Colin Fleming of ServiceNow: We are a CRM Company in the Age of Agentic AI

We always enjoy having Colin Fleming join us on the CRM Playaz show, and we really enjoyed catching up with him now that he's settled into his role as chief marketing officer of ServiceNow after being introduced eight months ago at the Knowledge24 event.

In this short clip we find out why the company is rebranding as a hashtag#CRM company in the midst of the rapid and significant impact that AI in all its forms, especially agentic AI, is having on the industry. We also get a glimpse into how ServiceNow's focus on strategic partnerships with companies like NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Genesys assists when significant yet surprising industry developments like DeepSeek happen.

Below the clip is an edited transcript ov the conversation.

Brent Leary: When you think about what's going on now with all the AI stuff and agentic AI it feels like CRM once again is evolving; some might say it's transforming. Why at this point in time do you think it was important [for ServiceNow] to start framing things in the context of CRM vs. the other verbiage that was out there?

Colin Fleming: I'm trying to be the most approachable enterprise software company we possibly can. If you had interfaced with us six months ago, you'd be greeted with hundreds of SKUs and lots of four letter acronyms.

They're wonderful products, don't get me wrong. They're incredible. But we thought there was a better way of communicating it. We've simplified that to six core solutions; CRM being one of them. And I do think that it is important to show up where our customers are.

So the game is completely changed with agentic AI. And obviously with the freshness of the data with the agentic,you’ve got to be able to move rapidly. I already have customers autonomously making decisions with AI agents on our platform today.

We think CRM will evolve to be more agentic in the future, in the near-term.

Brent Leary: You talk about the partnerships that you have, and I think that's one of the strong suits that ServiceNow has. One of the first in this industry to partner up with NVIDIA and done what you've done. And of course you talked about Microsoft. And I look at what you’re doing with Genesys.  

How do you work with your partners when things like DeepSeek happen? And and how do you handle or manage that from a customer's perspective? I'm guessing customers have a lot of questions when stuff like that happens.

Colin Fleming: I think it's one of the benefits of having such a strong partnership focus. We're an open platform, and no matter what the world throws at us or what changes, we can evolve, and we can move. It is the cleanest single-pane-of-glass platform I have ever seen. And our ability to move at rapid speed is a value for us.

The DeepSeek thing was a big deal because it shifted the focus from hardware and from the core strategies to more of the applications layer. We are absolutely in the first inning of this. Nobody knows what's going to happen next. And anybody tells you that they do is BS.

This idea of agentic AI has happened in the last eight months, and it's been incredible to see. But the pace in which we've been able to react to it is a great example of what happens when you have a clean platform.

DeepSeek is going to be a remnant of the past in just a couple of weeks when the next thing comes out. But it's pretty clear that the winds are shifting aggressively. And we believe that you need a platform to shift with the direction of the winds, if that makes sense. And that's what we're focused on.