Colin Fleming of ServiceNow: Autonomous CRM is a complete paradigm shift in how we think about CRM in general

Last week at their Knowledge 2026 user conference ServiceNow rolled out a series of major announcements, including:

*. ServiceNow Otto: A single, conversational digital assistant for everyone to use at a company for any work-related request.

*. AI Control Tower:  A centralized dashboard to discover, observe, and secure all AI agents and systems across the enterprise. Key features include deep observability into agent reasoning and a "kill switch" to shut down agents that go "rogue".

*. Action Fabric: Described as a fundamental change to enterprise AI architecture, allowing any third-party AI agent (such as Anthropic Claude) to trigger and execute workflows directly within ServiceNow while maintaining all governance for enterprise approvals and audit controls.

There was a great deal more announcements made and details to check out, but while out there I also had a chance to sit down with ServiceNow CMO Colin Fleming to dig a little deeper into one of the other major announcements made last week around Autonomous CRM, and its role in the transition to the Agentic Business Era.

We covered a lot of ground during our conversation, recorded live on the exposition floor in Las Vegas during ServiceNow's Knowledge 2026 conference. But a few things I saw and heard during Knowledge last week really grabbed my attention included:

• The world is facing a labor shortage of 50 million "workers" by 2030
• As Bill McDermott put it during his keynote, Cybercrime is the third biggest economy behind the USA and China, generating a trillion dollars a month in "revenues".
• ServiceNow runs 100B workflows and 7 trillion transactions a year on their platform Those numbers are staggering...
• The commoditization of intelligence, driven by the widespread use of identical Large Language Models (LLMs), is shifting the value of information from the answer itself to the quality of the question and the integration of the output.
• The impact on enterprises of depending too heavily on probabilistic LLMs versus deterministic systems is a fundamental architectural conflict.
• LLMs are built for variability and interpretation, while enterprises are built for predictability, accountability, and auditability.
• Heavy reliance on probabilistic models without a deterministic "control layer" creates compounding risks in reliability, compliance, and cost.
• As far as any of the enterprise software vendor events I've been to or attended virtually so far this year, ServiceNow did the best job addressing the SaaS-pocalypse fears, even though it hasn't impacted their stock price as of yet
• Jensen Huang is probably the best person at addressing why the best enterprise software vendors are not all going to be swept away by vibe coders.  ServiceNow effectively integrated him into their opening keynote in a compelling manner to reinforce the case they presented during the week.

Below is a video and edited transcript of my conversation with Colin Fleming, followed by an edited transcript.  

Edited Transcript

Brent Leary: About two years ago, at Knowledge 2024, it was day one or two for you with the company.

Colin Fleming: Exactly right, yes.

Brent Leary: You came here to really give some boost to what was already going on here and message it in more of a CRM-ish kind of way. Generative was going on, agentic was not. Agentic is all we're talking about now.

Colin Fleming: It sure is, yeah.

Brent Leary:  When you couple that with the two years you've been here, how has agentic changed the way that you and ServiceNow look at CRM and how you want your customers to look at it?

Colin Fleming: Well look, I mean it's sort of cliché to say, but everything's changed in that two-year period, right? We couldn't even spell AI when we joined, when I joined the company two years, kidding of course…

But look, I think clearly the world has changed immensely and it's only accelerating, right? There's days where I wake up where I feel like we're on it, we've got it nailed, and then I wake up the next day and something's changed, right?

What a time to be in marketing is the way that I think about it. We have the opportunity to shape a narrative, to invent, to create, and you think about what we announced, these are crazy concepts that even six months ago weren't even considered. And that's how fast this place is moving.

We talked about ServiceNow’s entrance into CRM two years ago. We introduced yesterday Autonomous CRM, a complete paradigm shift in how we think about CRM in general, right?

Brent Leary: Talk about that a little bit more.

Colin Fleming: CRM is almost unrecognizable these days from the world that you and I know. When you think about it legacy CRM has been relegated to a database. It's now more in terms of orchestration and automation and thinking about true agentic AI. And of course, I think ServiceNow is incredibly well-positioned here.

We found great ways of bringing together our leadership on the IT side and the HR side into customer relationship management; it’s similar problems, and really looking at it from a fresh perspective.

I think the legacy CRM model has served the industry incredibly well, but we see it in the sentiment data across legacy CRM customers, they wanted something different. And so we've put a lot of work into trying to create that and drafting off where the ServiceNow platform has really enabled us to go.

Brent Leary: One of the other big things around what you guys are talking about is the AI Control Tower. I’ve heard about the autonomous/agentic business, autonomous CRM, Control Tower. Give me like a high-level view of how that all fits together to create this new vision of CRM.

Colin Fleming: Well, in those last two years we’ve talked a lot about what AI can do for your company and for ourselves as individuals, right? I’m more productive than ever, we’re moving faster than ever, all these amazing things and we’re here to celebrate that technology of course. But what's understated is what AI can do to your company. And the last like three or four months has really accelerated that conversation.

You look at what happened with Pocket OS and basically an entire company being deleted in nine seconds. Or what we saw with Meta where entire codebases are deleted. These are substantial things that when AI has entered to the enterprise, the stakes got way higher, right? And the idea of relying on probabilistic technology in a world where we need that determinism is not really a world that we can operate in.

And so we’re really looking at ServiceNow being incredibly well-positioned to be that company that thinks about “AI that thinks” and “workflows that act”. That for me is the happy place that we need to be operating in, and we’ve really thought about our entire portfolio in that vein.

The Control Tower is part of that. The opportunity to really think about looking at your entire AI landscape across your companies, whether it be things that have been professionally installed as a company or things that just went rogue by a certain department. To be able to look at that, have a kill switch handy if something’s going wrong, and really thinking about this as a true control tower.

For me, that’s an exciting moment, we would not have talked about that two years ago. But that is now front and center to the entire company’s strategy and that’s just the pace in which we’re moving.

Brent Leary: Another thing that’s front and center was the talk around governance and security. That's one of those things I think that alleviates some of the AI anxiety I’m sure your customers have and they start trying to figure all this stuff out.

So how does that governance conversation go when you’re talking to a big enterprise and how do they kind of bring that back to what they need from an autonomous CRM standpoint?

Colin Fleming: Look, I mean I think security is the biggest frontier for any of us right now. I think, which is why we’ve invested so heavily into security. We are not only in the security business, we had a billion and a half dollar security business up until recently. By bringing on RMS, by bringing on Veza, it's a completely different landscape for us because we're looking at the future and we see our customers that are adopting, we see these technologies, it all leads to being able to track non-human identity, right? These agents, we just install them. They don't do the background checks that we do as humans, they don't do any of these things, and so we need to be thinking about that. So Veza is a huge part of that non-human identity side. You think about devices, right? We’re going to have billions of agents and trillions of devices connected to our systems and our tools. We need to be able to track them, manage them, monitor them, monetize them, and really understand that in a different way. And so we’ve tried to look at this from a forward-looking perspective. Obviously, security is an incredibly dominant perspective and there's incredible companies in this space, but we see a new paradigm shift happening in security that we don't believe the industry has really woken up to yet and we're trying to lead that frontier for us.

Brent Leary: Now one of the things that you said the first when we saw you day two or one 2024 is you were brought here to really, you know, bring the CRM messaging to ramp everything up. Two years in, how you feeling about where you guys are with that?

Colin Fleming: I’m thrilled. I'm thrilled with where we are. I mean, CRM's a huge part of it, obviously in the two years I’ve been here we’ve entered CRM, we’ve entered security, we’ve billion-dollar businesses in these areas plus. And so we're not that that true David yet, you know what I mean, like we are an established company, a leader in these places. And so we've been able to really kind of create and invent. And I, you know for me, you we’ve spent a lot of time together, my the way I approach marketing is there's no playbook. My one of my core values is ingenuity. And it's been an unbelievable opportunity for the company, for myself, to really just think about enterprise software in a different way. I'm so lucky to have Bill McDermott as a CEO who kind of lets us cook and lets us go, right? And I think that we've been able to do things that others haven't been bold enough to do in a way, which I'm really proud of. But look, the company's really, really, really on it. I think obviously we see this with the SaaS-pocalypse, there’s all kinds of narratives. But when you look behind us and you look at the amazing attendance of this conference, you look at the evangelism around the company, I saw somebody that walked up to me yesterday with a tattoo, a ServiceNow tattoo. You know you're doing something right.

Brent Leary: Things are moving really fast. Two years ago we weren't talking at all about agents and now that’s all we’re talking about. So if you had to guess, what are we going to be talking about a year from now?

Colin Fleming: I don't know the time horizon because I think it really depends on company's risk appetite and adoption, but it's pretty clear that we’re going to have more agents than humans involved in workforce. Which is a pretty daunting thing to think about, right?

If you saw Bill’s keynote we talked about the declining birthrate. We talked about the global workforce, there’s going to be a 50 million employee deficit of people in the workforce. How do you solve that? You solve that with agents, you solve that with robots, you solve that with devices in ways. And so there's going to have to be a new class of companies that helps orchestrate and govern that. And it’s so clearly that’s the frontier.

It is weird to be sitting in an enterprise software conference talking about declining birthrates, but that's the world that we live in. It really is. And so if we live in a world where there's eight billion agents, there’s going to be a completely new paradigm of companies that have to exist in that world.