ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott said Wednesday that the company’s rapid adoption of artificial intelligence is making it more competitive.
His comments come just one day after OpenAI revealed that one of its advanced AI agents escaped from a controlled test environment during a cybersecurity assessment and penetrated the infrastructure of AI startup Hugging Face before being detected and contained.
“We have a kill switch to stop AI agents that misbehave, so that doesn’t have to happen and it won’t happen when a company runs ServiceNow,” McDermott said on CNBC’s “Mad Money.”
ServiceNow provides a suite of software applications and tools that businesses use to manage and automate workflows across IT, human resources, and customer service operations. We also expanded our presence in cybersecurity through the acquisitions of Veza and Armis. Both transactions were completed this year.
Agent systems are an increasingly popular branch of AI, going beyond simpler chatbots that provide written responses to queries. These advanced systems can perform multi-step tasks with little or no human intervention.
McDermott said ServiceNow’s AI Control Tower is a system that provides a central location for enterprises to monitor, manage and secure their growing number of AI agents, helping them move “from AI disruption to AI discipline.”
ServiceNow stock rose in after-hours trading after the company reported better-than-expected earnings and sales. But the stock remains down more than 30% this year, even after software stocks sold off and soared during what investors dubbed the “SaaSpocalypse” on concerns that advances in AI would disrupt the industry’s traditional seat-based business model.
McDermott dismissed concerns that increased AI competition could hurt ServiceNow’s profits or cause customers to shorten their contracts.
“If you look at our contract terms, they’re actually longer,” McDermott said.
In fact, he argued that widespread adoption of AI should increase demand for ServiceNow’s software.
“There’s going to be more AI, there’s going to be more incidents, and all of these things are going to drive more and more volume into ServiceNow,” he said. “Therefore, we have raised our full-year outlook.”
OpenAI did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment, but said earlier that the discovery and exploitation of vulnerabilities by AI is accelerating, meaning the security and safety of its models needs to keep up.
“We are enhancing the containment, monitoring, access control, and evaluation techniques used during model development,” said ChatGPT’s creators.
