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Paul Fipps (President of Global Customer Operations at ServiceNow) joins GTMnow to break down how ServiceNow built the customer engine behind $10B+ in revenue and 20%+ growth for five consecutive years.
From CIO at Under Armour overseeing a 300 million-member connected fitness ecosystem, to now leading global sales, customer success, field marketing, and partners at one of the most disciplined GTM organizations in enterprise software, Paul has seen what it takes to scale from both sides of the table.
Discussed in this episode
- Why complacency is a bigger threat than competition at scale
- How to detect churn long before it shows up in a report
- What a CIO cancelling 900 AI pilots tells you about where enterprise AI is actually headed
- How ServiceNow unified sales, customer success, field marketing, and partners into one GTM motion so customers never feel the org chart
- Why ServiceNow monitors customer health daily — and what signals their teams actually track
- How community became a core GTM advantage, not just a marketing channel
- How ServiceNow’s AI Control Tower governs agents across the enterprise stack
- Inside “Now on Now”: how ServiceNow generated $335M in annualized AI productivity gains using its own platform
- How integrating Claude into the GTM workflow cut account planning from days to minutes
- What DTC product thinking from Under Armour unlocked in enterprise GTM
- How ServiceNow shifted from 6-month product releases to monthly innovation cycles
- Paul’s advice for building a world-class GTM organization: put the best people in the right seats
Episode highlights
00:00 – How ServiceNow built one of the most disciplined GTM engines in enterprise software
01:22 – 80B workflows, $10B+ revenue: what gets harder and easier at scale
02:05 – Why complacency is the real threat at scale
05:49 – Why ServiceNow unified sales, customer success, field marketing, and partners under one motion
06:49 – The post-sale handoff problem: signing on Friday, new team showing up Monday
08:22 – How to spot churn before it shows up in a report
09:55 – How often ServiceNow teams check customer health
12:25 – If you took away the dashboards, how would you know a customer is truly winning?
15:35 – Why Paul blocks calendar time every week for direct customer conversations (and responds within 24 hours)
17:53 – From Under Armour to ServiceNow: what DTC product thinking unlocks in enterprise B2B
21:06 – The personalization gap in B2B enterprise software and how ServiceNow is closing it
25:18 – The CIO with 900 AI pilots who cancelled every single one
26:03 – How embedding agentic AI inside existing workflows drives measurable ROI
32:39 – “Now on Now”: $335M in productivity gains running on their own platform
34:18 – Integrating Claude into the GTM motion for all 10,000 go-to-market team members
36:44 – The AI control tower: governing every agent across the entire enterprise
39:15 – Paul’s one piece of advice for every GTM leader: get the best people in the right seats
40:21 – The book that shaped Paul’s career: Execution by Bossidy & Charan
Key takeaways
1. At scale, complacency is a bigger threat than competition.
When you’re growing 20%+ year over year, the danger isn’t who’s coming to eat your lunch. The internal drift that happens when you’re adding thousands of people and hundreds of new processes to your org is a much greater existential threat. Paul’s job is to make sure every single person stays oriented around one thing: making the customer the hero of their own story.
2. Customers should never feel your org chart.
ServiceNow unified global sales, customer success, field marketing, and partners under one motion, deliberately. When you do all the hard work of a complex enterprise sale and then an entirely new team shows up Monday morning asking, “so what are we doing?” you’ve already lost. The pre-sale and post-sale have to have one continuous through line.
3. Churn shows up in relationships long before it shows up in reports.
They monitor adoption daily. But the signal Paul watches most closely is behavioral: when a customer stops showing up to QBRs, when they disengage from meetings, etc – you know something is already wrong. The best time to act on churn is before any data shows it’s an issue.
4. The AI governance crisis is real and it’s happening right now.
Paul spoke with the CIO of one of the largest healthcare companies in the world. The CIO had 900 AI pilots running inside his organization, yet he cancelled every single one. The security and governance risk outweighed the innovation benefit. For every company racing to deploy AI: can you govern pilots as fast as you can deploy them?
5. Consumer product thinking is still an unlock in enterprise B2B.
Most enterprise software companies hire from within enterprise software. Paul brought a different lens from Under Armour where data from 300 million users surfaced unarticulated needs that led to product breakthroughs. In B2B, that same instinct to treat every buyer as an individual with unique needs, not just a segment or a persona, is still a meaningful competitive advantage most companies haven’t fully captured.
Thank you to our sponsor: HockeyStack
If you run go-to-market, you already know the problem: your data lives everywhere. Spreadsheets, CRMs, sales calls, ad platforms… yet you’re still guessing what to do next.
HockeyStack is the AI platform for modern GTM teams. It unifies all your sales and marketing data into a single system of action. Built-in AI agents help teams prospect the right accounts, improve conversions, close and expand deals, and scale what works. That’s why teams like RingCentral, Outreach, ActiveCampaign, and Fortune 100 companies rely on HockeyStack to eliminate wasted spend, take better decisions, and make space to think.
Learn more at hockeystack.com
Follow Paul Fipps
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulfipps
- ServiceNow LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/servicenow
- ServiceNow website: https://www.servicenow.com
Follow Sophie Buonassisi (Host)
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophiebuonassisi
- X (Twitter): https://x.com/sophiebuona
- Newsletter: https://thegtmnewsletter.substack.com
Where to Find GTMnow
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- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gtmnow
- X (Twitter): https://x.com/GTMnow_
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The GTMnow Podcast tells the stories of how the top 1% of founders, operators, and investors build, scale and invest.
Each week, we uncover the pivotal moments, bold decisions, and go-to-market strategies that turn ideas into breakout companies.
GTMnow is the media brand of GTMfund – we are an early-stage venture firm made up of 350+ go-to-market executives from the fastest-growing companies.
Visit gtmnow.com for more episodes, The GTMnow Newsletter editions, and other content.
GTM 183 Episode Transcript
00:00
Sophie Buonassisi: You have built one of the strongest go to market engines in the industry. The now passed 10 billion in revenue.
00:06
Paul Fipps: This year, our customers will perform 80 billion workflows. You can imagine the trillions of dollars of value generated inside of a platform.
00:14
Sophie Buonassisi: Paul Phipps, president of global customer operations at ServiceNow. On how he’s driven 20% growth five straight years and why competition isn’t what keeps him up at night.
00:24
Paul Fipps: At this scale and size, you’re not necessarily worried about competition. You’re much more focused internally around how do you make sure complacency doesn’t set in?
00:32
Sophie Buonassisi: You actually own the entire customer lifecycle, bringing sales success, field offs and partners together. Why unify these teams?
00:39
Paul Fipps: Service. Now we actually are organized around the customer and we don’t want them to feel our organizational chart. That’s the worst thing you can do as a customer.
00:46
Sophie Buonassisi: We also talk about why 900 AI pilots got killed and how ServiceNow cracked it.
00:51
Paul Fipps: 900 different AI pilots that are not government is only choice was to cancel those pilots because the security and governance threat was too large and it outweighed the benefit of the innovation that those may have brought.
01:03
Sophie Buonassisi: How does ServiceNow, such a large scale organization, make the shift to be AI native?
01:07
Paul Fipps: In this case, what we did was.
01:15
Sophie Buonassisi: The.
01:20
Sophie Buonassisi: Call. Welcome to DTM now.
01:22
Paul Fipps: Thanks. So it’ll be great to be here with you.
01:24
Sophie Buonassisi: Paul Juran global sales customer success field marketing at ServiceNow, a public company powering more than 80 billion workflows and now passed 10 billion in revenue. So to start with, at that kind of scale, what gets much harder than people expect and what actually kind of gets easier?
01:42
Paul Fipps: Yeah. You know, Sophie, we’ve been growing, you know, 20 plus percent since I joined ServiceNow. So which is five years ago. And so you can imagine the compounded growth right there. And then all the teammates that come in when you’re actually growing that fast, who actually want to help. And so I think at this scale and size you’re not necessarily worried about and focus as much externally on things like competition.
02:05
Paul Fipps: You much more focus internally around how do you make sure complacency doesn’t set in. How do you make sure that when all those fantastic people that you’ve recruited to do amazing jobs are really focused on the core mission of the company? And I think that’s what you have to constantly look out for as you scale and grow. And we’ve seen that, you know, at ServiceNow with the past five years of our teams keeping them focused on the customer in a very organized and methodical go to market motion, making sure that at the end of the day, we’re making customers the hero of their own story.
02:36
Paul Fipps: I think if you do that, that tends to get everybody oriented on the right things. And, you know, that gets harder. Now. What gets easier is at scale. You also see all kinds of industries and all kinds of customer segments at every single level. And so their challenges and their opportunities and also the trends inside that industry get easier to spot.
02:56
Paul Fipps: So the pattern recognition becomes easier. So you could actually make sure that all the net new innovation coming from the product actually fits with where the customer is today, but also where she or he is going.
03:07
Sophie Buonassisi: Makes sense. And one thing you mentioned that actually gets harder is focusing on the customer internally versus competitors. And so this focus on the customer itself versus any competition. Is that something that you feel like is earned at scale, or is that something that startups and earlier stage companies should actually apply earlier?
03:25
Paul Fipps: If you start with the customer centricity approach? I would say most startups that I’ve engaged with or been involved with or even have spoken to, they’re identifying unique needs, you know, with those customers in that market which can be niche and small but really powerful use cases. They’re building their companies on top of that. So I think that it’s making sure that stays the North Star as you get bigger and as you grow and scale.
03:48
Paul Fipps: And so I think yeah, I think I think that that’s whether you’re a two person startup or whether you’re a 30,000 person company. Now that gets harder because again, you have people coming in from other cultures and other other industries and other organizations that service. Now we have focus on our core values, which is actually the fabric of our culture here.
04:08
Paul Fipps: And one of those core values is, wow, our customers. If you actually click below that, it really means end to end. So if we how are we making that customer the hero of their own story? And when you think like that, everything that you do then becomes customer oriented and customer centric.
04:23
Sophie Buonassisi: I mean, we at at GTM find we’re constantly engaging with many, many startups. And I know you’re you’re actively involved with startups also. And a big shift that we’re actually seeing now that we’re in the AI era is a less a lesser focus on competitors, because what we’re seeing, at least from our lens, is now your go to market.
04:42
Sophie Buonassisi: Motion is so unique. It’s so different because you’ve got so much more data and context that makes your go to market able to scale individually, as opposed to having more of this cookie cutter approach where everyone had the same signals, everyone had the same data. So you were transferring and so you’re really competing in the same go to market kind of box and configuration, whereas now it is quite unique and different, and that just enables people to have that customer centricity at greater scale or earlier and earlier now.
05:08
Paul Fipps: It’s a great point, Sophie. And what we see is, I mean, I had us move the needle on everything at this point. No, externally, internally, but inside of customers, what what they’re really challenged with is figuring out what are the AI use cases that drive hard return on investment. What are the I use cases that can actually drive complete differentiation in their existing business models?
05:30
Paul Fipps: And then what are the use cases that can actually create new business models for those customers, depending upon their industry and where strategically they want to go? And so I think that is the unique part about go to market now is really fitting into that customer in those three areas and understanding in depth what their biggest challenges are.
05:48
Sophie Buonassisi: And one thing that stands out about your role in particular is that you actually own the entire customer lifecycle and bringing sales success. Field ops and partners together at that scale isn’t necessarily common. We see it sometimes at the earlier stages, but often there’s a bifurcation. So why unify these teams?
06:06
Paul Fipps: Well, it comes back to that customer obsession. You know, a lot of companies talk about customer obsession or customer centricity, but at ServiceNow we actually are organized around the customer and we don’t want them to feel or organizational chart. That’s the worst thing you can do as a customer. But I’ll give you some examples. Let’s take large scale transformational work that we do with customers, and we do that every day.
06:24
Paul Fipps: And our teams globally do that. You may spend six, nine, three think the amount of months of investment and time together, deeply understanding and identifying the challenges, the business value, those challenges, how your solution is going to match that to those challenges, and what the ultimate outcomes are going to be achieved going through the process of approvals and large capital allocation.
06:49
Paul Fipps: And when you do all of that work, all that work then should be translated into actual action. So the post-sale part of that journey is really important. You know, I used to be a practitioner, Sophie, and in the days where I was a CIO, it would really upset me when I’d I’d work very closely with a technology company, a technology partner.
07:08
Paul Fipps: We’d go through that journey, I’d sign the contract on Friday, and then Monday morning, a new team would show up and say, great, what are we doing now? And I would think what we just went through all of this process work. So having that seamless, frictionless experience from the presale to the post-sale, so that really you’re starting with the end in mind and making sure that customer achieves the outcomes and the return on investment that they made in the first place.
07:33
Paul Fipps: So that that that is why we level all together. I think the last part I would say is, you know, we have one of the most robust partner ecosystems in the world. We’re very honored by that. Our partners are part of our team along that entire journey. And so making sure that that frictionless experience applies to our partner ecosystem as well is super important.
07:52
Paul Fipps: So in ServiceNow, we’re organized with worldwide sales. Obviously, a large part of our ecosystem. And then our customer success team, which helps helps customers adopt the software, but also implement either with ServiceNow or with a partner from our ecosystem.
08:07
Sophie Buonassisi: I love the point of customers not actually feeling the organizational design. It makes for a much more seamless experience. And if you think about just that line itself, that really guides how you how you structure, how you run the organization, everything kind of as a North Star.
08:21
Paul Fipps: Absolutely.
08:22
Sophie Buonassisi: And now, I mean, a lot of companies realize that there’s problems with the customer far too late. It’s much more reactive than proactive. And they’ll see it through churn in reports and that’s that’s just far too late. So from your vantage point, what are those early signals that tell you a customer relationship is is quietly starting to, you know, fail or disintegrate long before the reactive turn actually shows up?
08:48
Paul Fipps: From our perspective, having close and deep relationships with our customers is super important, and we all know what a happy customer looks like. They’re pulling you as the new use cases they’re leveraging, in our case, the ServiceNow platform to drive more and more value for their existing investment. I think one of the early warning measurements is adoption. So is customer actually adopting your software for the job?
09:11
Paul Fipps: They hired it to do? That is true. Then again, the return on investment. Because if you double the business case rate increase adoption should actually drive increased value for your customers. So you can measure and monitor that from a data and a dashboard standpoint. But I think the trust part of that relationship is really important. You know, many customers and we talk about this all the time at ServiceNow.
09:34
Paul Fipps: They may be betting parts of their career on the investment they’re making in the platform. And so we have to make sure that that trust that we’ve earned is never lost. And that means relationships across the entirety of the journey for the customer. So I think one is you have some early warning signs and that in dashboards, in our case, we we look at adoption almost weekly.
09:55
Paul Fipps: Many of our teams are looking at a daily actually. But we also then the relationships that we go to, customers in particular with those large transformational projects, making sure they’re successful throughout when they start to disengage or not show up for meetings, or they don’t come to the quarterly business reviews, or there’s something happening there that you need to really get under the hood on.
10:14
Paul Fipps: So there’s a human element, and then there’s obviously a data element, and you need to combine those two to make sure you have healthy customer relationships, which is all about value for them.
10:25
Sophie Buonassisi: And you mentioned daily for some teams, when you’re combining that qualitative and quantitative data to best understand where the customer stands, how often is that done?
10:35
Paul Fipps: If you’re a team on the ground, you know, we have a product called ServiceNow impact, for example, SoFi, which is a customer success product that many of our customers invest in. You have a combination of technology, but you also have highly skilled people that help you along that transformation journey. So if you’re one of those team members, you’re actively engaged with the customer and looking at that data every single day because it’s it’s really telling you what the health of that customer is.
10:59
Paul Fipps: If you, you’re, you know, at a more senior level, you know, we have rhythms inside the company that are looking at these things every single week to make sure are the implementation is going well for customers. Are they adopting software? Where are the escalations happening and the entirety of of their experience with ServiceNow? And whenever you see something happened, those escalations happen fast.
11:18
Paul Fipps: And I look at them every single week.
11:20
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11:40
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12:18
Sophie Buonassisi: So, you know, if you took away all those dashboards and metrics, like how would you actually know if a company if a customer is truly being successful?
12:25
Paul Fipps: I mean, from our perspective, we have so many customer touchpoints. So, you know, we we orchestrate them really well and we try to engage with customers at different modes. So every example, one of our more key events is our knowledge 2020 now 2026. This year K 26 is what we’re calling it. But it’s our knowledge event. We’ll have 22,000 customers in person, engaging with products, engaging with our teams, engaging with each other most importantly.
12:50
Paul Fipps: So I think an active and thriving community around your products and around your company is really important. And it’s an it’s a macro measurement of what the relationship is. You have, but it’s also a measurement of are you driving enough interest through innovation that actually gets customers to come to those events so they can learn more? So you can think about both how they solve their existing problems, but what are the future challenges that companies or customers like them have?
13:19
Paul Fipps: And how can they leverage ServiceNow to actually solve those challenges? So I think a healthy, thriving community is what you have to build inside of to come, because these challenges are complex, but they’re not necessarily unique. And so when you have customers who are like each other really deeply engaging in those challenges, and they’re coming up with new and innovative ways to solve those problems, leveraging ServiceNow, it also gives us insight in terms of how to generate new and innovative capabilities inside the platform.
13:49
Paul Fipps: So I think that’s really there’s a qualitative metric of engaging customers. That’s just one we we also do, you know, world forums across the globe, which are smaller knowledge type events. We have a whole community of now customers who actually engage with each other online through portals. So I really believe in a healthy, thriving community. You know, I used two years ago, Sophie, I was on the board of directors for the America SAP user Group, and it just gave me insight.
14:18
Paul Fipps: We had 150,000 members. Now this is going back probably 15 years ago or so, but we are 150,000 members who are actively engaged solving problems at that time around leveraging ERP system and integration and all the things that all the opportunities and challenges that came with that. So it just really opened my eyes up to the power of community.
14:38
Paul Fipps: And, and being able to measure that from a company standpoint based on where that community is.
14:44
Sophie Buonassisi: Love it. And it is hard to measure it, but it’s definitely one that at least we’re seeing emulated across the startup landscape is really leaning into the knowledge side, and ServiceNow is really paved the way at scale of doing this incredibly well, because it is this interesting period where everybody’s at a reset and everybody’s kind of learning first principles approach to AI together.
15:04
Sophie Buonassisi: So being able to not only educate on the product itself, like you mentioned, the actual industry, what’s the future look like? We’re just seeing tremendous success.
15:12
Paul Fipps: And you know what’s interesting so great is, is when you actually get in there with customers and you start to engage them, they’re going to pull you into more use cases. But one of the things I always tell the teams is as you scale and get big, one thing that can happen is you do a lot of talking internally, a lot of talking to each other, a lot of meetings, a lot of presentations, and your best time is spent talking to customers.
15:35
Paul Fipps: And so even like even someone like me, I take a percentage of my calendar every single week and allocate as much as possible to meeting with customers one on one. And so it just gives me real perspective what’s happening on the ground. And the first question I always ask is, how are we doing for you? And you know, they’re going to tell me exactly how they’re feeling about the relationship, about the product, about the outcomes, about the capabilities.
15:59
Paul Fipps: And there’s our job to respond to that as fast as possible. And we do that always within 24 hours.
16:05
Sophie Buonassisi: Within 24 hours is incredible turnaround for such bespoke asks. I’m sure the challenge that we hear is actually taking that data and feedback at scale and putting it into almost a central repo so that it can inform your roadmap when Paul is sitting on some customer calls. And then we’ve got other individuals on customer calls to and other execs, how are you actually bringing that data together to best inform the roadmap, not only for that bespoke customer, but for your whole customer base?
16:31
Paul Fipps: Yeah, it’s a great question. You know, again, now this is the benefit of scale. We actually have experts in the company who are customer advocates who can actually synthesize that data, particularly when executives are meeting, because I think what you’re pointing out yourself is we can go from one meeting to the next and lose some of that intelligence, which would be really, I think, a missed opportunity and also an unmet customer expectation.
16:52
Paul Fipps: So we harness and capture that information across the advocates, and then they centralize that intelligence. We feed that into our customer intelligence group. That does two things. One, they do all of the NPS measurement externally. Every single. They actually do it twice a year. We take all of that feedback. But then you combine the more qualitative intelligence based on those meetings, and you bring that together.
17:14
Paul Fipps: So you actually have as much real time information from customers on the ground as possible. We also capture all that sentiment. Our marketing team does an amazing job with all the events that we have around the sentiment, particularly around parts of the platform, but also in other areas around success, around support, how we’re actually serving those customers.
17:33
Sophie Buonassisi: That’s fantastic. I mean, a model that I’m sure many companies want to emulate to as they’re typically running this in some kind of customer success and rev ops combination. But it really is what’s the feedback loop at the end of the day and how quickly can you execute against it? That’s right. Now Paul, I want to zoom out on yourself because before ServiceNow you were actually at under Armor.
17:53
Sophie Buonassisi: You joined in 2014 and spent over seven years there. And it’s a very different environment from enterprise software. So in the DTC world, customer feedback is is fairly immediate usually. But in B2B it’s oftentimes slower. Like we talked about. We’re going through systems in customer intelligence groups. It’s much more complex often times. And it’s filtered through multiple stakeholders.
18:14
Sophie Buonassisi: So what’s one kind of DTC direct and consumer practice that you’ve really internalized or brought to ServiceNow.
18:21
Paul Fipps: So I was an unknown for seven years, great brand. And during that time we were growing so fast. So if we then had I had many different roles while I was there, I was very privileged to work for the founder and CEO, who even to this day, I think has some of the greatest insights around brand and consumer and product.
18:37
Paul Fipps: And so we spent a lot of time thinking about consumer experiences, but but building them based on the actual problems. And in 2015, we actually acquired a company called Map by Fitness. And then the following year, a company called My Fitness Pal. So I was privileged to lead what we call it Under Armor Connected Fitness, which was, you know, at one point we had 300 million people who had downloaded one of our apps globally with the largest health and fitness ecosystem in the world.
19:03
Paul Fipps: And I share that with you, only because we then could use that for intelligent insights around what challenges or problems were athletes having that we wanted to go solve? One of them was, you know, this conversation kept coming up around, how do I run? Now, many of us would think that running is natural. And, you know, we’re kind of born to do it and we should all just naturally be great runners.
19:27
Paul Fipps: The reality is it’s not true. And so we spent a lot of time figuring out what are the what are the simplest ways for us to create solutions to help our athletes and coach them into better running form. Because if you had a better running form, running actually becomes easier and you actually get better at it as you add more condition.
19:46
Paul Fipps: And what we learned from those insights and inside of the Under Armor Connected Fitness ecosystem, was that cadence and stride length were the two most important things around running. So we then built, a chip into the shoe, that chip that was connected to MetLife fitness. And we use machine learning to actually coach you into better running form over time, because we could measure your stride length and your cadence through the shoe, feed that back into the app.
20:12
Paul Fipps: That app then could personalize, give you personalized coaching insights to actually, most people need to shorten their stride length and pick up their cadence. And so you can measure those things in real time while you ran. I share that with you because their product became very successful. The shoe and connected to MetLife fitness as an app. And so we called it, you know, this connected shoe experience that actually gave you a better outcome as a runner.
20:37
Paul Fipps: And it took off. Now, the insight came from the data and lots of those community members posting information about how they ran and giving each other insights in terms of what was making it better. And so but it was not necessarily an articulated need when we were developing footwear products as an example. So I think bringing those insights into that experience, into those product development really made that shoe and that entire experience very successful.
21:06
Paul Fipps: So inside of B2B, I find two things. When I joined. One, there’s not a lot of personalized engagement in a B2B enterprise software company. And the reality is, if you’re a buyer and I spoke a lot to a lot of my life buying software, you’re an individual with unique needs. Just like when you’re a consumer, whether you’re buying enterprise software or you’re buying in this case, a connected shoe.
21:30
Paul Fipps: So bringing those insights into service now and really helping, helping the teams think about how do you engage, Sophie, as an individual in a B2B enterprise, not just sales motion, but actually solving her problems based on where she is, you know, and her persona in her company, in her industry. And that’s a unique thing. And I will tell you, we are still working that out, because traditionally, that’s not how B2B sales models work.
21:58
Paul Fipps: But we made a lot of progress with some of our products engaging those customers in unique and personalized ways. That then brings up those are Unarticulated needs that I was talking about. And you start creating products that wow the customer because you’re thinking about steps three, four and five and not just steps one and two. So that’s the insights from that industry.
22:19
Paul Fipps: It’s a great experience with Under Armor. And and it’s also been great to see some of that that as much as I liked yet. But some of that translate inside of ServiceNow.
22:28
Sophie Buonassisi: What are the blockers to actually translating on the B2B side?
22:31
Paul Fipps: Well, you know, most people who work at ServiceNow or any other enterprise software company come from enterprise software. Yeah. So, you know, and so there’s a method and a way that it’s always worked and, and and by the way, they’re complete professionals and they build careers that are amazing. And these things really do work in B2B. But I think as the world changes, I think you, you know, you and I started talking about artificial intelligence at the beginning of this.
22:54
Paul Fipps: I think the expectations of a B2B consumer are changing as rapidly as a B2C consumer, and so we have to be there for them in those moments. So I think we’re evolving rapidly, which does a really great things. But we have a lot of work to do there.
23:07
Sophie Buonassisi: Well, now, with so much more data.
23:09
Paul Fipps: That’s right.
23:10
Sophie Buonassisi: At our disposal, we can actually do those personalized experiences that we had before. So I think we’ll actually see a lot more B2B companies hiring leaders like yourself on the DDC side, because that’s truly best in breed from a customer experience and like really infusing those knowledge and, and perspectives on the B2B side quickly.
23:28
Paul Fipps: I agree, and I’ve actually done it here. I’ve watched some leaders also from those from those spaces. And what’s great is you have the enterprise B2B experts combined with some of those data experts. And when you put those together, the ideas just explode, softening. So it’s really you know, building a team that has different perspectives and, and has different experiences really does lead to better outcomes.
23:51
Sophie Buonassisi: So interesting what you said on the running side to just a few months ago, I ran my first marathon and I got to say the technique was something that I did not anticipate as heavily because when you actually are running consistently in a fair amount, you start to feel in different parts of your body and then you realize just the mind changes of like where your actual foot is making contact with the ground, or what shoes you’re wearing, or any small detail can just make such a difference on the actual motion of running.
24:21
Sophie Buonassisi: So that was an eye opener. Did you get into running yourself when you were testing the product?
24:25
Paul Fipps: I do run, Sophie, but I don’t want on 26.2 miles, so.
24:29
Sophie Buonassisi: That’s probably for the best. I wouldn’t recommend it to everyone. Cool. I mean, we talked about AI at the beginning a little bit more, and you just mentioned it. So everybody is talking about AI inevitably. But some teams are really stuck in pilots. You know, the whole narrative in discussion around experimental revenue and actual IRR. So from your seat, like what separates the teams that are really converting this experimental pilot revenue into paid and shifting that revenue to true?
24:59
Paul Fipps: Well, let me talk about it from a ServiceNow perspective, Sophie, because I’m obviously that’s that’s where I’m closest. Please. I actually had a CIO of one of the largest health care companies right before the holidays. He and I were talking and he said, listen, I have 900 AI pilots happening inside my organization and I am killing them all.
25:18
Paul Fipps: And the reason he was that at that moment is because if you think about a regulated industry like health care and, you know, 900 different AI pilots that are not governed, that are not necessarily secure, it come from different software companies or different, you know, probably really innovative use cases. But from his lens, how does he actually govern and manage those 900 pilots?
25:41
Paul Fipps: So his only choice was to cancel those pilots because the security and governance threat was too large and it outweighed the benefit of something like, you know, the innovation that those may have brought and put a whole new process in where we can actually leverage, a platform like ServiceNow to actually govern all those AI capabilities across multiple systems.
26:03
Paul Fipps: So one is we are seeing customers who started all the very rapidly doing pilots start to actually take a different approach, particularly in larger companies, and I would say increasingly in regulated industries, which makes total sense, right? I mean, if you’re if you’re in financial services or if you’re in health care, you just had or a public sector, you just have different requirements and different governance models.
26:26
Paul Fipps: So that’s one is we’re just starting to see that happen. I think two is a lot of customers are at that hype cycle moment where they’re just not seeing the return on investment around AI. And so, so inside of ServiceNow, what we’ve done and we’ve been at this, you know, we launched our first generative AI features, ten months after ChatGPT, you know, kind of blossomed in late 2022.
26:50
Paul Fipps: And the idea was now we’re fully genetic obviously on the platform, but we’ve evolved rapidly with our customers. You have to have AI inside of where the work is happening. And so I’ll give you just some some data points on the ServiceNow standpoint today or this year, our customers will perform start to finish 80 billion workflows inside of the ServiceNow platform.
27:13
Paul Fipps: So you can imagine the trillions of dollars of value generated by 80 billion workflows inside of a platform. And so when you then take a Gen2 capabilities and put it inside the workflows, whether it’s own technology or employee experience or customer experience, what happens is now you have this opportunity to to pick and choose which of those workflows need to be autonomous, to agenda.
27:39
Paul Fipps: And so, you can pick the highest value and ROI use cases so that your investment actually pays off and has auto ROI. You can also pick and choose which tasks you want humans to do and which workflows you want. In our case, the agenda AI to do so. I think there is just this evolution of, you know, we’ve gone through this moment.
28:04
Paul Fipps: There’s lots of capabilities out there. And now it is how do I actually drive real return on investment from the AI capabilities. So I think that’s a really important point of where customers are today. And the way we see it at ServiceNow is, look, we’ve got 20 years of integrating systems across, you know, across the board. We find customers.
28:25
Paul Fipps: So they have this I would say on average. But this is a small average 357 systems inside their landscape. So Magnus Sophie how much swivel tearing is happening between if you’re procurement operations or if you’re at human resources or if you’re in any function, how many different systems when we measure it? Typically people are using about 17 different systems we call swivel chair work to get their jobs done every single day.
28:50
Paul Fipps: So always the ServiceNow platform has been one that cuts across all of those ERP, human capital management, customer relationship management. And now all that data is in one place either. And you’ve left it in your data lake, or you actually go in ServiceNow and you can use intelligent workflows to autonomous across those systems, your core business processes. So it’s dramatically different in how we think about it.
29:16
Paul Fipps: But I think that’s important because as other companies innovate or keep leveraging large language models and all the great capabilities out there, it’s thinking about from a customer lens, how do they actually drive hard return on investment? I think it’s why you see coding going so fast because, you know, those software developers and engineers are really getting exponential productivity growth, which has real return on investment.
29:42
Paul Fipps: In our case, it is autonomous using the workflows that you already have and the ones you want to do in the future with the more complex business processes that drive real return on investment for you.
29:52
Sophie Buonassisi: You are truly at the forefront. Seeing so many different companies adopt AI and you yourself. You’ve adopted AI too, but really you were ahead of the game. So your first, like you said, your first launch was that you shortly after launch, how did ServiceNow, such a large scale organization, make the shift to be AI, native and AI?
30:13
Paul Fipps: First? It’s one thing I love about ServiceNow. It’s one of our other core values. Sophia’s win as a team okay. And so when a challenge like that arises, you see a company like ours, even our size and scale rapidly get some of the smartest and I would say most motivated people, you know, organized and energized around a topic.
30:35
Paul Fipps: In this case, what we did was, you know, later that year, we created what we called the AI lighthouse program, was actually a partnership with Nvidia and one of our large GSEs that we launched, and we took those capabilities to some of our largest customers to solve the immediate problems leveraging generative AI. So very early days, this is this is probably, August, September of 2023.
30:57
Paul Fipps: And we learned enormous amounts from that. Like we really those lighthouse customers in the early days, we had 15 we had across multiple industries, some very large companies, some smaller companies. But we learned a tremendous amount that then fed back to our product roadmap, and our engineering and product teams took very rapidly, started to iterate and innovate and what that led to was, you know, up until that point, we had a pretty good cadence, which I think for an enterprise software company was great.
31:25
Paul Fipps: Every six months we would launch a new version and upgrade to ServiceNow that would have 150 to 200 to 250 points of innovation. So if you think about a customer, you can go to the next version. Somewhere in the platform, you have 150 to 250 points of innovation. We are now innovating, in monthly cycles. So we inside the platform.
31:46
Paul Fipps: So so you just think about, less than three years, what’s happened in terms of really shrinking that time, that innovation and how many new capabilities we’re rolling out for customers now every single month.
31:59
Sophie Buonassisi: That is truly incredible. And I’ve seen firsthand I mean, companies, sure, you have to. But like truly dying, if you will, by not being ahead of that and the cycles at the time to be ahead of that required a lot of foresight and belief in AI. So that’s fantastic that ServiceNow made that shift and you know you are enabling teams.
32:19
Sophie Buonassisi: You’re adopting. AI is such a rapid rate, but you’re also internalizing it in your commercial engine, your go to market engine. Like you recently shared that the company is seeing roughly, I believe, 335 million in annualized revenue value from its own use of a gigantic I. What have been the most impactful internal use cases so far?
32:38
Paul Fipps: We obviously Sophia ServiceNow. We actually use our software to run ServiceNow. We actually call it it’s a branded program called Nelson now. Love it. And it covers everything from how we actually hire new teammates to join ServiceNow and how we onboard them is, by the way, now completely objectified. So there’s no real human interaction when you’re onboarding. We have no level one helpdesk anymore at ServiceNow.
33:01
Paul Fipps: So all of our level one tasks from a technology standpoint are taken care of. But by ServiceNow, the agents. So all of the things that it takes to run a large company inside of ServiceNow, we are leveraging the agenda capabilities that I was talking about to autonomous that work and what that what that has done is it’s allowing us to grow at our scale and size, maintain our our hotel in certain parts of the organization outside, and then reinvest those headcount where we want to actually grow.
33:32
Paul Fipps: It also gets rid of work that people don’t want to do. And the stuff that we call soul crushing work inside of ServiceNow and our customers have it as well. And so eliminating that work, freeing up people to really do the higher level tasks inside of their functions or inside of their daily activities has been a huge unlock for ServiceNow.
33:52
Paul Fipps: So you see a lot of that 335,000,000 hours of just pure productivity gains now in a go to market from a go to market standpoint, what we’ve done is we actually partner with Cod, anthropic. Recently we brought Claude in and we actually integrated it with our own ServiceNow AI agents. And so from a pure go to market standpoint, we have all 10,000 people on the go to market organization, which includes our success.
34:18
Paul Fipps: Our customer success teams have access to this to actually engage customers in a different way. And I’ve talked earlier about the faster innovation cycle coming from the product organization. We can’t have a natural enablement cycle inside of the go to market organization. We have to get those innovations out faster so our customers understand the value that, that, that, that those innovations will create.
34:43
Paul Fipps: And this new what we call the AI that this ServiceNow AI sales coach does all of that work. So you can now go and do a couple plans that used to take hours of days and do them in minutes. You can actually get the latest innovations of how that actually solve problems with a business value assessment done. And so customers can move faster inside the platform because they’re where these capabilities, but also can figure out how they’re actually driving ROI.
35:10
Paul Fipps: So we’re using it to drive productivity across the ServiceNow platform. We’re also using it to drive not just productivity, but the way that we engage customers in a different way to get those net new innovations out inside that go to market.
35:23
Sophie Buonassisi: That is incredible, and we can see the impact in the revenue. ServiceNow recently released its Q4 and full year financial results, significantly beating expectations and exceeding top line growth. With this momentum behind you, can you share what’s next for ServiceNow?
35:39
Paul Fipps: I think, you know, we, we just had our sales kickoff, Sophy. So we did that in Las Vegas. We had everyone there was amazing. The team did an incredible job and I think what we’re what we’re really excited about are a couple different areas. The first is those 80 billion workflows that are that we’re we’re honored and privileged that our customers actually complete every single year to the platform.
36:02
Paul Fipps: We want to help them autonomous those workflows. Okay. So that’s one we think the productivity gains there will be exponential leveraging both out of the box use cases, but also more custom use cases where our customers have more complex, challenges. So that’s that’s one thing that we’re very excited about when in 2026 of the year do that.
36:21
Paul Fipps: The second thing is will we call the AI control tower? If you really think about, you know, AI agents and you think about them as, you know, assets to be managed, whether you have agents in your CRM system or in your ERP system or in your HCM system, those things maybe doing purpose built work inside those islands of automation.
36:44
Paul Fipps: But if you’re a CIO or CTO or CTO or a CSO, you need to actually see across all of your agents inside of your organization, even the custom ones that you create. And so how do you govern those agents? How do you make sure they’re secure? And by the way, I think it actually makes sure that performing and performing, based on what you expect them to do to drive the actual ROI that you expect in the first place.
37:08
Paul Fipps: So we have what we call a service now, AI control tower it because we already do those integrations, we can actually surface those agents and give you a view by function or by business area, what’s happening in your entire organization? I think we’re the only ones that can do that at this point. So that so the service now AI control tower is super important for us and we’re very excited about it.
37:28
Paul Fipps: Actually, that business is growing very, very rapidly for us because of the obvious, implications. And then the third thing I would say, you know, listen, we, we made, we we announced three different acquisitions at the end of 2025. One is Move Works. Move works is now complete. And then the house demand for Move Works is incredible.
37:47
Paul Fipps: Bob, who’s the CEO move works in that team fully part of the ServiceNow family. And what we’re seeing is what they do really well is the what we call the front door. So the the I experience for me from a user interface standpoint, this conversational AI that can then deeply integrate with the ServiceNow platform is exploding. So okay, so we’re super excited about move works.
38:10
Paul Fipps: And then, you know, we’ve expanded our security business. Our security and risk risk business has been growing exponentially over the past couple of years. And we expand that with an acquisition with visa and an acquisition of a company called arms, which we are incredibly excited about. So. So if you think about ServiceNow, you think about the ServiceNow.
38:28
Paul Fipps: I control tower for what we call business reinvention. Those are the workflows I talked about, but also the ServiceNow capability around governance and security. As we stand out. So that is what we are excited about in 2026. And I think that’s what’s next for us.
38:43
Sophie Buonassisi: Amazing. Well, it sounds like it’s already forward looking, similar to your speed of adoption of AI because we’ve been in this adoption phase of AI in 2025. We’re continuing into it in 2026. But really, what’s next then is the measurement phase. And it sounds like that’s already on your roadmap ahead of time. I love it, Paul, to bring this full circle, you have built one of the strongest go to market engines in the industry for this era.
39:07
Sophie Buonassisi: If you had to leave listeners with, you know, one piece of advice around company building and go to market, what would that be?
39:15
Paul Fipps: I think the best piece of advice, Sophie, is it’s it’s tried and true, but it is about getting the best people and putting them in the right seats. And that’s from every leadership level to frontline salespeople and, and the best people are going to fit within your culture. The best people are going to be energized around the customer, and the best people are increasingly going to want to.
39:39
Paul Fipps: They’re going to be intellectually curious around the technology. You know, from a sales standpoint, increasingly, the sale is more technical, but great client executives, great account directors, great whatever you call them on the frontline, they’re always incredibly curious about where the technology is going and how it helps customers solve problems. You need leaders that think that way all the way up.
40:02
Paul Fipps: And when you have the right team in place, I don’t think no matter what happens externally in my office, the changes happening, those teams can move really fast, adapt and change and make sure our customers are taken care of and they’re successful.
40:14
Sophie Buonassisi: Brilliant people first always. And one last, last question is, are there any books that have made a particular impact on your career?
40:21
Paul Fipps: I’m going to ask this question a lot. I like to read a lot, Sophie, but the one that always comes to mind about impacting my career is a is an older book called Execution was written by Larry Varsity and Ron Sharon. I highly recommend, everyone reset. And the reason is it ties strategy to operations to finance, to outcomes, and it just does it in a really methodical way.
40:43
Sophie Buonassisi: That’s fantastic. I find some of the best resources that leaders are actually recommending are the tried and true things that do not change with AI. They’re the fundamental principles, just like that.
40:53
Paul Fipps: That’s right.
40:54
Sophie Buonassisi: Well, Paul, appreciate the time. Thank you. It’s been wonderful picking your brain.
40:58
Paul Fipps: Thank you Sophie, great to see you.
41:00
Sophie Buonassisi: Great to see you too.
