ServiceNow's Tzitzon on AI's pace, teams and being multi-dimensional

Nick Tzitzon, Vice Chairman at ServiceNow, said AI's pace of change shouldn't upend good business decisions, managing teams well and becoming multi-dimensional as an employee and overall human.

Tzitzon, speaking at Constellation Research's Futures Forum, touched on multiple topics. The forum features 120 public company CEOs and board members that collectively have more than $500 billion in revenue. The three-day forum is operating under Chatham House rules for many of the decision-makers and buy side.

Here's a look:

The breakneck AI pace. Tzitzon said:

"The speed is so different. We have some of the brightest minds in enterprise AI and sometimes they give presentations, including in our board meetings, and during the presentation the technology changes during the presentation. I've never seen it where in a presentation, a presenter will go back to the last slide and say this isn't the best way to think about this anymore. You can imagine the pressure that it puts on management teams."

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Everything has changed, but business sense hasn't. Tzitzon said:

"AI has become the answer to everything, even before people know what the question is. If you throw AI at it enough, then people are going to think that you're all over this and so clearly, it's gonna be right. That's wrong. AI covers up for a lot of cardinal sins against the basic business fundamentals. This is why boards have a unique role. If it doesn't feel right in the boardroom, chances are it isn't right."

SaaS is dead? Not surprisingly, Tzitzon didn't agree and had a simple answer. "Companies will go away where the customers don't like it and don't want to pay for it. That's when companies will go away."

Culture amid AI upheaval. "AI can make certain things that were labor intensive before less labor intensive now. But how does anybody expect to keep a motivated and inspired culture if your people are literally sitting around waiting for the layoff notices to come? That's not a winning argument. Honesty is a winning argument," said Tzitzon. "We may need to think about the roles we have people in, but we're not going to throw out people because we want short term margin expansion. We want to invest in people. We want to give them a great opportunity to be part of this AI revolution, and we want to be a growth organization. Growth will always win over efficiency."

Advice for his 20-year-old self. Tzitzon said:

"It's funny because it's the same advice, I give to people in mid-career who ask me. People who are one dimensional, who become wholly owned subsidiaries of the logo on their business card, who do nothing but the job in front of them, those people effectively lock themselves into a relegation of someone else's creation. You're never going to be more than what your employer says you are. People who do other things, people who volunteer for a political campaign, people who volunteer for a nonprofit, people who maybe work for the Sharks boosters, On the weekends, do something other than what you're doing day to day, and make yourself multi-dimensional. That advice has always served me well."