Knowledge 2026 - CEO Bill McDermott was playing chess last year. Now he says ServiceNow manages everyone else's board
Last year at Knowledge 2025, ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott told me his company was "playing chess, not checkers." I took that to mean a game of strategic patience - ServiceNow thinking several moves ahead while competitors reacted to the every latest update in the generative AI boom. He also declared at the time, in a notably sharp shift of tone, that CEOs were "now demanding software losers." The implication was that ServiceNow's AI Control Tower would become the arbiter of which enterprise applications survive the age of agentic AI.
Twelve months on, here at Knowledge 2026 in Las Vegas, McDermott has continued to escalate that claim considerably - and with ever increasing optimism. The chess metaphor is back - but the ambition behind it has grown:
We're playing chess. If you're a line-of-business toolset, you're playing checkers. Both games are perfectly okay - but we're playing a bigger game. We...
Copyright of this story solely belongs to diginomica.com. To see the full text click HERE
