Bill McDermott wants credit for building a panic button. ServiceNow's CEO says his company matters more now because businesses need someone to shut down the AI agents they probably shouldn't have deployed in the first place. That's like an arsonist selling fire extinguishers.
The pitch is simple. Deploy autonomous agents across your enterprise. Watch them make decisions without human oversight. Then when one goes rogue and starts doing whatever the f*ck rogue AI agents do, hit the kill switch ServiceNow so thoughtfully provided. Problem solved. Relevancy defended.
McDermott frames this as ServiceNow becoming "increasingly important" to businesses. He's not wrong. If you're the guy selling both the disease and the cure, you've got a solid business model. Drug dealers figured this out decades ago.
The kill switch itself is the best part. It exists because someone at ServiceNow sat in a conference room and asked what happens when an AI agent decides to do something catastrophically stupid. The answer was apparently not "maybe we shouldn't do this" but rather "let's add a button." Classic enterprise software thinking. Build the problem. Sell the solution. Invoice quarterly.
Retail traders will read this headline and think ServiceNow stock is about to moon because AI safety features sound impressive. They'll ignore that the feature exists solely because the underlying technology is dangerous enough to need an emergency shutoff. That's not a selling point. That's a warning label.
McDermott is defending relevancy nobody questioned until he started defending it.
Photo by on Unsplash
Leave a Comment