ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott: Silicon Valley is getting enterprise AI wrong

Enterprise software has long operated on a relatively stable hierarchy of power: The companies that owned the interface largely owned the customer relationship. Employees moved through dashboards, tabs, forms, and menus; software vendors sold more seats, expanded across departments, and steadily compounded recurring revenue. Agentic AI is beginning to destabilize that model. Increasingly, enterprise users no longer need to navigate software directly to complete routine work. AI agents can coordinate actions across multiple systems through natural-language commands alone. That possibility has rattled the software industry. Earlier this year, SaaS stocks sold off sharply as investors questioned whether AI agents could weaken sticky interfaces, compress seat growth, and erode the economics that powered enterprise software for decades. The question now hanging over the industry is whether AI agents will hollow out enterprise software altogether, or if they’ll reorder where value accrues wi