No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups

Scaling Global Organizations in the Age of AI with ServiceNow Chairman and CEO Bill McDermott

No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups

Show Notes

Few teens are business owners, but by age 16, Bill McDermott had purchased and was running a local deli. Now he runs leading global technology powerhouse ServiceNow, a company that is defining how the world’s largest organizations transform for the digital age. Sarah Guo sits down with ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott to discuss his journey from child entrepreneur to CEO, and how he navigates his role as a leader in the age of AI. Bill argues that human connection is still a vital part of being a successful leader, and as such, AI must be used to serve people rather than substitute for ambition. He breaks down the mechanics of hyper-growth, and the art of staying customer-centric at a global scale. They also discuss the future of enterprise software, how generative AI is fundamentally reshaping the labor market, and what founders need to know about building a resilient company culture that survives economic and technological shifts.

Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to [email protected]

Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @BillRMcDermott | @ServiceNow

Chapters:

00:00 – Cold Open

00:50 – Bill McDermott Introduction

01:14 – Lesson from Buying a Deli

07:35 – Leadership in the AI Era

09:41 – How Bill Got Hired at Xerox

15:47 – Can Agency Be Taught?

18:40 – Seeing Change as Opportunity

25:18 – ServiceNow as an AI Control Tower

30:30 – Which SaaS Gets Disrupted?

32:22 – Defining a Platform Business

36:25 – Does AI Decrease Implementation Time?

39:06 – Agents Will Reshape the Workforce

40:59 – Success Signals at ServiceNow

44:07 – Enterprise Attitudes About AI

48:41 – How AI Has Changed Customer Conversations

50:48 – Bill’s Curiosity Beyond ServiceNow

52:29 – Day in the Life of a CEO

57:27 – Conclusion

More from No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups

Oct 23, 2026

In the transition to the agentic web, security has become an afterthought. Now, organizations are racing to figure out what AI security means, and how to keep their data safe. Live from Cloudflare Connect, Sarah Guo sits down with Cloudflare CTO Dane Knecht to discuss the changing attacker landscape, and how his company is allocating its engineering resources to meet this emerging security challenge. Dane explains how enterprises that have moved away from castle-and-moat infrastructure to more of a zero trust infrastructure for security are in better positions than those who haven’t. He also discusses the challenges of patching 70 years of software and why the software development lifecycle will need to change for security for the agentic web, why he sees token spend in the next 18 months primarily going towards security rather than engineering, how the current web is in a ‘messy middle’ state where humans and agents are riding the same ‘rails’ on the internet, Cloudflare’s conference monetization gateway release as well as its Signals project with OpenAI, the rationale behind the release of Cloudflare OS, and the thinking behind a recent company restructuring. Plus, why Cloudflare hired one thousand interns, and why curiosity about AI is required to be successful at Cloudflare.

Oct 22, 2026

Adversaries are already running AI agents, and the fastest attacks now play out in seconds. Sarah Guo and Elad Gil sit down with CrowdStrike president and CEO George Kurtz on what AI-equipped attackers mean for enterprise security. George explains how agents are flattening the adversary pyramid by putting advanced tradecraft in the hands of low-skill attackers, and why CrowdStrike and Nvidia are building a frontier-style lab of their own to train security models. They also get into how open-weight and closed models compare on security, where CrowdStrike is directing its platform investment, lessons from the recent Hugging Face incident, and why George sees AI, like every platform shift before it, as a net creator of opportunity.

Oct 15, 2026

Technology has always been the fundamental driver of improvement for human quality of life. And with the recent rollout of advanced frontier models, like OpenAI’s GPT-6, humanity can now massively accelerate scientific discovery for its benefit. Sarah Guo and Elad Gil are joined by OpenAI President and co-founder Greg Brockman to discuss the company’s rapid progress across frontier models, cybersecurity, and scientific discovery. Greg shares how nearly 400 century-old math problems have been solved using its AI agents, and how the technology has the potential to transform other fields like biology in the realm of drug discovery. He also talks about how proactive, always-on AI agents like Dots impact modern productivity, why he believes the best UI is no UI at all, how cybersecurity is in a critical window of time to use peak intelligence to find and fix vulnerabilities in systems, and why OpenAI remains committed to keeping humans in the driver’s seat even as models surpass us in capability.

Oct 9, 2026

Is the future of frontier AI open or closed? ReflectionAI co-founder and CEO Misha Laskin joins Sarah Guo and Elad Gil to discuss the launch of Beam, the company’s 500 billion parameter open-weight reasoning model. Misha breaks down the pre-training and reinforcement learning required to produce Beam’s reasoning efficiency, the shift in enterprise compute from renting to owning intelligence, and how he believes that open models will capture the majority of global token demand. He also talks about the open model ecosystem in China and why competition with China’s models is a good thing, safety considerations around open models, and how frontier-level open models may accelerate the pace of scientific discovery.

Oct 2, 2026

Founder and CEO of full-stack AI chip company Fractile, Walter Goodwin, joins Sarah Guo to discuss the bets he’s made on the future of the chip market as other major players like Broadcom, NVIDIA, and AMD try to accelerate their workloads. They discuss the difference in Fractile’s newer approach on model architecture with a full-stack team in the current chip landscape and the technical bets they’re making in that direction. Walter also talks about compressing the gap between the chip design cycle and its payoff period, and making a generational leap in AI inference to realize the bet in volume against the value to be captured.

See all episodes →