Dive Brief:
- ServiceNow credits five hypergrowth areas in setting the stage for customers to harness enterprise AI, Chairman and CEO Bill McDermott said on the company’s Q1 2026 earnings call. Security, core IT, agentic, AI native capabilities and a workflow data fabric are the key growth drivers for the company, McDermott said.
- "There has never been a tailwind for ServiceNow like AI," said McDermott, who touted the provider's access to enterprise context and its interconnectivity across key systems as assets in the enterprise market.
- Despite deal delays from ongoing conflict in the Middle East, ServiceNow reported Q1 revenue of $3.67 billion, up 19% year-over-year, President and CFO Gina Mastantuono said on the call.
Dive Insight:
In the last year, ServiceNow has acquired and partnered with companies that bolster its AI and security capabilities.
Late last year, the provider bought cyber-physical security and cyber exposure management firm Armis. It also acquired identity security company Veza, a move McDermott said solved issues with visibility, and real-time agentless discovery of assets.
“AI, data, security and governance are now built into every product and package, not a separate purchase,” McDermott said on the call.
The company joins the ranks of other enterprise AI providers that have built up governance offerings in the last year.
IBM launched a tool to help secure AI models, data and usage last summer, and Salesforce strengthened its observability controls in an update to its Agentforce platform. In the past month, providers Salesforce and Databricks have rolled out agentic AI governance features on their platforms to add more controls over how agents operate across enterprises.
Earlier this year, ServiceNow also teamed up with OpenAI to grant its customers direct access to frontier model capabilities to build speech-to-speech AI agents, among other features.
With a broad surface area, McDermott said ServiceNow will focus on accelerating time-to-value for customers, boost revenue growth and expand profit margins.
“Our platform has gone from land-and-expand to control-and-compound, AI that thinks, workflows that act, all production-grade, enterprise-scaled,” McDermott said.
