#128: Cathy Mauzaize, President EMEA, ServiceNow: “Technology only matters when it translates into impact for people.”

25:46Yeah, absolutely. I think the hype around AI has surpassed the technology almost. And it's, you know, we need to come back around to what's realistic. At the end of the day, as you know, Cathy, it's all about the quality of your data, isn't it? I mean, if you don't have your data in place in the right way, then you're not going to get much value from AI. And also, if you haven't got governance in place, then, you know, you're going to get in trouble with AI, power of AI technology. Very quickly. Very quickly. Look at that. the number of agents that's going to be deployed in the industry. I was meeting with a customer in the tobacco industry.

26:24I cannot name any name, but there's not a lot of those across Europe. They already deploy more than 2 ,000 agents. Wow. Chaos. How do you control? How do you orchestrate? How do you make sure you're compliant? How do you make sure you can report to the regulator around what these agents are doing? Right. So right now, the big topic is governance, understanding how you can, you understand the decision chain and the interaction between agents to solve the problem. And if you consider AI is outside of your system and embedded into the workflow, you're totally wrong. So AI is only as good as the platform is built on, only as good as the data you're using, and only as good as the workflow it is embedded into.

27:10You need the three components to come together and you need to govern all of that. Yeah, sure. I think I described what we do, right? That's precisely what we do. Those four things together. It's the perfect storm for you guys, isn't it, really? It is. It's the perfect storm for what you've been building up to since 2004. We've been built for that, for that moment, actually. For this moment, this is the moment. This is our moment. So that's why I'm so excited to be here right now in this position at ServiceNow, because I do believe there's a very strong momentum for us. My understanding is that ServiceNow was created by someone who was frustrated that, you know, service tickets weren't being cleared fast enough.

27:51For a customer, literally, if you look at this story, it's pretty fascinating. Actually, that was not IT at all. That was literally a customer service. There was a lady that needed to get into, like, I think 10 systems to get a customer order form ready. And that's what our founder, you know, figure out that, you know, using one button, you could automatize the process and the workflow. That's how we were built on a very simple idea that actually you can digitalize and automatize process. And now, of course, NextWave is not automatized, is a gigantic embedded workflow, right? So it's, you know, that's to run autonomous enterprise.

28:30That's the vision of the future. This is a bit of a sticky subject, I think, at the moment, because people are just really not sure what's going to happen as this technology, you know, as AI generally gets better. Are you seeing your customers hiring less? It's not necessarily getting rid of people in redundancies, but are they hiring less as a result of agents doing more and more around service management and, you know, service desk stuff? We don't see them hiring less. We see them hiring differently. Okay, good answer. different skills and you need to be able to have people who can work fluently with AI right so you could be thinking that the young generation will be AI native but even them need to do need to learn how to do a prompt you still need human brain to figure out if the prompt and AI is doing something stupid or not right so it's a different skill that you will need by the way all tech company, including us, have a huge responsibility and contribution to the skill set.

29:32I guess for some functions, there will be impact. That's for sure. By the way, just before this conversation, I saw a new news that Anthropic has disclosed the list of jobs that will be, according to them, the most impacted by AI. And if you look like, of course, all IT, all engineering, mathematics. Things that have manual administrative tasks, I suppose, yeah. That, but if you look at the other side, according to them, that will impact the highly skilled people much more than the people that don't have that many required capabilities. It's funny that, isn't it? You still need people to do manual things, right?

30:14For instance, in agriculture, you can enhance and augment the yield on the yarn, but you cannot replace farmers. You need people to do the job. No, yeah, plumbers and things. I think right now, everybody's pretty much navigating. I do think there's going to be impact on some sort of jobs. I do see most of the companies trying to figure out how to be more productive, including us, by the way. We need to drink our own champagne. So we need to be using our own technology. We need to be smarter. We need to be AI native. We are not an AI native company. And we are competing with AI native companies.

30:48So we need to become AI native, which means using the technology to get us, to augment us. Will that translate into a reduction? I don't think so. I really think it's going to be translating into a shift in profiles. I personally don't believe that we're going to be having a company that will be run entirely on AI agents. That's impossible. That's my wish. That is impossible. Yeah, I can't see how that could happen unless it was a very specific business. Yeah, or you can fully automatize and maybe robotics can be enhanced. So there's a bucket of things. I do believe it's going to be a lot of multi-model and combining human agents interaction much more.

31:31That's why you need human that needs how to speak to agents, needs to know how to control the wrong decision and be able to judge. Judgment will be critical even more. Because if you just rely on Chagipity or any cloud or any model, you lose your ability to judge. So judgment will be critical and skills, how to use AI properly will be critical. That's my view, right? But I may be wrong. And I hope I'm right. If not, that's very scary. No, I think you will be right for sure. I don't think there's much doubt about that. One of the most interesting conundrums this has created is around content creation.

32:10So it's like the child who gets AI to write the essay that the teacher has wrote them and hands it in, okay? Now, if that essay that the teacher marks is clearly, or they know for some reason that it's written by AI, but nonetheless, it's right. It feels like the person's words, but clearly they've used AI. Does that detract away from the outcome of a good essay? Or should we ban AI for learning activities? It's a bit like the calculator with math equations, isn't it? You know, so the question is, in terms of creating content, if you use AI, does it detract away from the outcome of the content created?

32:47And do you view it like that? Or do you think that we need to embrace it? Yeah, for me, we need to embrace it. It's like, you know, we had the digital revolution, we had the mobile revolution, we had the cloud revolution. And, you know, and remember all these big, you know, people say, no, no, no, it's going to be horrible. It's going to change. We need to stick to the past. Yeah. We can't. We need to stick to the future. We need to embrace the future and we need to learn how to cope with the future and to use the future. I had this very interesting conversation with my daughter, actually 20 years old.

33:20She's in Les Urban University and she's using CHGPT to augment herself. So the deal is, hey, I still need to learn because if I'm doing studies, if I'm a student, I still need my brain to learn about the content. But I'm going to use AI to be faster in some of the things I have to do or getting straight to the point. It doesn't mean that a brain will be less trained. It means that she's going to be smarter and more efficient on some delivery. Absolutely. Efficient is the word. Super smart. Super smart to do so. And, you know, we had this debate. It's pretty fascinating to see the young generation.

34:01Some, I guess, are a bit extreme because they are using AI to learn instead of them and they're going to become stupid. And that's the risk that we lose our brain and ability. But, you know, Garrett, AI is already stronger than human. It's already, you look at all the, you know, chess board, AI is beating any of our players globally, right? So that's the unique nature of this, right? So we cannot fight this technology. We need to embrace it and control it and use it the right way. I think that's for me the key. How do you use it for good? How do you use it to augment you, to augment company? You know, if tomorrow we have a fix for cancer treatment using AI, that's great.

34:44If we have a fix using AI technology for global warming, wonderful. I mean, if we have a fix using technology for education in a deprived environment, great. If we are using AI to kill even more each other, no. But that's why, you know, in a human, my view, personal view, that we cannot stop this. And we just need to... There's no point of fighting against it. Co-exist. Use it to augment you while, again, using your brain to be very conscious. Yeah. It's just, you know, self-awareness. You know, I'm a firm believer that technology is for good and it has to be for good. Yeah, that is the only thing that concerns me a bit, though, is the fact that people like you and I clearly are very bought into this technology and use it and benefit from it.

35:32But there's a lot of people who don't and just cannot get on with AI and large language models. And I just think it's going to create this enormous gulf, this inequality in progression, you know? I agree. And so we have to get more people using this technology in order to elevate us collectively, I think. Do you agree? I totally agree with you. I totally agree. And that's why, you know, all 10 companies have a role to play. That's why we, for instance, you know, launch Servista University to scale on AI up to 3 million workers by 2027. It's a drop. It's a drop in the ocean. But if everyone is embracing, you know, we can have an impact globally.

36:11Now, I think all the education system has to be rethought and teachers have to be retrained. It's a huge change. And, you know, AI will be multimodal and that will be the new normal. That's going to be the reality. And so that's going to be impacting enterprises for sure. And that has been confirmed by IDC and by all the research environment that 80 % of enterprise AI system will be multiple input types by 2028. That's the reality. But even in society, it's going to be a huge transformation. and coming back to a conversation earlier, Western Europe is moving quite slowly because we are afraid and because this is an American company, most of the time American technology, and we are unique.

36:56We need also to control. So I guess, you know, there's also an opportunity for Europe to lead in some way, right? And to have a voiceover at global level, not to be squeezed between America and China. We have a great company. We have great education. We have great people. We just need to make sure that we have the mix of talents and also that we are all AI-augmented citizens. I do believe there's going to be a wave of change in a couple of years. It has to be for good again. And that's something you and I can debate. We can contribute. But we need our politicians. We need our regulatory system.

37:35We need everyone to embrace it. It's there. It's there. So there's no way that we can avoid it. We just need to embrace it. Yeah, 100%. And that's why I asked the question, is because there is still stigma around using AI. It's still kind of people go, oh, you're using AI. That means you're cheating. And it's like, no, we're not cheating. That's ridiculous. You're looking at it the wrong way. So I'm glad you agree with me on that. So can we jump back on to ServiceNow then? I wanted to ask you about the knock-on effect, the multimodal AI, the platform strategy, and the knock-on effect this has on your commercial pricing and your engagement, your commercial engagement model with your customers.

38:11So I know, obviously, in the past, it's been evolving probably for years. Do you build your customers more on a telemetry model, a consumption model now? And what do you see the next couple of years looking like on that sort of things? Great question, Gareth. We have to ship to consumption. It's going to be tokens, agentic tokens, how many you consume for what use case. So we are just changing our models. It's going to take a bit of time, but that's the direction of the industry, a direction if it agentic token consumption, right? And again, this is going to change a lot in the next two to three years, right?

38:48So all of us are trying to figure out what is the right pricing model. We were not a consumption first pricing and licensing. We have to go there because again, our customers are willing to consume. So we are navigating this transition. All our product is going to be AI embedded, all of those, right? So it's going to be not going to be agentic, not AI, agentic embedded. So it's not about, you know, are we identifying or not? We are identifying. As you know, we've had quite Moveworks, which is the employee front end, which also will have to be consumed, yeah, agent and telemetry. So we are shifting to consumption.

39:24We're going to have those two models over time. Time for us to just, you know, settle into the new world because we still have products that are not identified. But as the next release, which is Australia, we're going to have everyone using Australia, agenting first. And so while we transition all our customers, we're going to get there all the time. So it's going to take a bit of time, not that much yet, because that's the direction of travel, that's the industry, the industry is like that. So we just need to embrace it. But for us, we need to move from one model to the other one. But it's like moving from on-prem to cloud.

39:58It's moving from SaaS to authentic. It's just the next wave of evolution. I'm quite relaxed. How long do you think it will take you to complete that transition then? Do you think globally? I know it's probably a difficult question to answer, isn't it? But do you have any idea? Well, I think it's going to be very fast. I'm telling you. Because the technology is going so fast. I think we're going to be driven by our customers and they will push us. I think, you know, three, four years, maybe less than that. We have to do maybe two years, right? You know, again, Next3Ds, Australia, all products are gentrified.

40:36We're going to sell only that, identify workflow, right? So, you know, it's time for us to move to a break people and to change all the engagement models. And it's depending on customer. It's how they want also to engage with us. It's what customers want, right? So we are here to serve our customer, to drive them, of course. But, you know, I guess the customer will be the voiceover to anything we do. Yeah, of course. I have to say, I was going to say, just in terms of the impact of AI on SaaS, generally speaking, and it doesn't really impact you guys because it's a big enterprise product. But I'm thinking in terms of smaller sort of SaaS companies who've got product sets with little tools and bolt-ons and plugins and things like that.

41:18I mean, I was using Claude Code last week and I created a piece of software, like a dashboard for analyzing your software spend with a couple of major vendors. And I used ChatGPT to create the prompt. It was quite a sophisticated prompt, put it into Claude Code and the outcome was just like, wow. Wow, I mean, in five minutes, I'd create this incredible software product. And I'm not even technical. And I just think, you know, a proper software engineer would be able to create very complex software very quickly now. This is going to hammer the SaaS world, surely, over the next couple of years. Have you got any thoughts on this?

41:53And what can SaaS companies do to fight back against this wave of bespoke software creation on demand by companies and individuals? Well, I think some will die, to be fair, and some will win. Again, for me, I see that as another disruption from, you know, digital to mobile to cloud, you know, all these waves. I think I don't have the answer to all of these, right? But I think the SaaS bashing is a bit exaggerated because you need to, again, put yourself into an enterprise world, right? And that's why we believe we're extremely well positioned. There's no way you're not going to have an ERP to run a company.

42:29No way. That's not going to happen. So you're going to have SAP or Oracle. there's no way you're not going to have a CRM to engage with your customer. There's going to be ServiceNow or others. I'm not going to say any names. There's no way you're not going to have a financial system to report to a system of free code, right? That will not happen, right? Of course, there will be agentic embedded. There will be more agile, leaner, faster. And again, coming back to what I'm saying, what makes a difference between that and the world of the future is how you govern and how you embed AI into the workflow.

43:06Because the work, the work is the workflow. It's how you move things from one point to the other one. How you connect systems so that they are making together the right outcome for an employee, for a customer, for a finance person, for whomever. So I don't believe SaaS is over. I do believe though, small SaaS, niche SaaS, like insurance, for instance, or legal, will be heavily disrupted. Yeah, I think so. No, there's going to be disruption in all the SaaS companies, all of us. And we are both SaaS and on orchestration layer. That's why we don't see us really as a SaaS. There will be point solution that will be impacted.

43:48Small company, the big one, will have to change their model to be more agile, more innovative, leaner. But they will survive because the company will still need them. And there's legacy. Coming back to where we are initial conversation of who will tomorrow disrupt a mainframe to use cloud? Who would do that? I would love to see their name. I would love to have a conversation with them. Maybe in three, four years' time. But Gerard, think about that. All of this will be commoditized over time. What is hype today, Anthropic, Cloud, and Chagipity will be, again, commoditized. Their own business model will have to be revisited.

44:25They are not making money. So they are building on a lot of infrastructure. So all of this will change a lot. There's a lot of unknown and there's a lot of, you know, people, betting. I don't believe SaaS is that at all. SaaS will have to change. Small SaaS, niche point solution may be heavily impacted. But, you know, what is sure is our industry will be changing very fast again, as we did five years ago with COVID, as we did when we moved to on-premise to cloud. Remember that at the time being, it was a big thing, right? And so the difference is the pace. It just goes much faster. Yeah, I mean, one thing the service now have always been good at is allowing people to build applications within the platform so they don't have to rely on IT to build them something.

45:13So that you've always been big on the no code stuff, have you? And I think that's probably the future is good SaaS providers will adapt by giving their users, you know, the tools they need to create the applications they want within their environment. I think that's the key, isn't it? But then you need to govern all of this. It's not just a chaos. And then you're creating shadow IT, shadow AI, and it's going to be ungovernable. That's why we do believe governance is everything and embedded into the workflow. Can we quickly chat about that then before we finish? I'm just really interested in what advice you're giving to your customers, et cetera, on software asset management, essentially, and governance.

45:53What kind of advice are you guys giving to CIOs at the moment? First, they need to be convinced they need to have control, right? And they need to be thinking a bit differently than in the past, right? So control tower, again, the world of tomorrow is a world where you add data, LLMs, workflow, and you need governance above, right? That's a bit different than the traditional system when you need an ERP, you need a CRN, you need an HGM system, which we have much more silo. Now, the word of today is a word of transversity. It's across. It needs to be across. And so that's why we are helping our customer to figure out, you know, we've acquired VEZA and Armis and MoveWork recently.

46:33All of this is really giving us first the employee front door experience with MoveWorks, but also with VEZA and Armis, the ability to control agentic access. So it's access management, the agentic, right? So you can scan all your assets and you are via AI control tower, just scanning all your assets. And then on top of via BIDSA, controlling what agent access to what. And that's going to be critical. Because, you know, again, asset identification is pretty basic. Agent identification and access management is a bit more tricky. And that's where the risk, by the way, sits. And then with Armies, you can connect with the physical and digital world, O-T-I-T.

47:18So that's what we call AI control tower. By the way, that does resonate extremely well with our customer because right now, it's a nightmare for them. BOLD wants governance, wants regulation, wants clarity, but also wants transformation, wants speed, wants effectiveness. That's really hard, really hard. So what we are advising them is put the framework in place together. Put the right connector to your data set, the one that do matter for you to do this workflow. Be pragmatic. Don't boil the ocean. Just be very pragmatic. Identify what LLMs you really want to use. Don't do shadow AI. LLMs are critical.

47:57Select a set of LLMs that you need to make your agents intelligent or to augment yourself. And then put it back into this framework that we can provide and help them build. That's fantastic. Yeah. It does resonate very well because that's the moment for them to just put this in place and imagine if tomorrow an agent is making a bad decision in the bank transaction and just instead of, I don't know, that will not happen. But instead of, you know, creating a credit for 100 euros, it's creating a credit for 1 million because there's a mistake in the system. You can have a huge, huge, huge impact on the bank credibility, a huge impact on the citizen that is impacted, the customer that is impacted, governance, DORA regulation, all of this is exploding.

48:38You cannot let that happen. So you need to make sure that you track access, you track decision making, you track workflow, and you report. More important than ever, in the physical, digital world, consistency all the time, all assets. All the regulated industry are coming to us with this question. Yeah. All of those. But then it's going to be scaling across regulated industry because with agent deployment, it's going to be any industry. Fantastic answer, Cathy. We are actually a software asset management company. So I've got so many questions, but we ain't got time. So let's finish up on these ones then, okay?

49:15So that was a brilliant answer, by the way. And I thank you so much for sharing that. That's really useful for our listeners, I'm sure. So let's jump into this one then, okay? So you're obviously, you know, a female tech leader and, you know, I'm sure an inspiration to many people. So what I'm keen to understand is if you could go back and give that 21-year-old person advice, it wasn't that long ago, Cathy, I'm sure. If you could give him advice in terms of, you know, knowing what you know now, what would you say to that person who started your career? Trust yourself. Be bold. Take risk. Confidence, yes.

49:49follow your heart follow your guts because my i've been following my guts a lot of time anytime i didn't follow my guts i i made a mistake but of course good mistake that drove me to the next level so that what i would i would say to me and also i would i would tell me don't start in finance you don't it goes straight into business because you are meant for that right so again i'm not i'm not blaming myself for anything i did because all the steps brought me to where i am today but it's more about the doubt and sometimes the uncertainty and you know managing a big family for kids sometimes it's been like that's a lot of work I got two yeah yeah yeah I have two business I have the home business and the real you know no the real business is home that's the real business yeah yeah for sure and the one I'm paid for right so so yeah I would say like just be more relaxed about myself.

50:46I put a lot of pressure on myself as a female. I always wanted to deliver more. I always wanted to be better. I always had to prove that I deserved. It's always this male versus female, all this bias. Female need to be 100 % ready before they think they can take the next steps. Men, 50 % are okay to try. And when I was young, I've always needed to be 200 % ready before I even consider getting the next steps. be more relaxed, right? Just more relaxed. I want you to control everything. And in life, you cannot control everything. And what's happening today, this revolution is the best demonstration that you just need to embrace.

51:27You cannot control. Yeah, absolutely. Brilliant advice. I love that. I love that. So for our listeners then, so let's finish on this one. We always ask our guests to recommend a piece of content. It's normally a book, but if you're not a reader, it can be something else. Something that's inspired you recently, Cathy? Yeah, well, not recently. Something that everyone needs to be reading is a book from Carol Dweck about the growth mindset. That's the playbook we had to read at Microsoft, Carol Dweck. Oh, can you spell the surname? D-W-E-C-K-R, Carol Dweck. And this is how you embrace growth mindset, learning a learning mindset and lead with empathy.

52:09I think that's really, really, really, really one of the books that really forged my thought process. Satya has been a big fan of this and used this as his personal style. I read the book. I highly recommend it to everyone because it's really what I believe is great leadership. And that's really coming back to empathy, coming back of growing mindset and embracing. And in this moment, growing mindset is critical. Yes, absolutely. And what a great place to finish. So where can people sort of connect with you, Cathy, and keep an eye on what you guys are doing? LinkedIn is the best channel for me.

52:47I'm very active on LinkedIn. I'm very good at Twitter. Sorry about that. And I don't want to be good at Twitter. I'm good at LinkedIn, posting the news on LinkedIn, what's happening. It's a mix of, you know, what I see, a conversation with my team and my customer across Europe, Middle East and Africa, and also the latest and the greatest on service. So that's a good combo and a good mix. Fantastic. Well, Cathy, I've really enjoyed this conversation, genuinely. And so did I. And like I said to you earlier, I could go on all day. But thank you so much for doing this. It's been an absolute blast.

53:16Thank you, Gareth.

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