Hopefully it does fill up soon. So we're going to be talking... maybe it's a good lunch. Who knows? Delicious lunch. So we're talking about ServiceNow, and what I love about ServiceNow is we've talked a little bit today about this focus on workflows and understanding process. And what I love about your experience as well is long time at Oracle, seen tech bubble burst, you've seen countless transformations, Google Cloud, just such a fantastic experience. And I think all of that wisdom around seeing so many of these transformations succeed and fail, I think is a really interesting thing. And I think what you're seeing now at ServiceNow is invaluable, and I think it's going to take a little bit of a different lens. So we titled this session "Pace versus Panic," and I think that'll resonate with people in the room because on the pace side there's so much pressure from boards, from investors, to go faster, and there's so much pressure from everywhere on the panic side, whether you're a governing body, whether you're a board, whether you're a C-suite, whether you're an employee, whether you're Gen Z or Alpha and you're worried about getting into the workforce, no matter what it is, there's a science fiction fan. There's a lot of money to be made in instilling anxiety. And so I think the first thing that we love to start with is CEOs come to me all the time and ask, "How do I balance those two things? How do I balance this constant pressure and how do I sort through misinformation, facts that don't really look like facts, to get me to do things that may not be long-term in my best interest?" So we'll start at a high level, and then we promise we'll get more specific.
No, no, thanks for the question, and it's good to see all of you here. I think no doubt there is this constant struggle between pace and panic, right? Every customer I speak to, they've been pushed by the C-suite, by the boards, in terms of what they should be doing with AI. And AI is a big transformational technology versus everything we've seen before. As you said, I've gone through many changes in the tech industry at Oracle and Google Cloud, and many things happened over many years, but I don't think I've seen the pace like this. So there is definitely a fear of missing out from many companies, and they should be rightfully worried about it, right? Because if you don't get it right with AI, there is very high probability that you might not exist, right? So that is really top of mind for many. But also you want to do it carefully so that you don't do something stupid, which will kind of kill you anyway, right? Because AI can really disrupt things externally from other companies, but also internally if you don't put the right kind of focus, right kind of processes, right kind of governance around it, it can also still kill you, right? So I think this is where the dilemma is coming in. And the companies which we've seen, and we did recently a survey with many enterprise companies out there, and we saw the pace of innovation has been very high. They've been picking it up also very quickly, but a lot of them are not getting value from it because they've really not thought through the governance, the security, the cultural changes. And so that's the balancing act to be done. And whoever gets it right have really accelerated the growth, they improved the efficiency as well as they've accelerated what they can do with AI, and it is changing how you operate clearly. So we talk about companies like AstraZeneca, which we've been showcasing with ServiceNow, and they changed how they do drug discovery. And they were worried about AI because AI could have a big negative, could be a potentially bad negative impact in drug discovery as well. You want to be careful because you don't want to do something wrong with all the issues you have with hallucination or wrong data and things like that. But done right, they are now reducing the drug discovery timeline quite a lot, right? I mean, they have removed human elements in terms of which was inefficient while keeping human oversight. They've been at least able to now reduce the amount of time it takes to go through testing, go through processes, go through approvals drastically. So there are a lot of those things we have to think through, and whoever gets it right, I think, can really capture a huge amount of value out of it.
One of the things I'm hearing from CEOs and C-suite members is so much is being thrown at them. So many big numbers around TAM, around opportunity cost savings, just astronomical numbers, and everyone has an opinion on AI. And so what they're having to do is figure out quickly who they trust, and it doesn't have to be everyone in their company. It can be people in the industry. So some of these people you could be meeting at this event, but are you seeing that as well, that they're having to figure out who do I really trust that is going to help tell me the actual truth?
Yeah, I think at least the C-suite, the CEOs, and the ones I speak to, they're definitely creating an ecosystem of trusted advisors. And I don't think so you could go with the traditional ones always, right? So you have to now start looking at newer vendors, newer partners, working with your peer companies a little more closely in some cases so they can keep up with those things, but also a lot of startups, right? I mean, there is a disruption happening, there's a lot of innovation happening in this space. The combination of those kind of things are really valuable to them. Also keeping up with the trends while looking at what could drive value inside the company and at least moving fast enough so that at least you get understanding of it and evolve it depending on what you learn from it. So there's definitely that thinking going on.
What I love about what you all do is it's not just a one-size-fits-all and you force it down the customer's throats. There's a lot of care around what's the state of their infrastructure, their talent, their budget, their maturity level, what you talked about earlier. There's a lot of listening. So I think that's fantastic. When getting back to the pace part, how do you know if you're going too fast?
Yeah, I don't think there's any real science to guarantee things too fast. In general, what I've seen is when projects either don't give you the value or the employees or the people you're working with are just confused. So as long as you get a buy-in, you have some cultural changes happening inside the company, and you're able to now get clear clarity in terms of what you're driving, and you're picking the right use cases as well, right? So that's where a lot of the value I've seen created is picking the right use cases and getting it done before you go and do everything at the same time. That's probably the big difference usually.
So one of the things you all are pretty active in the acquisition space, the partnership space. So what are the things that you focus on when you're evaluating? I'm sure you get approached by a lot of startups. There's a lot of opportunities for partnership. I'm sure ServiceNow is a very popular suitor. So what are the things you look for when you're evaluating these opportunities?
Yeah, no, I think acquisition is a big part of how we continue growing, right? So ServiceNow has been acquiring companies for many, many years. Typically it's been more of, I would, you can call it tuck-ins or bringing IP with some people who can help us build some of the areas we might be investing in already. So augmenting our skills, augmenting some kind of understanding of it, and helping us move faster. So that has been the traditional ways for us to grow in some new areas. So we've been doing a lot of acquisitions like that for many years. Over the last year or so, we definitely have increased the kind of companies we're looking at now, right? In terms of size, we increase in terms of looking at IP with some customer and market momentum and bringing those companies into ServiceNow to allow us one to expand into new areas, second to bring in know-how and capabilities in things we might take some time to get to, right? So it's a combination play now. I mean, we recently acquired Logic.ai as an example. It's a little bigger than the typical companies ServiceNow has been acquiring before, and they are the market leader in terms of the AI-driven CPQ, configure, price, quote. We have been investing in the CRM, especially customer service, sales order management, for quite a few years and growing, and that has been growing significantly fast. So we thought, okay, you know what, if you want to now look at complex orchestration, you want to look at how we can solve very complex business processes, CPQ is a very good example of where a lot of customers expect us to be able to provide them good solutions around. So when we start looking at Logic.ai, they have a very good way of solving a very complex problem using AI to automate this whole CPQ process, which every company suffers through, right? I mean, if you ask any IT department one project they will say they don't want to touch again is CPQ because it usually fails or it usually goes through like four different levels, four different managers before you get it right, right? So we thought, you know, if we can solve the problem with a unique IP, with people who understand that space, with a lot of domain expertise. The person who built that company, Chris Scholes, this is his third time around. First he did it on-prem, second time he did it in cloud, the third one is AI. So he's done a great, great understanding of the space and domain, but he's looking at it how you solve it differently every time. So that's a company we thought is a great fit for us because it allows us to get into new space, brings in a lot of domain expertise, and allows us to now provide customers a bigger, broader solution around CRM. So that's how we've been looking at it. Similarly with a couple of other acquisitions we announced recently as well in the data space and some of the work we're doing in our enterprise search is to really think about where we can expand, solve problems faster, bring in domain expertise, and allow us to grow and solve customer problems in a unique way. And that's what you'll see more and more. And I do believe, I mean, there's a huge amount of... I respect entrepreneurs. I mean, they've been doing a lot of amazing things for many, many years, but with AI, I think that's moving even faster. And someone who's closer to a particular problem set and can bring that expertise, ServiceNow, we definitely would appreciate and continue kind of looking at that as a way to keep on expanding while we, of course, doing a lot of things organically, right? I mean, we have a very large and very, very capable R&D team, but we can't do it all ourselves.
Got it. And someone in this room has data on this, but anecdotally it feels like one or two years ago when a company like ServiceNow would acquire an AI startup, the stock would see an immediate boost, and it was almost an assumption that a lot of positive things. I feel like Wall Street's gotten a little bit, and some of the markets have gotten wise to it a little bit, and now it's all right, that's great, but how does this tie to your broader strategy? What are you going to do with the people? What are you going to do with what you're buying? How does it make ServiceNow stronger? So I think in terms of a quick question to the CEOs of startups out there as they're thinking about the journey towards interacting with, you know, ServiceNow, Microsoft, Salesforce, if that's the path they want to go, any advice that you have to them as they manage those relationships?
No, I think, I mean, usually the way we've seen success from any acquisition is something we either might have some relationship prior to acquiring, or there's unique problems been solved with very deep expertise and good leadership because we want to bring in folks to help us through osmosis also get better, right? So I think the advice, my advice to a lot of startups is one, of course, look at where the synergies might be from go-to-market, product investment, and how combination can solve a problem better and faster, right? Build, get to know the product set better, and if you can find use cases which are a combination of your company, individual company, and ServiceNow can really differentiate against other competitors, we are definitely, many other companies would be very interested in that conversation.
