ServiceNow boss Bill McDermott: "Traditional CRM is broken"
AI agents are the new hype – and US provider ServiceNow agrees. For CEO Bill McDermott, the future of CRM is clearly agent-based.
(Image: Jonas Härtfelder)
- Prof. Jonas Härtfelder
According to ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott, traditional applications could soon be a thing of the past – or at least become much less important. According to his vision, all company data should flow into networked central databases from which specialized AI agents extract the required information and trigger actions independently.
An ambitious vision of the future, which McDermott presented at this year's customer conference of the company known for its IT service management platforms – and also formulated his next goals: "The CRM of today is broken," McDermott explained with a view to the market leader Salesforce. But his strategy goes further: traditional ERP systems are no longer fit for purpose either.
AI agents in ServiceNow's own support too
To accompany the CEO's visions, ServiceNow also presented the next development stage of its own AI-supported CRM solution. Unlike conventional systems, which often end up as pure data silos in the front office, the new ServiceNow CRM is intended to be an end-to-end AI platform. Sales, fulfilment and customer service are to be fully orchestrated on a single architecture – with the aim of creating personalized customer experiences.
AI agents will take on tasks along the entire customer lifecycle – from initial contact to closing the sale to service processing. According to ServiceNow, the AI helpers analyze customer inquiries in natural language, forward complex cases in a targeted manner and coordinate the process through to completion. Predefined scripts are not required for this. According to ServiceNow, these agents already automate 37 percent of its own support cases. This should not only relieve call centers, but also increase customer loyalty and boost sales by accelerating processes.
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However, McDermott's strategy faces a key test: AI agents still have to prove that they actually work reliably and can also be used in business-critical scenarios. So far, there is still a lack of independent evidence that the agents are scalable and fault-tolerant enough under real conditions to permanently replace traditional CRM applications.
(dmk)
