India is moving away from a labour-centric mindset to an Artificial Intelligence (AI) mindset, according to Bill McDermott, CEO of ServiceNow, a global AI platform for business transformation.
“Corporations that don’t get on board with AI right now will fail,” McDermott said in a media interaction at Knowledge 2025, ServiceNow’s annual event in Las Vegas on AI-driven service transformation.
“Autonomous agentic AI is changing everything. The 20th-century industrial complex of software stacks is now going by the wayside and being integrated into ServiceNow, so companies can run more efficiently at a lower cost and start to grow again,” he said.
Asked about the challenges before ServiceNow in a price-sensitive market like India, McDermott said, “I think that in any market, you have to be responsive to the needs of the market. And we try to be as responsive as we can.
“I think India is really moving from a labour-centric mindset to an AI mindset, which means if you have brilliant labour and can apply the magic of AI, put AI to work for the people, the force multiplying effect is so big,” he said.
Business cases are big when you don’t do things manually and let autonomous agentic AI help the people, he said.
“So the business cases are what decision-makers need to start looking at. How big of a business price is moving to a platform like ServiceNow? What do I get from it? Not what the platform costs. I think we’re moving away from how much the price is, to how much value can I extract,” he said.
McDermott said, “We have come out with a very interesting programme called NowNext AI for companies that go all in with us.”
“Reliance would be a great example of such a company. They have broad access rights, broad IP rights, and incredible access to all of our AI innovation, and we give it to them,” he said.
If such a programme is used by a “gigantic corporation”, the cost per unit goes down massively, he said.
“And I think that’s what we need to do in India. We need to go big with big partners and big companies, and then they need to go big with us and look at the unit price and how drastically lower it would be. I want to make it easier for India to do business with us.
“So, you know, we discussed bringing the price down by partnering with bigger players like Reliance,” he said.
McDermott said it was a pleasure to attend the wedding of his friend Mukesh Ambani‘s son Anant Ambani and Radhika Merchant last year.
There are big companies like Reliance, Adani Group and Tata, but there are also a lot of small ones, McDermott said.
He said ServiceNow plans to be “absolutely competitive” in the market. “It is not just cost per acquisition but what it is doing for you. Instead of doing it yourself or instead of having many different providers, you consolidate the number of providers and you do more on ServiceNow.
“You put agentic AI on that clean pane of glass and you generate enormous productivity, happiness and value. What we build is the world’s finest enterprise software platform or what Jensen Huang of NVIDIA calls the AI operating system for the enterprise,” he said.
“I will do business in India and we will meet the market in India … whether it’s a big one, a midsize one or even a small one.
Some companies have found out that with ServiceNow they could do the same amount of work with 60 per cent fewer engineers, he said. “I am not suggesting they should have 60 per cent fewer engineers. If you keep the same number, you get 60 per cent more work done,” he added.
Asked about the reason for setting up the ServiceNow University, McDermott said, “There will be 50 per cent of the AI jobs this year that will go unfilled in the United States. Almost 75 per cent of the AI jobs in the global economy will go unfilled.
“There’s a massive skill gap in the world economy. One out of every four hires in corporations today is looking for AI skills, and they’re not there. So, you can’t hire what isn’t there. You can’t hire a ghost, unfortunately. So, we’ve got to train people.
There is a shortage of skilled people to go into IT jobs. In the world economy, I believe around 10 million jobs will go unfilled because there aren’t skilled IT professionals to go into those jobs.
“AI is the gateway to prosperity, and it’s also the necessary move for survival. Corporations that don’t get on board with AI right now will fail. If they’re not on AI right now, in five years, they won’t be around.
ServiceNow will be the defining enterprise software company of the 21st century, he said. “When you learn our system, get certified, you get a diploma. You can use those skills to get those jobs, those open jobs in the global economy, he added.