Hello and welcome to the Global Dialogue. I'm Shireen Pal. The IT workflow workhorse ServiceNow is hosting its first ever World Forum here in India. Well, the company has continued to deliver on its financial performance. The stock markets, though, have not really played along. To talk to us about all things innovation, India and the future, joining us now is the man who heads ServiceNow's engineering and technology, Amit Zavery. Many thanks for joining us here in India and great to have you on the Global Dialogue.
Let me start by asking you about why the decision to bring your first ever World Forum to India.
First, thank you for having me. We're really excited to talk to you about this. I think India is one of the bigger global markets for us. I think India is going to be the top three market for ServiceNow globally in general. We're seeing a huge amount of traction and demand around ServiceNow products, but in AI in general. The work which is happening in India is so interesting and innovative, and we have a large presence. So our goal was...
It's your second largest employee base outside of the US, right?
Yes, for sure. Yes. And it's growing very quickly as well. The big thing we wanted to do was to bring our top customers together at one place, talk about the innovation, talk about the way we can help them, how we can partner with them, including a lot of the partners who are here who work with global customers as well as the local companies. So this was a great time to do it, and the demand as well as the response has been great. So very excited to be here and be able to talk about it.
So you said India top three by when?
Hopefully soon. You know, India is growing very well for us. We are very happy with the success we're having here. We have invested aggressively in the product and engineering for sure for many years. Over the last many years, we've grown our go-to-market capabilities, our partnerships, and the results are exceeding our plans. So we feel very good about the future, and that's why we continue to do this more and more and continue to bring a lot of innovation out of India as well as for India.
Okay. I do want to get a little bit more specific with you, though, on what the India contribution is. You don't disclose that country-wise, but you know how much of your revenue comes from India, is driven by India today?
No, I think if you look at a lot of the business we're getting in India, it's by Indian customers. So we work with all the large banks here, a lot of the large telcos, public sector, both state, local, as well as with the federal government, the central government. So that's been a very big part of our business. Healthcare is growing very fast as well. So I mean, we don't have specific numbers in terms of how much it contributes to our total, but the growth has been a big part of India. So if you look at Asia Pacific specifically, the fastest growing market for us is India.
And that's why we increased the number of people who are based out of India working with the local teams. Even if you look at the partners we have, the system integrators, others, they're doing a lot of work inside India itself, not just outside for multinational companies.
I'll come to the system integrators in just a second, but you've had some announcements that you've made which are specific to India. Let's talk a little bit about the plans as you move forward.
Yeah, I think some of the things we've done, we have this AI concept of AI Control Tower, a product we introduced last year. Thousand-plus customers. A lot of the work was done in India here. The Indian team has been building a lot of the capabilities. And the key idea is that how do you go and discover all your AI investments, AI agents, AI systems you're running, make sure that none of the systems are doing rogue things or going haywire and destroying your company, as well as making sure that you're cost-effective, governance, security, all that stuff, and become a very central tenet to anybody who wants to adopt AI. So that's been a big part of it.
And then around that we've been building a lot of other capabilities. For example, this idea of autonomous engineer, how do you build an application very quickly using vibe coding, but also with all the governance and security built into the platform as well. The idea of AI workflow factory, where you have a whole lifecycle of what it takes to run a workflow, how do you manage it, how do you operate it, and then also connect onto various different systems to get the return as required. So we continue to innovate out of India, and a lot of the things like the voice capability we're building for the Indian market so that people can interact with it with different languages, different accents and other things like that. So tons of things going on. We can go on and on in terms of the innovation here, but it's been exciting times.
You know, it has been exciting times. You've done a $40 million bet as far as Business Next is concerned, and that largely has catered to the financial sector in India, banks particularly. Anything more on the annual?
No, I think we have our hands full and we're doing a lot of things as you can see. But this idea of Business Next is a very good example, right? We're doing things which are much more specific to a particular market because we're seeing a specific demand, and that can be replicated outside India as well. So a lot of Business Next is a good example where we're taking that capability to Southeast Asia, to Australia, and they have a lot of expectation about what we can do jointly. We have a lot of expectation in terms of what they bring in the domain, and a lot of the customers we work with jointly are getting a lot of value. We're identifying partners like that who we can really co-innovate as well as quickly take to market and build the business for them with us.
You know, let's now talk about what's happening as far as the world is concerned. And of course, this AI-driven disruption has captured mindspace, headlines, and certainly, you know, it has put pressure on stocks like ServiceNow. 2026, how would you describe the year? I mean, you know, while quarter after quarter on the financial front you're actually meeting your estimates or in fact beating them, you've raised your revenue guidance as well, and yet the market is punishing the stock. How do you explain that?
I think the start of it is very hard to understand investor sentiments depending on them not understanding nuances in the business when the technology...
What are the markets getting wrong about the story?
Oh, quite a few things. One, I don't think they understand how AI is going to help a lot of companies like ours. They're kind of putting every software company in the same bucket. We are really getting a lot of acceleration in our revenue and customer demand because of AI. If you look at our revenue numbers, we talked about for AI products, our plan was $1 billion ACV, we are going to be $1.5 billion, we raised the guidance, that's 50% growth on top of a large number itself, and we continue to see the acceleration. So I think the understanding of how AI helps specific companies versus others, I think it has to be a little more nuanced because we are really the operating system which is connecting various different things inside an enterprise. What we are trying to replace or change is that it becomes very difficult because we are really adding value, making companies operate better and be able to get results out of it. So our products are really driving value and results. That's why demand is going up. Our results are great. We're helping really innovate with AI with our customers on the same platform.
So those things are all working out. So I think the confusion for many investors is not understanding what it does to who, and that's why they're putting everybody in the same bucket. But if you look at the last few months, we seem to be getting the message through on the messaging part of it.
There has been some recovery from the lows that you've seen, but still nowhere close to your 52-week highs. But you know what I want to understand is, you said the market is tending to put everybody in the same basket. Now, if you believe that you're not vulnerable, who do you think is vulnerable?
The ones who are not going to innovate. I mean, when any transformation happens in technology, you saw that with cloud, you saw that with mobile, you saw that with web. If you don't innovate, doesn't matter what technology it is, you're going to suffer. So I think it's companies who are not going to change how they operate and how they use this technology to make a difference in the product. They're going to have a difficult time. Second are the customer companies who are going to be very feature-oriented, right? They're a vertical stack providing one particular feature that can be very easily replicable, replicatable, because they can be replaced by buying something else somewhere else because you're not integral to the enterprise. If you're integral to an enterprise or integral to an organization or integral to a company, very hard to replace.
But how is embedded software in the AI era then very different? Because we've been doing exactly that, isn't it?
No, I think, see, the AI software is just, it has to be in the product to really drive the difference. But you're not buying AI for the sake of buying AI. So am I adding value? Am I making you be more efficient? Am I saving you money? Am I helping you grow top line? If you're going to answer the question in the positive with your product, customers want you. If you're going to be the same product doing the same thing without any difference from the outcome perspective, that is very interchangeable.
The two nightmarish scenarios that were painted at the start of 2026. One, SaaS apocalypse, is it all over as far as SaaS companies are concerned? And two, will you be claustrophied? I want you to explain your thoughts on both, because you have multi-year partnerships with Anthropic, with OpenAI, and again the question is, are you actually working with your competitor in the garb of your partners at this point in time? Will they actually be an existential threat to you a few months perhaps down the line?
Yeah, if you look at what they're doing, right, they need help from enterprise companies who know how the domain works. They're providing information, they provide intelligence. They're not the execution engine. They don't have the context. So that's why you think they're coming to me every day and say, let's partner together and help us get to market. But they are a very small part of the full stack. If you look at the IP inside my product today, it's less than 10% is LLM, rest is all IP I have built for years understanding how workflows work, what is the business requirements, how are the contexts associated, why a decision was made. Those things are not replicable by any LLM. So it's a very good opportunity for us to partner in some cases, but we're also very smart about what we partner on.
I mean, of course everybody has ambition. So see what has happened with AI, the lines between different teams have blurred. Everybody can claim they can do everything. Yeah. Because you know, you say, oh, I can write the software. The problem is you write software without domain, it's useless. The software writing part is cost-wise 20%. For an enterprise to maintain the software, it's the other 80%. Understanding the governance, the security, the compliance requirements, maintenance, upgrades is 80% of the cost that is not easily replicable just because you have cloud. Cloud can write you the software, but who's going to do the rest of the maintenance? So that's why it's very difficult to replace things we do. And that's why we're not really worried about it. I mean, customers are not coming to me any day. I talk to CIOs, nobody says, I'm going to go and rebuild this thing ever.
The worry though is that, in your words as you said, if context is your moat, what will it take to be able to defend that moat? And are you not in fact bulking up your competitor by partnering with them?
No, so the way we work with them, they have no access to my data. Today I run 100 billion workflows on ServiceNow and 8 trillion transactions a year growing at 25%. That's not replicable. If they had to do that, they had to run that much before for the last 20 years. How are they going to get that context? You have to learn this thing over time. If they learned something next year, I would have done more of it next year anyway. So that data is not available to them. Customer information is not available to them. They're really just an intelligence layer, which is great, it's great for summarization, great for understanding or planning or reasoning. But I use that technology because just like I use a GPU or I use a chip. So that is just an infrastructure to me and it's very interchangeable by the way. They have no moat if you look at it. Open weight, any of these models. What is the difference? You can change them any day. I change them every day.
So you're for the best price, best return. You're in the camp that believes in having a portfolio of models.
Yes. Why not? Because customers don't care what model I use. Customers care about outcome. I give them the outcome. So if they're getting the outcome and I get the cheapest price but the best result, perfect. So I keep on changing them based on what works. There are some specific use cases I use them depending on their ability. But every month a new one comes out that's better and another one catches up. It's great. It's great for me, great for my customers.
You're saying the frontier companies don't have a moat.
Not in the current model. No.
That's, I mean, as they look at IPOing, that's going to be a big cause of concern, isn't it?
