AI ‘the biggest opportunity of our lifetime’, says tech veteran

McDermott said the average enterprise worker uses 17 different applications a day, and switching between those applications chews up to a third of their individual productivity.

“We have an AI platform for business transformation that is a clean pane of glass that resides above what is now more than 50 years of chaos, half a century,” he said. “ServiceNow has become the central nervous system for any well-run company or public sector entity that wants to drive transformation.”

The company recently tapped Australian business veteran David Thodey to serve as a strategic adviser as it chases $1 billion in local annual revenue. Thodey said he had been impressed with the ServiceNow platform as a way to drive digital transformation and automation quickly.

Amid a sea of competing visions for how AI might look inside the workplace, McDermott envisioned chatbots that deflect “soul-crushing work” that humans don’t want to do.

“If you take Australia as an example, there’s a major labour gap because there’s more jobs that are open than people to fill them. So we need to put these AI agents to work, but we’re putting them to work for people. This whole thing is for people,” he said.

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“But these bespoke systems are siloed. If a company takes one of those approaches, and says let’s get sales agents, some HR agents, and some finance agents, you’re only going to make the half century of chaos worse… The digital agents still can’t go east to west, and they certainly can’t go north to south. You have to be able to go north to south and east to west to transform a company. And that’s our superpower.”

McDermott, who penned a memoir titled Winners Dream: A Journey from Corner Store to Corner Office, lost one of his eyes after falling down a flight of stairs while carrying a water in a glass, which shattered into pieces and pierced his left eye. He wears sunglasses everywhere in public.

“When you have something like that, a pretty difficult accident, what you learn is two things,” he said. “One is going through the process of the accident itself. Because it’s easier to quit, it’s easier to say ‘I’ve done enough. Let me fold it up. Go to sleep. This is it.’ The hard part is having the courage to get back up again and find a way to survive.

“The second thing is to recognise with complete humility that everybody is going to get hit with a thunderbolt. Everybody. No one’s getting out of this life with a hall pass. So the question simply becomes, what will you do? How will you be when it’s your time to get back up again?”

McDermott said the accident made him more resilient, more positive about the world and ultimately more empathetic.

“It’s like a brand-new lease on life,” he said. “As crazy as it might sound, if I hadn’t had that, I don’t think I would have made as big an impact on the world.”