‘Companies are going to be able to decide, ‘Do I go for growth? Invent new use cases? Solve new customer problems and grow again.’ And I think we can lift the whole GDP of the world economy,’ ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott tells CRN.

ServiceNow Wednesday unveiled new AI technologies and expanded strategic relationships with Nvidia and Cognizant as a way to showcase its AI prowess, taking advantage of its third fiscal quarter earnings to stake its claim as one of the IT industry’s leading AI companies.

ServiceNow introduced Workflow Data Fabric, a new integrated data layer it says unifies an enterprise’s business and technology business data as a way to provide real-time secure access to data for all workflows and AI agents.

Also new Wednesday is an expansion of ServiceNow’s strategic partnership with Nvidia under which the two companies will use Nvidia NIM Agent Blueprints to co-develop native AI agents to help businesses create new use cases for the ServiceNow Now platform. Under the expanded relationship, the two will collaborate to map out multiple AI agent use cases.

[Related: ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott: ‘We’re Putting AI To Work For People’]

AI, particularly in conjunction with help from strategic partners such as Nvidia, has become an important driver of ServiceNow’s business overall, said company CEO Bill McDermott.

“I’m really excited because we’re taking on the world’s biggest challenges,” McDermott told CRN. “They’re also the world’s biggest opportunities. Loving the fact that already with Now Assist we’re increasing human productivity a day-and-a-half [per week]. I think we can increase human productivity at a level of three or four days a week. So companies are going to be able to decide, ‘Do I go for growth? Invent new use cases? Solve new customer problems and grow again.’ And I think we can lift the whole GDP of the world economy. I think we can add trillions and trillions [of dollars] to the world economy with the ServiceNow platform and Nvidia. Literally.”

ServiceNow’s third fiscal quarter, which ended September 30, was another beat and raise beyond expectations, McDermott said.

“The key takeaway is Now Assist, which is our generative AI platform, is the fastest growing product in the history of ServiceNow,” he said. “We have many, many customers investing millions and millions [of dollars in Now Assist] because they know they’re going to get a great return, and they know they’re going to run a much better company on the back of the ServiceNow Now platform powered by Gen AI. And among those great brands, you have the Defense Logistics Agency, EY, Lloyds Bank, Cognizant, and Pure Storage.”

ServiceNow Wednesday said the company and Nvidia start jointly developing a Vulnerability Analysis for Container Security AI agent as a way to use the AI Agent capabilities on the ServiceNow Now platform to automate vulnerability analysis and provide human agents with recommendations. Further AI Agent collaboration is expected throughout 2025.

With the move, the two are bringing turnkey capabilities using Nvidia NIM agent and blueprints to help customers to solve some of the world’s biggest challenges, McDermott said.

“One such example would be security vulnerability,” he said. “So we’re super fired up.”

AI agents have become key to helping businesses orchestrate processes across departments and with other businesses, McDermott said.

“Since 2007, when the iPhone hit the market, people stopped working in silos,” he said. “They work across departments. They work cross functionally in teams to get things done. We will be the only one with a platform that not only has our own AI agents, but also integrates with other people’s AI agents. We’re putting AI to work for people. We’ll be the one that’s the orchestration layer of all the agents, so you have a well-governed company, a compliant company, a secure company, a company that’s managing the risk. Because if you let agents run wild the way these departmental application systems have run wild, it will be like hitting a baseball bat into a hornet’s nest with agents zooming all around, people zooming all around, but no one corralling it all into a coherent process.”

ServiceNow’s new Workflow Data Fabric works with an enterprise’s structured, unstructured, semi-structured, and streaming data, both within and outside the business, to scale and provide efficiency, and works with ServiceNow Automation Engine and the RaptorDB Pro. Automation Engine works with the RaptorDB Pro database to provide pre-built integrations and automation tools and other processes to improve orchestration, the company said.

Cognizant, ranked No. 8 on the CRN 2024 Solution Provider 500, was also unveiled as the first strategic channel partner to work with Workflow Data Fabric.

McDermott said that, at this year’s ServiceNow Knowledge 2024 conference in Las Vegas, that he talked about the chaos of 20th century enterprise architecture with so many point solutions in departments that do not integrate well.

“This causes 33 percent productivity leakage because people ‘swivel chair’ in and out of 17 different applications on average a day,” he said. “No wonder they don’t want to come to the office. With ServiceNow, you have one clean pane of glass that resides above the chaos to automate the way work flows. Today we introduced Workflow Data Fabric to the marketplace. Businesses are pulling in a variety of data from all sources. Those sources could be structured when, for example, in a fixed format, easily searchable data, or it could be unstructured, not predefined. It could come from OneDrive or Box.”

With Workflow Data Fabric, businesses don’t have to change their data strategy, McDermott said.

“We invented a zero copy capability on our amazing RaptorDB workflow, and you now can directly access any enterprise data without copying it into ServiceNow from any data source,” he said. “It could be those systems of record. It could be the great partnership we announced today with Databricks and Snowflake. And it could be the hyper scalers. But now you fundamentally have changed the game because RaptorDB, which is an underlying database, is 27 times faster at analytics and reporting than any other one, and in processing speed per transaction is 12 times faster.”

ServiceNow By The Numbers

For its third fiscal quarter 2024, which ended September 30, ServiceNow reported total revenue of $2.80 billion, up 22.3 percent from the $2.29 billion the company reported for its third fiscal quarter 2023.

That included subscription revenue of $2.72 billion, up from last year’s $2.22 billion, and professional services and other revenue of $82 million, up from $72 million.

Analysts had been expecting total revenue for the quarter of $2.74 billion, according to Zacks. ServiceNow originally projected subscription revenue of 2.66 billion to $2.67 billion, while the analyst consensus was $2.663 billion, Zacks said.

For the quarter, ServiceNow also reported GAAP net income of $432 million or $2.07 per share, up from last year’s $242 million or $1.17 per share. On a non-GAAP basis, ServiceNow reported net income of $775 million or $3.72 per share, up from last year’s $603 million or $2.92 per share.

Analysts had been expecting non-GAAP earnings of $3.46 per share, Zacks reported.

Looking ahead, ServiceNow expects fourth fiscal quarter 2024 subscription revenue of $2.875 billion to $2.880 billion, which would be a year-over-year rise of 21.5 percent to 22.0 percent over last year’s $2.37 billion.

ServiceNow also expects full fiscal 2024 subscription revenue of $10.655 billion to $10.660 billion, up 23 percent.