Hi, this is Amit Zavery, president, CPO and COO of ServiceNow, and you're watching Sachin Sal at the Oak Show.
Hello everyone and welcome back to the Oak Show. We're Silicon Valley's first business, tech and self-improvement podcast for teens, hosted by a teen. I'm Sachin Sal. I'm an 18-year-old award-winning entrepreneur, podcaster, author and student from the Bay Area. And I interview remarkable and influential entrepreneurs, executives, investors, leaders and inspiring individuals from all walks of life, so we can learn from their stories and level up ourselves. I am also the co-founder of threedoshas.com. We're a coaching company transforming lives with three-dosha science from yoga and Ayurveda. The purpose of this show is to inspire you to go for it, which is what the Punjabi word 'chalo' means. Today our very special guest is Amit Zavery, who is the president, chief product officer and chief operating officer of ServiceNow. He is also formerly the vice president and general manager and head of platform for Google Cloud. He was also an EVP and corporate officer of product development at Oracle. He's a board member at Broadridge and he's also on the advisory committee for the electrical and computer engineering department at the University of Texas at Austin. He holds a bachelor's degree in electrical and computer engineering from UT Austin and he also holds a master's degree in information systems, computer science and business from CMU. Thank you for being here, Amit, and welcome to the Oak Show. How are you and what's new and exciting?
No, thanks for having me. Lovely to speak to you. A lot of things going on, as you know, things are happening very fast, but really excited about all the things we're doing and look forward to talking to you about things you are interested in and your audience is interested in.
Yeah, I just want to emphasize this before we get into the whole interview that I really appreciate this because things like this, in studios like this, at companies like this, with people like you, just keeps me going, keeps my dreams alive. I want to eventually have this be my full-time career as a podcaster, and thanks to folks like you, you're really making that dream come to reality. So I appreciate it.
No, of course. No, this is great.
Yeah. And this show is for teens actually. So I wanted to ask you, let's rewind a little bit. What were your teenage years like? What was... um, what were you into like as a teen? What was Amit like as a teenage Amit? What were you into, passionate about, and what sparked your interest in tech? I'm curious.
It's been a long time ago, but let me see if I can recollect. No, my teen years were quite, quite fun. I mean, definitely a lot of fun friends to hang out with. A lot of sports. I did a lot of sports activities. And then I was quite interested in technology. So I was good at science and good at math and everything else. So I got quite early in my childhood into computers. So that's how I got introduced to computer science and technology like that, which I continued in my college years as well. But it was a combination of fun times as well as kind of making sure you focus on doing the right thing from the study perspective and growing from there.
Yeah. Honestly, I didn't think it was that wild. You look pretty young to me, man. Like actually...
I don't know how many old people you've seen, but definitely.
No, I've seen... No, you look great. I think honestly I didn't even expect that. But I'm curious, like for the teens watching, they obviously have... they're trying to get their foot in the door in the industry, right? They're in college or they're doing a startup or something. What if they want to like actually understand what does your role mean? Can you just like briefly, simply explain what does it mean to be the president, CPO and COO of ServiceNow? It's a lot of hats.
Yeah. Yeah. So I think the way to think about this is we are in a software industry. We build products. We build products for customers to go and run and operate the business. So my team and myself, I get very involved in terms of thinking about what should we be building, what we should be investing in, what does the roadmap look like, what technology, where the technology is going, and how do we keep up with what the demand will be in the future. So working with customers, working with partners, looking at the industry and taking all those inputs and deciding where to invest our product engineering resources. And the second part of the job is then once you decide what you're going to build, how do you operationalize it and execute against it? So how do you get those product releases out, get the new feature capabilities to a customer, get them successfully deployed and get them feeling they're getting a good return on investment they're making with our product so they go and invest more with us so we can continue growing. So that's what the CPO is really to build the product and the roadmap as well as the vision around it and the strategy around it, and the COO role is to really execute against those visions to deliver what we are talking about so that the customers are getting the value and we are really delivering all the things we talked about. So that's really the day-to-day job and that involves a lot of engagement with various different folks, as I said, customers, partners, analysts, investors, our engineers, product managers, our design engineers, our sales teams. So it's kind of encompassing many of those kind of discussions on a regular basis.
Honestly, man, you make it seem so simple and easy, but it's pretty big roles to have those three roles at ServiceNow. Like, how have you liked it so far? How's it going?
ServiceNow is a great company. I mean, I've been here for 10 months and if you look at the kind of the basic way ServiceNow operates and thinks about it, there are a few ethos. One is for sure around this idea of humble and hungry. Right. It's the idea that you want to make sure that you are really careful about how you think about things and how you're delivering value to customers, but also really be aggressive enough to be providing something which is very differentiated and important to our customers as well. So I appreciate that part. It's almost like a 20-year-old startup.
Yeah. Founded in 2004, right? That's so impressive.
Yeah. It's one of those few technology companies this big which has been started out recently, and it was founded by founder Fred Luddy, who was 50 years old himself when he started this company. Very rarely it happens where you have entrepreneurs this late in their career building out a new product and a new business. And then we have a very visionary CEO, Bill McDermott, who has a very clear idea of how to build this market and how to build this opportunity. It's a great place to work, a lot of good people, very technically driven. It's a product-oriented company. So I enjoy that a lot and really solving a lot of important problems in AI, which is exciting to me, and I learn a lot every day.
I love it. I also find it so cool how like the companies you're at, you're at such iconic times, including Google, Oracle, now ServiceNow. And yeah, I mean literally it's crazy to think 2004, right? Like two years after that I was born. That's pretty new. Like that's pretty new. And then on top of that, I'm pretty sure what is this, like more than... what is it, more than 85% of Fortune 500 companies use ServiceNow, right?
Yeah. ServiceNow sells to very large companies and the Fortune, as you talked about, the Fortune companies, Fortune 2000 companies, the big customers of ours.
And I love the thing you said about the two H's, humble and hungry. That's very well said. I love it. I'm curious, you know, my mom always tells me, prioritize, get your to-do list done and do stuff. What is your top priority at ServiceNow right now? And what are you kind of like heads down on? I'm curious.
Yeah, a few things. One, we are going through a big evolution in the software industry with AI. AI is top of mind for everyone, it is really a transformative technology. So how do we take that capability and make it useful for everyone who will use our products? So that's the number one priority is to really make sure AI is helpful, it does the right thing and delivers the value everybody expects. So how we transform and guarantee that kind of capability to our customers and employees. And secondly, the big priority for us is to continue to make sure that we hear our customers and deliver to what they expect and we keep on innovating. So innovation is a big part of our core principles and if we keep on innovating we'll keep on delivering value to our customers and that's really the big priority for me.
I see. I love that. I'm curious, in your opinion, like from someone that's been here, and obviously I've done an experiment honestly I think it's kind of funny, but I go to every tech company and I go on their website and the front page has something about AI. Sure. So I'm curious for your company, ServiceNow, how is like AI transforming your guys' work and strategy?
Yeah, every area, right? AI is touching everything we do, right? So internally inside the company, like how we build our products. We're using a lot of AI coding tools to help improve efficiency of our engineers. How we support our customers. We're using AI to answer questions, help customers get a lot of help without having to go and talk to everybody. How we now also run our finance and contracting systems so that we can be more efficient and do things faster. So that's internally. Externally, our products, the goal behind our products is to really help customers really automate the business. So what we provide is the ability to kind of wire different parts of the business and really improve the efficiency and not require huge amounts of interaction with humans because it slows down the process, and also with AI we can get much faster outcomes. So we're using AI across the board. Again, the goal is not to use AI for the sake of AI. It's really how the outcome is better. So our thinking always is like, are you investing in things to make things better? And if AI helps, sure. If it doesn't, then we find something else. But that's the goal is to really learn from all those technologies which are evolving today.
So then would you say AI, like for ServiceNow, the biggest priority is just, if you say in very simple teen terms, like at a high level, is to make people's lives easier and get stuff done faster.
Oh yeah. I said it, you said it well.
Okay. All right, good. I'm glad. I also had a question for you about like being a leader. Obviously there's challenges and it's not easy doing what you do, but there's a lot of perseverance, resilience, you know, a lot of hard work, focus. I'm curious, is there a recent challenge that you faced that you were able to overcome that can maybe inspire some of my teens watching?
I think it's every day there's a lot of challenges. I mean, I think in the world we are in, things are moving very fast. Keeping up is one challenge. I think there's a lot of sense of overwhelm and anxiety across the board. Everybody's kind of getting overwhelmed with the amount of information they have to deal with. They're getting overwhelmed with the technology shifts. So there's a huge amount of human elements. It's not just technology shift, right? So there are cultural changes which we need to bring in and there's anxiety around job losses or associated economy issues. So all of those things are playing into how we deliver the right kind of capabilities, but also how do we make sure our employees and our team members feel comfortable with this transition. So a lot of the challenges we face is really making sure we're communicating well. We're providing the right vision and the strategy to the people we work with. As well as we are really supporting as we transition some of these things where a lot of people have to reskill, they have to learn new things, they have to do things differently. So a lot of the things are part of the day-to-day challenges and then of course training, recruiting, retention are also daily parts of our jobs now. And technology is only going to do so much. I think that there's a huge amount of human elements and learning and understanding what that means and how do you interact with people and how do you help them through the process. I mean, as you, as the college students today, they are also getting overwhelmed, I'm assuming, with the mountain of information. And they are worried about jobs. They're worried about what they should study, what should they focus on and how do you evolve. So I think it's a matter of now prioritizing but also figuring out what will help you. And trying, staying up to date but also making the right decisions in many cases, and that's the daily job for all of us nowadays.
I find it very fascinating how these... because you listed out a bunch of stuff, right? Most people would think that like it's only a few things, but to make your customers actually feel comfortable and help them with the AI transition, it takes a lot. Because by the way, what you said is really spot on. I have lots of friends. Should I switch my major? Like should I even apply for this job? Because AI will just eliminate it. Should I not do graphic design anymore? Because now like... so there's like uncertainty, but there's excitement at the same time. And those two when they come together kind of creates a beautiful thing. To be honest, in my perspective, I love it. Like I think AI has helped me so much with the podcast, with my business, with school. I don't cheat or anything, but you know, I'm just efficient. Yeah. Just, you know, helping stuff get done. I write my own essays and everything.
Oh, good. Good. But yeah. No, very well said. I have a 17-year-old daughter who's going to be applying to colleges. Right. So, and I have a 22-year-old who just started a job after graduating from college. So we've seen this shift over the last four or five years in terms of what everybody's going through. Her, my daughter's friends, her, she herself thinking about what to study, where to, what kind of things to focus on, and the worries about what tools to use, what not to use, and which will be considered plagiarism, which will be considered something which is allowed to use to help your day-to-day work as well. So there are a lot of learnings to be had and I know a lot of people are going through that transition right now.
Well, I must say your daughters are lucky because they have a pretty good mentor. They can just go to their dad and say, 'Hey, dad, I need some help. Can you tell me?'
I'm not sure they listen to me. So...
You know, I don't know. Do you listen to your parents, everything they say to you?
It's different when it's your parent. When it's not your parent, you're like, 'Oh, you know, so I had to find somebody else to communicate for me.' Oh, well, it's really cool to see that you have kids around my brother and my age. It's pretty awesome. I'm curious. Obviously like after Oracle, Google, you could have probably went to any company you wanted to. Like, not like why did you choose ServiceNow, but what do you think ServiceNow does to make it stand out in the crowded SaaS space? Like what is it in your opinion is a unique selling proposition that's like this company is a star because of this. I'm just curious your opinion.
Yeah. You know, when I was talking to Bill and Fred, and I have followed ServiceNow for many years. ServiceNow has created this unique capability which really looks at the heart of the company and kind of thinks of that as an operating system for how you operate a business, which is rare for any other providers today. All the other vendors provide you pieces of functionality or they provide you technology for a particular department or a particular function. ServiceNow kind of operates at the end-to-end level, which really excites me because then you're transforming how you run and get value out of software. Second, I think if you look at the AI evolution, automation, agentic AI, which is this idea of using AI agents to do your tasks, can really improve how you automate your business. So bringing that change in technology to ServiceNow was really exciting to me because you can transform what we're doing at ServiceNow while we're learning something new as well and make a big difference. So that's why I joined and I think it's playing out very well for us.
So it is, it's doing great. I'm curious like for people wondering that are watching right now, what are some specific things that you can explain at like a high level, like not too complex but like a level that young folks can understand? Like how exactly are you helping your customers succeed with AI? Like what certain things are, what is AI doing that your customer is saying, 'Man, I love this stuff.'
Yeah. I don't know how many times you usually run into issues with your, say, hardware like laptop.
Yeah. And then you have to either get help, like if you work in a company, you're asking somebody to help you fix that problem. Typically in the back end, the system which does that for you is ServiceNow. You might not realize, but most of the companies out there or many of the universities use ServiceNow as a way to manage that request and process that issue. Right. It could be your password reset. It could be you wanting to get a new laptop or you want to go on a PTO or a vacation and you need to kind of book that time away from your calendar. So all of that process required to do those tasks, ServiceNow automates. And with AI now, instead of having humans do that part for you where they go and log in and make those changes or order you a laptop inside the company, we would take that out and use AI agents to do that work for you. So there's no human interaction required, but also your speed happens faster. So when you request something, it automatically has filed it, got things shipped to you, and you can get tracking without having to wait for a lot of the stuff. So ServiceNow is doing that and now we're doing that for customer service as well, right? So if you ask for help on... I mean, like one of our customers is DraftKings. When you are doing your fantasy football and bets and things like that, you could use that software to get support for any kind of issues you might have been having there as well. Same thing we do for a lot of the airlines or banking industry or for travel agencies and things like that.
So you say companies, universities, all sorts of stuff. Now, I guess the name makes sense. That's why it's called ServiceNow. That's right. I get it now. I love it. I want to ask you a question about some of the previous leadership roles you've had. I'm curious, can you talk a little bit about being an exec at Google Cloud and Oracle? I'm curious, how were those days? And do you think those days helped you become a better leader here at ServiceNow?
Oh, for sure. I think every experience helps you kind of get a bit better. So I've been fortunate. I worked at Oracle for 24 years. I started as a software engineer out of college directly. Right.
Software engineer to EVP is crazy.
Yeah. I think a lot of people, I think you have to kind of put in the time, learn about things, and you have to get good at something first. You know, I always believe that you have to get deeper into some area so you learn the details and not just a superficial level. And once you get good at one or two things, it becomes very easy to kind of add more and more skills around it. So I always felt that when I worked at Oracle, when I started as a software engineer, then I evolved to becoming more of an engineering manager and then taking on more product responsibility, becoming a GM, it was a natural progression because I added more skills but had a very deep foundation. So Oracle taught me a lot of those kind of skills in terms of how to build software but also how to think about how you build a business around it. As I evolved to my role at Google Cloud, it was more about Google Cloud was going through a transition from being part of a consumer company, which is Google, to becoming an enterprise software provider which is selling to companies. And that required experience. They were trying to bring people with experience in the enterprise space and how you build enterprise software. So it was a natural progression for me to take what I learned at Oracle, apply it to Google, and help them build out the Google Cloud business. And I learned a lot about how do you build that, a lot of the latest technology, but also how you build a new business inside an existing company. And Google Cloud by itself has become a very large business for Google now. Right. And similarly, ServiceNow, I'm taking that experience I have in the enterprise space, some of the innovation around AI, and combining those two things and hopefully helping ServiceNow get to the next level by growing the business but also really rethinking what we build and how we deliver new capabilities to our customers. So it's kind of a natural progression. I always believe getting to the depth first, and then really you have to have background in some areas and then learn new things every day and grow from there.
No, I love it. It's absolutely incredible. It's phenomenal work you've done. By the way, if anyone's curious, it's great if they can just go on his LinkedIn and look at Oracle. Like it's just so satisfying to see the progression you made, right? Software engineer and then I actually looked through it and I'm like that's so inspiring from like software engineer to higher and higher, and you kept getting higher and that's like the dream for a lot of people in tech.
No, it's a great, great experience in a way. You learn and pick up and you grow and you feel satisfied because you feel also that you're contributing, right? So...
Yeah. Yeah. Well, you went above and beyond though because then you went to Google Cloud after, did great work there, and now you're here at ServiceNow. So it's great. I'm curious, how do you see... I know we can't predict the future obviously, but like as a tech leader and someone really well-known and influential in this space, where do you think, how do you think AI will change the way we work? Let's just say in the next five years. Do you have any like predictions or any bold stuff you're going to say? Because then I can say it on my show first.
No, I think it's kind of... if anybody can tell you what it'll be in five years from now, I think I'll be shocked to see that it really comes true. Because I think it's changing so fast, and I don't think I've seen any technology change happen in such a short amount of time and continue to change that fast like AI has, right? I think the other technology waves we had, either going to... you know, people were doing e-commerce, internet to mobile to cloud, and now AI. We talk about it. I think AI has taken up, it's done so much innovation in a short amount of time. But over the next five years, I do think it will be integrated into everything we do. That for sure, it's already happening. There's not a single area of our lives which is not getting impacted by AI. I would expect everything you do from your day-to-day, your personal life as well as what you would do at work or what you will do at your school, will have an AI element to it. So I don't think you can ignore that. So I would suggest that everybody should at least get familiar with what this technology is capable of, how it can help your life, and what you can really contribute towards it as well. Because I think the worry everybody has is that does it take over your life and does it really replace you? And I don't think it's going to be that extreme. I think there will be parts which will be, just like with any technology change, some of the jobs will go away but some of the new things will emerge, right? So we are starting to see a lot of those evolutions happen now. A lot of the mundane tasks which are usually very repetitive, day-to-day stuff you do today, hopefully that will... exactly, that's why, why not, right? And then you can free up your time to do other things which you might not be getting to today because you're just bogged down for a lot of the mundane pieces of it. So I think over the five years it's definitely going to be a much, much bigger part of our lives. And I don't think you can ignore the fact that it's going to be important as well.
Yeah. I think it's... I always feel blessed that I get to experience this at like a pretty young age because I'm only 18. As I get older, we'll see how AI, like you said, it'll probably in the next five years probably be in everyone's life. So I feel like that's why a lot of people should embrace it. I feel like there's kind of two types of people. I'm not saying one is better than the other or anything. Like some people are really scared of it or they have a pessimistic, negative view, and there's some people that are like looking forward to it, and there's some people that are stoked about it like me, which is kind of like the other...
No, but you're right. I think there's no way to ignore it. Yeah, you have to like... it's kind of something like I think people... it was so interesting for people because it came into the world and it grew so fast, rapidly, and people are like, 'Whoa, what's going on?' And I think the big thing is you guys are the generation which are probably born into this, right? Almost. So we would look forward to you all contributing and thinking about how we should be approaching this. A lot of us are learning and trying to retool ourselves, versus it's natural for your generation to really... this is part of you from day one. I mean, you look at social media, you look at the things you do with technology day-to-day and what you're doing now with AI. I don't think it feels foreign to many of you because it's just natural. A lot of people who grew up with other technologies, it is something which they learn. That's why the apprehension is higher. And there's worry that what does it mean to me and do I become irrelevant or become... I can't keep up. I think your generation will hopefully help us get better at balancing what you do with AI versus what you do without AI and how those blend works and feel a little more natural, I think.
Yeah. No, imagine, think about it. I can tell my kids like when I was in high school, I used chatbots and stuff, but think about the kids younger than me. Their whole life doesn't matter. They're used to just... they start, they get exposed to the technology and it's already AI. So for them it's just like that's always there.
They don't have to relearn it like... right. So it's great.
Same thing I think if you look at the generation before this, I mean mobile was just part of the day you started using phones, right? Versus something else. The same thing's happening now with a lot of these chatbots and things like that.
Whenever my parents talk to me about their days working with tech, I'm like, 'Oh my god, that seems so far away.' I feel like when I get to talk to my kids, I'm like, 'Oh, you guys only had that back then. Look what we have now.'
That's why you had to go to the Smithsonian and see all the old technology.
Exactly. By the way, my aunt gave me a thick book on that. It's really fascinating. I learned a lot from that book.
No, it's good to... I think it's important for everyone to look at the history though. And hopefully you guys see what that meant and what helped, what didn't help, what changes were valuable, which were not valuable. So you make the right decisions. You can't ignore. And history does repeat itself. So it's no harm kind of being aware of what that was like, right? So good that you're reading some of those previous generation technology stacks.
Yeah. I mean, I truly feel like this is obviously going to go down in history books and stuff like around this timing with AI and everything.
Yeah. You can ask the chatbot to give you the answers, but yes.
