remixed?

From the award‑winning team behind Cloud Realities, Realities Remixed explores what happens when people, culture, industry, and technology collide, because real breakthroughs rarely come from technology alone.
In each episode, hosts Dave Chapman, Esmee van de Giessen, and Rob Kernahan dig beneath the surface of innovation to understand what’s truly shifting. They speak with leaders, practitioners, vendors and thinkers across industries to explore how technology reshapes human behaviour, organisational culture, and society, for better and sometimes for worse.

Web - https://www.capgemini.com/insights/research-library/cloud-realities-podcast/
Email - [e-mail]

(00:00.526) When we do try and him to speak, he doesn't speak. Well, you fell asleep in Google next, halfway through a pod and then we asked you a question and you just stared at us. no. I was doing uploads. I was doing uploads at the same time. You were paying attention. What does it say about the level of service we get when our producer falls asleep during the pod? I mean, that's pretty terrible, isn't it? No, no, no, no, no. (00:32.642)

I'mDave Chapman. I'm Esmee van de Giessen. I'm Rob Kernahan. And this is Realities Remixed, an original podcast from Capgemini. And this week we are talking SaaSpocalypse, we are talking new enterprise operating systems, and we're talking to ServiceNow about Knowledge 2026. But before we get onto all of that, happy word password, Esmee. Thank you. Thank you. was actually thinking about this. How long do you, cause I actually now received it just today. How long do you wait till you actually renew your password? Because like we received like 20 days ahead, like you need to renew it. And then I see the data and like, 20 days. So how many times do you actually just delete the email? Cause I wait till I cannot enter the system anymore. Yeah, 20 times. If you get one a day, where it's right to the very end. They could, see there's a theory about if you can do something in less than a minute you should just do it, right? So when you get the email, just change your password and then you don't get 20 pointless emails you have to delete. but it's easier to just delete the email, that's even quicker, that's like one second. You've got to do that 20 times and then still change your passwords. It's all additional work, just be You do it, after the first email you just, you're brave. Maybe second, who knows, I don't know. but you know it's World Password Day so we should celebrate being efficient. World Password Day Robert. Yeah, yeah. I always get bounce out of bed in the morning, streamers going, party music plays, the cakes out, set the family down, two hour presentation on the importance of strong passwords and good password hygiene management. in online as fast as you can to find out what the big news is on World Password Day. you like to know what the focus is? Well, the parties across the world I'm most excited about, but tell us the focus, David. What is it going? Four big areas of focus and best practice this year. Okay. So, ready? You're going to love these. No, no, but I think we should all be honest and say how many of those practices we actually use today. I'm going to use my fingers. I'm feeling quite good about this. I'm feeling quite good about this. right. Paschis and multi, MFA. What does MFA stand for again? Multi-factor authentication, David. (02:46.586) Pass keys and multi-factor. That's one area. me. Edge, you're up. Yeah, MFA. Good. And pass keys. Okay. Now this one is a soft box item for Robert Kernighan. Password managers. yes. Tick. Use one, different password every site. Dave, have you got a password manager? I do indeed. I've got two in fact, which is a little bit annoying, but there we go. You've two. You don't need two. That's okay. Continue. We've one in Apple and then one in Google. It's anyway, let's not get into that. Let's not get into that. That's not best practice. I hear some too hard. Now this third one is a bit wider and it goes a bit to your point earlier Esme about how fast do you change your password, which is what security habits do you have? So change passwords only when necessary rather than arbitrary intervals. Use long, unique passwords containing letters, numbers and symbols. All of that good practice. So Esme, how do you do against that? I think, well, besides the, wait till I can't enter the system anymore and then I, you know, start to err and then I forgot the website, how to actually change my password and that's an ongoing practice. But I do use the long words or with everything in it. Different password for every website and security service. 100%. Same for me. Van der Gleeson 2025, van der Gleeson 2026. I do use the year of the year. Yeah, sorry. Yeah. I have a friend who uses his birthday in his online name and you're like, what are you doing? Putting your birthday in your online name. must have been, he must have set that up in the hallowed days before nobody started worrying about data privacy. How much information would you like to give away without even trying? He's got his long form one, got his... actual physical address in as well. it was his address is banking passwords. It's all in his name. His passport number. Side question. Is there a happy email address day? What do mean happy email address? Well, I was thinking about my first email address. How many email addresses do you have? And I was thinking about my first one because I still don't understand which password my brother made up for me. So I always use the secret answer. (05:03.48) to get in that email address because my brother just looks at me like, gosh, I don't know, I was 15, you needed an email address. I don't think different email addresses are celebrated yet, but maybe it's something you could start. I mean, that's it, that's the moment. That's it, let's all remember our first email address. And there's a lot of people who created an email address back in the day who thought it was funny when they were 13 or 14 and then it ended up being on their CV or something and it's like... use it. Maybe it's time to update that. Now, just to finish off on World Password Day, just to give a complete picture, the final focus area this year is emerging threats, particularly quantum and a focus emphasising moving towards advanced cryptographic standards. So, they haven't got some good themes this year, isn't there? Well, the problem with that is, problem with that is pass keys, right? Nobody really understands them properly or how they work. Quite not how they work. They're quite useful. They are useful, the way it works, etc. mean, going to post-quantum encryption methods and things might blow Doris's mind about how she has to secure access to my sovereign hosting capability in the shed type thing. You better get a cracking on that. You said that she was introducing some quantum hybrid platforms though. She's on top of quantum. Yeah, I think she is actually modelling fertiliser molecules at the moment with quantum. There's hope for the future. Excellent. mean, look, that's good stuff. Good work by Doris that. Not bad for 82. So there we go. Happy World Password Day for all of you that celebrate out there.
Now let's move on to the main thread of today's show. I am delighted to say that joining us to talk all things SaaSpocalypse, new enterprise operating systems and ServiceNow's Knowledge 2026 is Hannah Datz. Hannah's the Americas VP. (07:03.826) for CRM at ServiceNow and let's go to our conversation with Hannah. (07:18.136) So Hannah, nice to see you today. How are you? Nice to see you guys. How you doing? Exciting week for you guys, isn't it? my God. I'm exhausted. I've been on my feet all week. This is why don't wear heels anymore. Outlawed. Have you noticed that at the conferences people are wearing ever more like sparkly trainers and stuff? It's become a thing. It used to be like, you know, it was always brown or black or something. And now there's like bright sparkles and red stripes and all this stuff going on. It's going quite, uh, know. People do that, create your own sneaker from the Nike website or something. And then it all comes in your branded colors. What's your footwear of choice, Hannah for a conference? have a very interesting green, which is the Service Now color. It's called Wasabi Green. And so it's very hard to find a sneaker with the Wasabi. shade. We have a little group of fashionistas, a team's channel, where we all before our conferences will all post links to different shoes, different sneaks that fit the tone of the wasabi. mean, it's a sub-genre of conferences now, isn't it? The whole thing is now it's become a thing that people focus on as a... Yes, but what I will say for ServiceNow is when I joined five years ago, we were really more of like this kind of scrappy, underground, tech guy conference. And so it was super casual and everyone was wearing sneakers. But now everyone's looking fancy. And it's like, now I got to step it up. Not so grown up that it's everybody in a black or gray suit and a tie. No. Because I've been to some conferences and it's just a sea of suits of exactly the same color and white shirts. And you sort of go, that's less exciting. It does probably say something about the change of the audience as well, Hannah, right? If you look at serving our audiences and the way the evolution of the platform has been going. It's crazy. And we'll talk about it from a platform perspective, but I always tell people when they join the company. Service now is like we're a JV basketball team, but we're playing varsity ball and our uniforms are too big and like they're kind of dripping off us, but we're winning the game and we don't know why. (09:35.522) We're just, our tech is so good and our talent is so good, but we're kind of like, wait, we're winning and it's crazy. And now we're getting into high school and you know, those awkward eighth grade years are kind of like coming off and now we're looking a little fancier at our conferences. But yeah, we're growing up. That's awesome. let's get to the conference in a second, but before we do that, just tell us a little bit about what you do at ServiceNow, Hannah. And maybe, maybe for those that... that don't really know ServiceNow. It's like a name that gets knocked around a lot. where is it up to at the moment? What's the state of the art at ServiceNow? Sure. So I run our CRM business for the Americas. So Latin America and North America. I'll talk about what CRM means in a minute because that's a loaded term. That's a loaded term. But let's talk about ServiceNow first. I joined ServiceNow five years ago and We are much older than that, but not that old. I think like, I would say like ServiceNow was workflows before workflows were cool. And even when I joined five years ago, we were using a lot of this workflow terminology and the market hadn't cut up yet. I was like, guys, business users don't know what workflow is. And now everyone knows what workflow is. But we were a workflow engine from the start. When we were founded by Fred Letty, we actually weren't an IT engine. So a lot of times I'll be talking to people and be like, hey guys, what do you think ServiceNow is? IT ticketing, IT ticketing, IT ticketing. That's not what we were designed to do. We were designed to be a workflow automation tool and help people move work across systems in a really intraoperable way. And the market told Fred, hey, the opportunity is in IT, so go to IT. And great, we have amazing, overwhelming market share in the IT service management space. But what was really interesting is at some point along the way, customers started leveraging that workflow technology to do other stuff. And ServiceNow kind of caught on. They're like, man, this is crazy. Like you're leveraging this workflow technology for financial operations or customer operations or procurement or HR. And then the company about seven years ago or so said, man, we should probably build some data models that actually speak to those businesses and productize them. (11:56.578) And so that's where we've come. And now we've got all these mini billion dollar businesses within our business, our HR business, our procurement team, our CRM team, we're almost at 2 billion per CRM. We'll talk more about that. But yeah, it was designed to really be a workflow engine and people still think of us as IT. And did I get it right when understanding that you've not grown by acquisition, but it's internal development for all of your growth. So you've just extended the product out of the base that you created. So it's all naturally yours as a source. the most part, would flip that to say we do acquisition a little differently. So we don't do major acquisitions that are going to completely bring inorganic revenue sources in that help us make more money and look great to the street. We bring in acquisitions that are very strategically tucked into our platform. And for the most part, we re-platform. those acquisitions before they even go live, which is very different. And I've been at a couple other large companies where that wasn't the case. it is very that you bolt this Frankenstein thing onto the side of your product that doesn't look the same, feel the same, nor does it integrate. Yeah. Or like, Hey, now we're going to be a widgets company because we just acquired this widgets company versus like, no, no, no, we're always core to what we do. It's just that we're adding different pieces of functionality and ways that we address the workflows by little tuck in acquisitions. But mostly it's the core code, which is super special, I think, in the market. Let's talk a little bit about the conference that's happening this week. So first of all, set it up for us. Like what's the name of it? Where is it sort of scale? (13:42.798) Yes. So I don't know if you guys have heard of Las Vegas. It's a little town. We've been there occasionally. We've passed through. I was just thinking like, how many times have I been to Vegas? And I think it's over 30. Oh my word. It's hard. That's hard. We were in Vegas recently and we had this conversation. had a member of our team that was with us had been there 20 times or 20 odd times. And, but one of my ex colleagues from a previous life who was in Vegas for this particular conference a couple of weeks ago, he'd been 57 times. I mean, that is, that's over a year in Vegas for a week at a time, isn't it? I mean, that's a lot of Vegas. Over a year of your life. I don't want that. Here's my, this is, know, I'm just going to, I'm not sponsored by the city of Las Vegas, so I, but I will put in a word. Listen, Las Vegas is in the desert and the desert is beautiful. If you can get outside the strip, there's so much cool stuff to do. Hiking is gorgeous. The city of Las Vegas wants to hire me though. I'd be more than happy to take on that sponsorship. I thought it was Mafia run, but maybe not these days, who knows? But that's what everybody likes to think when they turn up about it, isn't it? It's that sort of mystique that exists in the background. So Hannah. Paint a bit of picture for us. What's the focus? What's the scale? Where is it? Yes. So we are at the Venetian Palazzo in Las Vegas. Grown tremendously. This is an awesome conference. it's 25,000 plus in person, plenty of people online, lots of walking as is usually the case. People are getting in their steps, which is a lovely side component of the event. What I love about how we've grown and kind of come into our own is, like I said, this used to be like a little techie event and you know, a couple of thousand people and now business owners, executives, right? We're talking about technology, but we're also talking about transformation. It's a really cool conference. So, um, and, Thursday night, backstreet boys in the sphere. I don't know if you guys are backstreet boys fans. That's I think girl. (16:05.902) Oh, right. Okay. There you go. So you don't, what's the song? What's the, I want it that way. That was their big song. Wasn't it? Yeah. You're doing that. Yes. And, you know, I think what people are saying is AJ, he's held up the best. So if there's any the actual fans out there, it's AJ. It's going to be his face right across the sphere. is massive then. They'll use him as the poster child. Yeah. Very good. Correct. Have you been to the sphere? Before? Yes. We had Gwen Stefani last year. I'm a huge Gwen fan. So for me, was, that was amazing. And she, she's a, you know, I think she's, she's over 50. She was amazing. She like held it up for herself. She sounded perfect. Lots of no doubt. So that was fun too. Yeah. No hollowback girl. Yes, exactly. Exactly. I think in order to talk a little bit about the conference, it might make sense to level set. We talked about like who service now is right. And yes, and help to define that we're more than just it, but it also might be, can we address the elephant in the room? Please do. Is it the SAS apocalypse? Yeah, please do. So for, for people that don't know what that is, let's just set a little bit of background for that. This is the, the impact on. the market pricing and share price of a number of organizations that have been impacted by a series of AI announcements this year. Both SaaS companies, some SIs, a number of organizations are impacted down because of the market assumption of the effect that AI is going to have. So with that being said, Hannah, what's your perspective on that? It's really interesting to be in it. And I think it's one of those things that when we're out of it, we're going to look back and be like, the answer was so obvious. But I do think it's a lot of hype right now. It's a very easy narrative for the market token to say, you know, SaaS is dead. But it's actually, it's a great opportunity for us. We, I mentioned that we're a workflow platform and I gave some examples of how we might do that on a singular level, but I think the real power of the platform is doing that at an enterprise level. So let me give you an example. (18:29.432) When you think of traditional AI, like an LLM, it's a very personal experience, right? I'm going in as a, as a user, I might, you know, in my personal life, I might be like, make a plan that shows me how to get, you know, lose 50 pounds or as a person, you know, at a corporation, I might say, Hey, help me with a business plan, but it's a very personal experience. It's almost like a GPS telling you how to go from point A to point B, right? In an enterprise environment, there's thousands, soon to be millions of GPS routes being calculated for personal people to do personal stuff. And we see ourselves as the air traffic control, right? Versus the GPS. We've already done this. We've done this for 20 plus years because we've automated workflows through a very complex enterprise environment across various business systems in an interoperable way. And so as we move towards this world of AI, where a lot of different departments and a lot of different individuals and then lot of different agents, digital agents are driving transactions and resolution in the business. And those agents are ServiceNow agents and most of them are not ServiceNow agents because this is an enterprise and we believe in openness and interoperability. We are the control tower. We call ourselves AI control tower for business process. There's a thing that's going on, the conversations going on in the industry now about what is that control plane? How do we bring it together? Because you can imagine if you just get a gentic proliferation, you could potentially create chaos. So you do need some form of structure to define it, guide it, control it. Otherwise you might get an explosion, a spaghetti factory of a business in the future that you don't properly understand. You're not quite sure if it works or not and you don't know what's going on. I think that is, I think there's a... there's a definite conversation saying we do need something like this. And maybe that's, as you say, the air traffic control of the agentic future. And there's so many reasons for that, right? One is just, hey, what departments are leveraging AI bots that I don't know about? So how do I discover that they actually even exist in my environment? Like, that's number one. That's something we've been, the discovery element of what we do, we've been doing that really well for years. There's, think the thing that people talk about the most is the ethical concern. (20:55.906) Right? Like humans are by nature ethical. I am not going to go on LinkedIn and share the birthday of my employee. I'm just not going to do it. Like I understand that's bad, but robots or AI doesn't always understand that's bad. And so you need a governance engine. You need a common set of roles and ethics to drive the agents by. And so that's, that's a really big portion of what we do with the control tower as well. Hannah, if you look at workflows, it feels quite linear. And I think it's also something we've been discussing throughout the show. It's about the fluid behavior of customers and obviously also employees. How do you see that? Is now workflows also tapping into those non-linear movements or is it still quite linear as you do A and you want to end up at Z or whatever? I'm so glad you asked that. That actually goes back to the fundamental thing that makes ServiceNow different than any other workflow solution in the market. And this isn't an AI thing. This is just workflow. I'm going to get a little nerdy for one sec, just one sec. We are a task-based engine. OK? That means that we do stuff. And a lot of task-based engines that do stuff from A to B to C do it in a linear way. We were built to be non-linear in that multiple tasks can be executed at once with multiple dependencies. That's the framework of the solution from the very beginning. And those tasks can be interoperable. We don't believe that those workflows all need to live within ServiceNow. So that's just the foundation of the solution itself. And then you can see how that would apply to AI. So when you look at the new enterprise stack as it's sort of emerging, which is systems of record, then perhaps some form of data layer, then maybe a semantic layer of some description or a context layer, an agent infrastructure, and then above that, a series of either developer or end user tools and agents and things like that that they can leverage to get their daily work done. (23:24.204) And then there's some form of, you know, human AI hybrid organization, which I think is not well understood yet in terms of what that really means. that like, is that humans using tools or is that some form of like, it's more of an equitable relationship? Don't know. Let's see how that emerges. But when you describe then the role that ServiceNow is going to play in that stack, which of the layers do you see it like really adding value in? It's interesting. I think the narrative is we're just going to slap a bunch of LLMs on top of a database. And that will be such a great way to run the business. We're not there. And I don't know that that is where we should be. The data model, the data layer that structures database information is really important because AI, our AI, a competitor's AI solution, partner's AI solution is only as smart as the context that it's driven from. So, and this is why I would say whether or not you believe that SaaS is dead, ServiceNow is perfectly positioned because we don't care if we're the interface. I mean, we can be, we have a great interface, but those are going away, right? Like we want to access information and data wherever we want to access them. But that data structure that's going to contextualize what's sitting in a warehouse to say, no, this frequent flyer has to sit in this particular seat, or has this particular loyalty points, or is this particular family base. And we need to make sure that we're taking into consideration all these different types of data before we service this flyer for an airline is really important versus just having it in a sea of unstructured mess. The LLMs aren't smart enough yet to make that you see a very clear positioning at the system of record and data structuring layers. I mean, I would say that I would not call us a system of record. And I think companies that have bet on this idea that we're going to own as much of the data as possible and not be interoperable are going to have a really hard time. (25:46.816) We don't see ourselves as a system. We see ourselves as a system of action. And we can own the data or not. But I think that's what differentiates us from other SaaS players right now. there's the other thing about there's got to be a lot of learning. mean, do remember we had the trends a year ago where we talked about AI bloopers? And they are coming true. There's one every day. The one that made me chuckle this morning. was on Tom's hardware and it went, Claude powered AI coding agent deletes entire company database in nine seconds along with the backups after the cursor tool powered by Anthropix Claude went rogue. And the blame was it was the devs fault for putting it into live into production. But that's a classic sort of catastrophic blooper. Did the AI blame the human? Oh, was it like the humans? It was all in me, told me to do it. But that's just one of many. Every day you hear about open Claude deleting a load of stuff or, you know, all those things. And I think When we're talking about what we're talking about, there's a huge amount of learning we've got to do about what works, what doesn't, where does trust lie, how far can we go, what's the efficacy of the tooling, and we're still finding our feet in how does this structure actually play out and what is the future of it. So whatever we think it is today, it's likely to be quite different tomorrow once we've discovered the realities of what actually happens and what works. I think there's still a lot of proving to be done, albeit now that we've got to scaling, and there's a fair bit of scaling starting, there's some brutal stories. arising from people who've learned the hard way. So a very fast moving, quite complex environment that's, I say quite complex, that's understating it quite dramatically. Context for Knowledge 2026 this year. So let's return to knowledge and let's dive into some of the themes. So tell us what's happened at Knowledge 2026. Yeah, so let's, it's easiest to pull on the thread we already started, which is where does AI fit in in this world of workflow? And what's that balance between the human and non-human interaction? So one of the big announcements that we've made this week is all around the autonomous worker. And in April, we released autonomous workers on IT. And we just this week announced 20 new autonomous workers. (28:05.198) across CRM, employee services, security, risk workflows, et cetera. We are always the best. We eat our own dog food. That's what we say. we implement our own stuff way before it hits the market. And we've seen great success with being able to offload level one work across any of those different types of disciplines onto an autonomous workforce. And that's a very practical safe way to apply AI in a truly cost cutting and operationally focused way Autonomous workers, are presumably pre-built agents, are they? To do specific tasks. Yeah. So think about your L1 support workforce being totally AI driven. So an example might be I am in the CRM world, so most of my examples are going to lean this way, but think about something like invoice disputes, right? Hey, I call in, my bill wasn't correct, something seems to be off, and there's the ability to have a direct conversation where the AI can automatically check tolerances, go back and check if you paid your bills on time. helped to do address updates or send an invoice to a new address or all these different types of things. Those are all little different agent agents running in the background. All of those simple tasks can be handled by an agent, which therefore for that company is leading to the ability to recognize revenue faster because they're getting revenue in the door. So it's like that level one base where we can offload that work onto an agent. Gotcha. So autonomous worker, a big thread at knowledge this week. What else has caught your attention, So autonomous security and risk is a really important sub-bullet of that. And we talked about how we acquire companies earlier. We just announced the acquisition of Vesa and Armis was shortly before that. And Vesa's acquisition is all around identity management, which is a beautiful, very complimentary. (30:26.766) Um, add to the stack and our security and risk stack. And it's really around governing human and non-human identity. Um, armists all around real-time contextual awareness in the security space. And so I think that's, this is what's being discussed in boardrooms right now, right? Is the and efficacy of how we manage AI. this is a really, really important topic and very, very exciting. And where does that function in the enterprise stack? Is that something that manages? ServiceNow agents and how ServiceNow agents interoperate or is it, could it be more of manage more heterogeneity than that? Yes. So back to the control tower concept that I was talking about earlier, that is not the whole point is that we're discovering and managing agents across the enterprise that may or may not have anything to do with ServiceNow. Right. So that, that we really see that as the control plane. for AI in the organization outside of Just Service No Agents, which is inclusive of the new VESA and RMS capability that rolls into our security and risk portfolio. Very good, very good. You are right in the sense of the period between sort of now and maturation of this technology is going to be an absolutely enormous burst of agents, a little bit like the app explosion, maybe even bigger than the app explosion of what is it now, 15, 20 years ago. So to be able to get the right infrastructure in place. upfront to be able to monitor all that's pretty critical. If you look back at history repeating itself from the world of I'm sort of chewing this over in my head at the moment where a lot of the early adopters of cloud technology, myself included in a previous life, (32:27.918) had to do things like rebuild landing zones a number of times until we fully understood actually what that thing needed to do and conceptually, how does that need to work? Are we in the same place here with some of these layers and platforms that are being put in place for agentic management, do you think? Or is it a different ballgame? I was in a conversation recently that was very entertaining. I feel like we always come back around to the same stuff, right? We change, but we don't change that much. And I was talking to someone who is in the hardware business 15 years ago and he was like, Hey, I'm getting back in the hardware business. It's where it's at the moment. It's absolutely all about hardware. Isn't that crazy? So I say that to say that I think, yes, I think the AI is a new frontier. for us. But in how we adopt and change, it's going to be the same things, the same adoption curve or the same change management curve that we see with any new technology wave, which is people are going to make mistakes and those mistakes will be public. The production database gone nine seconds. There's your business out the window. And think about even how companies monetize AI. It's such a question mark right now. People, you know, there's some vendors out there that say we figured it out. No one's really figured it out. I mean, I think we're all, all figuring it out together and there'll be a time when we look back, just like we look back on cloud and say, that was an interesting couple of years. And now we know what we're doing. But I think that's, I think that's gotta be right. Isn't it? It's fairly standard, fairly standard adoption curve. let's, let's go back to the themes. So we've talked about autonomous worker and associated security and risk. Everything that you're going to see coming out of the knowledge press releases is all about more openness and more interoperability. I, guys, do you love marketing? I love the names that marketing gives things. Yeah. we love that. It's either excellent and epic, or we can just take this out of it because it's stupid. Sometimes when it's made up by a curious creative (34:54.877) or even a marketing organization, you get really cool, funny names and then you'll get some bit of the organization that decides to do a naming topology and they'll strip all the joy out of it with a name that makes absolute perfect. You know, it's perfectly accurate, but all of a sudden it's not fun anymore. So are you in the side that says, well, we've got a very basic name, but it is exactly what the product does or is it, is it a fun name? I think all marketing names are a little bit stupid. we all... that Marcel? You basically said, I heard everything Marcel does is stupid. That's how I'm translating that. Sorry Marcel, but we just heard it here first. And who am I to disagree with an expert? That's an expert opinion that marketing names are stupid. Um, no, it's, it's all kind of fun. love when things are personified. Like that's really, that's really fun. Um, and so we, this is an excellent buildup by the way. Yeah. Yeah. We're expecting a lot from this. You're going to say your next engine is called Tracy or something like that. It's like a sort of anthropomorphized. Yeah. Imagine if we really have to service now, Karen. Yeah. And it was all automated. Like, listen, let's automate the stuff that only a Karen would complain about. That's perfect. That's what it is. is high potential. This has got high potential, I would say. Um, I'm going to, I'm going to go pitch that after this, but, uh, no, just, so we, say that everything that's mentioned on the show is now the property of realities. that's our engine name for a complaint system. So good. So no, no, I just say that on the personification. So we we recently did a talk in acquisition of a company called move works, which is very exciting. And we have a lot of really, really amazing technology around our own intake that we've developed in house. I'll just say like our voice technology is off the charts. We're running some pilots right now with a couple very, very big data C companies and the results are very cool. So we're to come on that. (37:17.582) So we're bridging all of these intakes, whether it be our voice technology or the move works technology into a single intake engine. Here's the drum roll. Here's the persona. You guys ready? on, go on. Service now. Auto. Auto. O T T O. Oh, as in, as in lift auto, auto. No, Otis. Auto. Does it stand for anything? Does it stand for anything? It does. And I'm going to come back to you. It's impactful and exciting. So I know I love it. I just love thinking about what ServiceNow Auto looks like and just preferences. But yeah, that was a big announcement for us this week. ServiceNow Auto. And that's the unification of all of our front door technology. So that's exciting. And I've used it. It's very clodified, if I could say that. Like it just feels like you're in an LLM and asking the enterprise for stuff. So literally your front door is now, also gives you natural language interface to everything beneath it. And that's the, the intermediary that you work with. That's quite cool. Correct. And we'll talk about this at some point, I'm sure, but that's one way to access the data. And then we, you know, we're also the plumbing in a lot of cases too. So we can go down that path. Dave came up with an idea. about you talk to your organization, is your organization alive? And Otto is the person you would speak to. But what I really want to know is does Otto have a personality type, like gives you back sass, overly friendly, always grumpy? think someone named Otto is giving you back sass? No. I don't know. could be like that could be the ruse. You expect a friendly interaction and you get a bit of grief. I think that would bring more fun to the interaction. Another obvious question. What next obvious question do you want to ask me? Come on, hurry up. First of all, Otto is definitely not American. No way. There's no way. What kind of, have they got a voice? Has it got a voice? Or is it like, is it a text interface or has it got a voice? It must have a voice. Let's, let's maybe we can, we can, I'll give you three options. Tell me which one you like best. Okay. Hi, I'm Otto. (39:46.702) I don't know. It's got legs. going. Hi, I'm Otto. All right. No, that's vanilla. Yeah, that's you. All right. Let me think of a good one. I don't, I don't have a good German accent or I do it. Someone have a good German accent. Dave, do you have one? I don't I could do the German accent. wouldn't know how to say hi, I'm Otto in German. If only we had some technology that would enable us to do this. Oh, you can probably ask an AI agent to say something with a German accent. I think I'm going to get Googling on that one. Maybe you guys can edit that in later. Rob will try and do it now in the background. worry. That's probably it though. So that's a big announcement, the change of the overall interface, personifying it in the way that you said, and then presumably allowing you to have that conversational input. Does it allow you to do action as well as kind of reporting, if you like? So you can ask it to do something and it will go ahead and execute it. If you're going to take one thing away from listening to this. beyond selecting number one as the voice for auto. That would be my choice. It would be, we are a system of resolution. And I talked about all the reasons why at the beginning, the fundamentally we solve problems and now we're solving them autonomous, autonomously for real. Right? This isn't like hand me off to someone else or This isn't like summarize the case. This is solving problems. I don't care if it's coming through auto through teams, through text, through a voice note. This is what the platform does. We solve problems. And so the answer to your question is yes. The new battleground for AI and agentic is often said to be the ability to make a decision and then onward prescriptive action. So it's the decisioning capability that is the critical part. I think that's what you're. (42:05.398) alluding to there, which is you take something in, you'll make a decision, you'll progress it. That is the fundamental success, isn't it? So once you get the decisioning right, then it doesn't matter if you've got thousand agents or 10 agents, it's their capability to progress. That's the key. I would argue that the hardest part is the resolution, not the decision. Like in a real enterprise environment, you have so many systems and the like, how do you actually get work done? And a lot of times, You have an operational office and those people have been at the company for 30 years. And if one of them gets hit by a bus, like you're not going to recognize revenue for another 60 days. mean, like that's the way that most companies actually work. it to automate getting stuff done across systems is really hard. And so I would say like the power of us doing that is probably what makes us most interesting in the market right now. I would also think that if your context is more rich, then you might hit reality closer. If you talk about CRM, it has always been about the sales reps being able to put in the data as easy as possible, but they had to type. It was also a huge, I don't want to do it. It doesn't work at home. And then, you know, the quality of the data was so poor, it was really hard to build a relationship on it based on a digital flow. Do you think... the data is now more accurate in terms of what you see in CRM about the relationships now that it's easier to grasp that data via AI and what you've been doing? Yeah. So maybe let's talk about CRM because that's way more exciting than security and death by AI. And talk about the change because to your point, As may, think there is a complete paradigm shift in what CRM means. And my short answer to your question is that I don't think that we're capturing meaningful data anyway, right now in CRM and that we can talk about what that paradigm shift leads to, I guess, for outcomes. while we're on CRM and you've just begun to touch on it there, let's delve into that area. It's your area of specialism I know. And let's start with CRM at Knowledge 2026. (44:29.262) What are the, what are the big things that you guys are talking about? So I talked about us releasing 20 autonomous workers and CRM, there's a bunch of those in the CRM bucket, which is very, very exciting, which underscores generally what we see happening in the CRM market, which is that, um, that we, you know, and Gartner came out with this about a year and a half ago saying CRM is being completely redefined. And we are called out along with Microsoft as being leading on that front. very exciting right now. Gartner called it out as being redefined, just go a level deeper on that. What was it before and what about it is being redefined? Yeah. So I grew up in systems of record. So I've got a special place in my heart for. in putting data into a system in a really organized way. And that was really awesome 40 years ago. you all romantic you. We love a good bit of quality data entry, don't we? And you sit back and you go, it's perfect. I'm thinking about that. my God, 40 years ago, that was so exciting. That was so exciting. my God, we have all of our financial data in one place and not in a book. This is so cool. Breakthrough. And, you know, from a CRM perspective, like I don't carry around a diary with the phones and addresses of my individuals, right? Oh, we're going to put them in a system. So do two thousands. Do you not think there was something quite satisfying about the filofax and the sort of all my information in a leather-bound thing you could stick under your arm? I think we lost something there when we, we let all the Rolodex, you know, I'm just going to call whoever and like flip through. It was a visceral experience, wasn't it? I think we've lost out a little bit anyway. Yeah. Like I said, it's all coming back around. The rotary phone. It's coming back. Oh yes. This is true. So I don't think we've seen a real progression in the CRM space in a long time. And I, you know, when you, when you represent a body of people, I have, you know, been in sales roles so I can speak as a seller. I'm going to tell you about us as salespeople. One, we're liars. Okay. It's a brutal start really, isn't it? (46:51.502) Full of it, no, we're totally full of it. And I'll get to what I mean by that in a minute. But like we also have ADD and like, what are we good at? We're good at building relationships and proving value. And the idea of a CRM was great at the time because it allowed us to digitize all of the amazing relationships that we had in our book or in our head and maybe help the company see our revenue potential. But CRM is still a place where salespeople are manually telling the company how much revenue they're going to get that month. Like that's insane that you are depending on the amalgamation of adding up what people are telling you they're going to get that month to predict your revenue. Not cool. Like I think we're smarter than that now. I think we're smarter than that. So the idea of the new world of CRM is not taking data from people. but in fact allowing the system to help define the key metrics while making it very easy for people to get use out of the system. So today, easy example, I might go after I have a customer meeting and then have to go back to my laptop. and type in some notes about how that meeting went. And then I get a call from my boss because it's not in the right format that I was supposed to put the thing in. And my God, I forgot to update this. And everyone's looking at spreadsheets and yelling at me. And I'm just trying to be in front of customers. The future vision of that is I'm now picking up my cell phone because you can't see me. I'm like walking out of a meeting and I'm like, hey, just got to this meeting with Rob. He told me he is super interested in my widgets. And he's really interested in potentially customizing them. So I'd love to follow up with someone in my product department to figure out how much we can customize these widgets. And he needs a little bit of a value talk track that he can take to his executives. So let's go ahead and send that over to Rob. You also missed the bit where Rob was deeply boring. You missed that bit. Personality side update. Not my customers, Rob. They're not boring. (49:04.15) Right? So we're not expecting salespeople or service agents or, middle office workers to like do the things that are manual. We're allowing them to do their jobs and we're helping them do their jobs. It seems silly, it's simple. we haven't, CRM has not evolved in 20 years. think that though it does seem silly and simple, but it's like one of those things that without something as simple as that. What it inevitably meant that nobody really did an update and when they did, it was late and you couldn't really act on that. And it was maybe also in shorthand and not really legible and, you know, and therefore, you know, you lost a lot of the potential value that these sorts of things can give you. What I like about being able to do that update is simple, quick, done almost instantaneously. And presumably if you wanted to, if the client was okay with it, you could probably record what you're talking about. And then it would input straight away. wonder if that will also flow down into, you know, things like sales tracking tools and pipeline tools and things like that. I'm going to take it a step further. we talked at the beginning of this talked about like, how do we make the data smarter now that we can do things a little bit more autonomously? One of the agents we're releasing at knowledge this week, is a quoting agent and that agent can take structured and unstructured data. from a conversation, from emails, from the transcript of a meeting and generate a quote. And I can tell you, we talk to organizations that have teams of people that generate quotes. It takes like seven to eight days, right? that- expensive. It's a huge needle mover. And so when I talked about the resolution engine, like we're driving to resolution, we're driving to do something. That's a great example of that versus like, We're just going to take your voice note and now we're going to make it a lead record. Not exciting. the, the, I mean that fundamentally redesigns or re-profiles the way you get from a conversation to a quote, to action, to delivery, to humans doing things. Cause that sales cycle can be quite protracted, can't it? With all the, I wasn't at me desk, I missed your email, that sort of stuff. We're talking about this massive compression. (51:25.998) from a conversation to a, okay, let's do something together. And that's something that is quite necessary today as well, because it can take a long time to do something. And then the poor development team gets compressed because it took two months for the sales team to pull their act together and write the document and get the signatures done and everything else. Is that extending out is quite cool because it just makes everything a lot easier, doesn't it? It's like a big sigh of relief for those downstream who have to get on with it. there's also another side to it, I think, because what if the system knows your deals and is already calculating your pipeline, is already showing your manager, this might be the number that I'm about to hit. I know quite some sales reps that keep deals in their back pocket for the right timing of the year. Something to do with quotes and bonus. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, But that's the thing though, isn't it? would you get intelligent then and then you could like do a minority report of salespeople to say you're at this client who was definitely a meeting there, you were there for an hour and you didn't update the records. There's a compliance point there, isn't it? the, come on, tell us the truth. Doesn't take much for the stars you to come out in you, does it? The police, come on, bundle you into a van. How much are you sandbagging this week? Here's my hot take on sandbagging. Hot take on sandbagging. That's the name of the app. So like, listen, the reason people sandbag is because it's really hard to sell. It's really, this is a very hard job. And so it's like, if you have something and you want to make sure it gets across the line and the executives don't, you know, blow up the deal or You like you want to make sure that you're not going to get called out because it falls out. Like you hold onto it for dear life. If we make selling easier, do people need to sandbag? Right. Like if we can free up the way that people are spending their time, that will want some revenue. And I would argue, I would argue that sandbagging gets less and less because we're giving people the opportunity to find more sources of revenue versus just holding onto it because selling is so hard to do. (53:45.258) That would be actually an incredible outcome, I think, if it really does free up that process somehow. it's a merry dance, isn't it? The targets come in for sales. They play the game, so it's just edging up and then it arrives just at the right moment and they just tip over the line at the end. It's been like this very traditional, well-established understanding of I'm sandbagging and you're going to overestimate what I'm going to do and it all comes together at the end. We'd all just like to have the truth on the table, thanks, and be open and all this and that'll be the end of it. But this thing that I suppose its personalities and the way it works and it's a very established way of doing it, isn't it? First of all, Esme's face is classic right now because she was like, dude, these guys are not going to stop lying. But I'm thinking this is inspiring me. Maybe next time I come on the pod, I'll be talking about my new book. The art of sandbagging. The art. I like it. Yeah. Yes. Yes. I think there's a, think there's a, I think there's a readership there. We're just waiting for that. Instant bestseller. Definitely. I you get a support though. If if this whole agent thing is going to sort it out, you've just sort of lost the audience for, for that kind of idea. It's the art of sandbagging in an AI world. Ah, that's it. That's that. How to convince your boss you have no pipeline. And then at the end, ta-da, it's all there. And we are talking about this like it's this new revolution. However, ServiceNow, we've been in the CRM space for seven years. When I joined the company five years ago, we were at 250 million in our CRM business. We were nothing. We're over a billion. We're going to hit 2 billion by the end of the year, just in CRM. We are the fastest growing. CRM company of all time, baby. Yeah. What's differentiating you in a way that's creating that level of interest? It's the resolution capability. And I hate to go back to something so simple and clearly it's AI driven, but I just met with a CTO of a manufacturing company who said, I have 123 ERP instances. (56:07.63) Every division of... 123? Instances, yes. Because if you think about it, a lot of them by country, coming from an ERP space, sometimes they'll customize by country. So they'll have different instances of ERP. What a nightmare to manage. Oh my god. Are they the same, just with a little bit of customization? Some Oracle, some SAP, some blah blah blah. I mean, all over the map. I have that. And then every region, major region, has decided on a different CRM system and revenue and billing system. And I'm not going to change that. But what I do need is one unified engine, one plumbing system to help me understand what's going on in the business and to drive resolution. Great. So that's, that's how companies are consuming us, right? They're like, please stop the bleeding. Please stop the bleeding. And so that, that's what's driving that day. Like there's just so many places that we can plug in because we're very interoperable to help stop the bleeding. And that's been a major driver of our growth. (57:20.578) Now we ask every guest that comes on the podcast what they're excited about doing next. Now that could be, I've got a great restaurant booked at the weekend or it could be something in your professional life. So Hannah, what are you excited about doing next? This weekend, I am playing in a very serious tennis match for mediocre middle-aged women, of which I am one. And I hope to win that match. That is what I'm looking forward to. Are you looking forward to the playing or the winning? The winning. We're a very competitive team. For those tennis fans, we're 3-0 if you are in the US, in the USTA. And so that's very, very mediocre, a very serious, mediocre team. So I'm looking forward to kicking some butt. Singles or doubles? I'm a doubles girl. I like the communication on the court. I'm a somebody to blame when it goes wrong. Yeah, that's the reason why you play. It wasn't me. It was. Yeah. And the politics and women's tennis get pretty intense. There's a lot of like game playing when you play doubles, like just a lot of like, that was out. That was out. Come on. Like, do we need a ref over here? my God, that was out. And then they get in your head and I love all that stuff. And then there's the slashing of the tires after the game and the, poisoning of the food to knock their performance off social media. Yeah. I really go after my opponents on social. That's my attack them online. Yeah. With a burner account where you actually pretend you were one of the spectators or what I try to do is I get them to say crazy stuff on social media so I can slash their rating. Yeah. get them kicked out of the league. mean, it's the whole, it's total tennis, isn't it? It's not just the game and skill. What you're thinking about is the whole environment and then how you control it. I mean, that's quite important. That's the, that's the future. Yes. Now, before we end the show, I've got, I've actually got a couple of additional business items. This is quite unusual and quite exciting, but I think they're important. So the first one whilst you're in Vegas this week, is now where do you stand on burgers? Do you like a burger? (59:38.904) Do you not like a I mean, this is requiring more thought than I was expecting. Can we be honest? It's usually a question that you have relatively straight road. or no, you know, take time. Was it a traumatic experience with a burger in your past? I feel like I've stumbled into something unexpected. No. when it. I'll make a service now plug in that we, we power almost like every fast food restaurant. Oh, you're going to burgers then. you like it's one of our special, like honestly, we're so good at quick serve restaurants because it's so complex and the problems they solve and ask the customers. So I have a lot of different, what I was thinking was I have a lot of different customers that I could call out right now and I don't want to offend one. No quite right. I will go on the Just a simple, you enjoy a burger? Yes or no? We the name out. Perfect. Right. Now on that note, this won't compromise any of your bigger burger clients, but Marcel and I stumbled upon an amazing burger at the Hard Hat Lounge in Vegas. Just like a little dive bar thing. If you Google best burger in Vegas, this burger comes up. And it is absolutely legit. So hard hat lounge. was my, that was going to be my Vegas tip. I missed it though. You did. Listen, these conferences are so crazy. I think my only food source is going to be an IV. Walk around like you're in a hospital with a thing. It's open till 2am. So once you've finished all your client meetings, you can just pop there. It's just around the back of the, the strat. So it's not like the easiest place to get to. It's worth the effort though. Okay. Final point of business for today. How do you celebrate world password day? Well, the first thing I do is I post my password spreadsheet online so that everybody can celebrate. Please judge the quality of my passwords. yeah, yeah. I've been freshly got it in a spreadsheet. I used to. I do have it in Google now, but I used to. What do you do? What do you do with your passwords? I like to collect up all the post-it notes and put them in the drawer. And I keep telling Dave, stop using (01:01:55.342) password multiple times on multiple sites. Have you got any further with that Dave? know full well I use two fives instead of the S's these days, Robert. Come on. Do you remember when Dave tried to get in his work account when we were in the car in Vegas? Oh my. And then Rob actually went into, he actually found out what the password of Dave was. It was my, it wasn't my password, it was my username I was struggling Oh, that was it, yeah. So, Dave, password was fine because I actually had that in my Google, but it was the username that was the problem, wasn't it? Yeah, yeah. I was like, yeah. I mean, that's the level we're operating out here, Hannah. I have to tell Dave what his login credentials are so he can access information. I mean, this is- I'll get an agent for it. password Sherpa. I'm not like your password Sherpa, Dave. That's me. That's what you need to trust me with. With biometrics, shouldn't passwords go away? They should, yeah. Although pass keys are confusing a lot of people with they don't understand them and how they operate. says, would you like to create a pass key? And people go, I don't know what it is. And then just stuff happens. So I think there's education required around things like pass keys and biometrics or biometrics or energy safe forward. you need to, don't you? Well, look with that. Thanks for that, Rob. That's all right. we weren't asleep at the end, we definitely are now. on. Rob has ground us to a halt. So with that, I will say Hannah, thank you for tolerating us this afternoon. And thank you for sharing all your perspectives on this week's Knowledge 2026. Thank you guys. It's been a blast. And happy password day to all who celebrate out there in Listener World.
If you'd like to discuss any of the issues on this week's show and how they might impact you and your business, please get in touch with us at realitiesremix at Capgemini.com. We're all on LinkedIn. We'd love to hear from you. So feel free to connect in the end if you have any questions for the show to tackle. And of course, please rate and subscribe to our podcast. It really helps us improve the show. A huge thanks to Hannah, our sound and editing wizards Ben and Louis, our producer Marcel and of course to all our listeners. See you in another reality next week.