And yeah, so more to come on where GenAI goes for us, but rest assured, ServiceNow is going to be a winner in the GenAI space, and we’re extremely excited about pipeline build, and where we are today.
Samad Samana: Great, and Bill, if I could squeeze one in for you, you’ve talked about how much interest and buzz that’s been generated, and how it’s increased the velocity of conversations. When you think about your Board-level conversations, are you seeing that the budget that’s being carved out for spend on GenAI, is that being taken away from other parts of the overall IT budget, or is that, hey, this is a strategic imperative, and we need to find the money, whether we’re growing our IT budget or not? Just how are they thinking about that — those dollars and where they’re trying to grow?
Bill McDermott: Yeah, Samad, the CEOs all have Boards of Directors, and they don’t want to show up without a GenAI plan. So, this is a CEO-level decision, and I think that is why we meet with so many CEOs and the C-Suite is now completely embedded in the ServiceNow go-to-market plan, and it’s working beautifully. What they are doing is as follows. According to IDC, the IT budget this year would have been about 3.5% spend, and next year, it’s expected to go to, instead of incrementally increasing 3.5%, which is your typical year, it’s expected, according to IDC, to incrementally go up 7%, and that’s the IT budget itself. What I believe is going to happen, and based upon the CEO discussion that I’m having, and also based on my own way of thinking, I would very much like to take the position of looking at the world through the customers’ eyes, and on them, 7% may or may not get it done.
I might look to G&A functions to further fuel this generative AI revolution because this is really about business transformation, and truly transforming the way you run your company, and it’s not a nice-to-have IT project. I do think that is one of the — interesting question you have because, I think it’s one of the reasons why I have said repeatedly the IT strategy has become the business strategy because digital transformation is an end-to-end imperative now generative AI across platforms that matter, and is only a few and we are one of them is really to me, going to get a very nice tailwind investment in 2024 regardless of the macro.
Samad Samana: Great. I really appreciate you guys taking my questions. Thank you.
Bill McDermott: My pleasure, Samad. Thank you.
Gina Mastantuono: Thanks, Samad.
Operator: We’ll take our next question from Derrick Wood with TD Cowen.
Derrick Wood: Oh, great, thanks for taking my questions. I guess, either for Bill or CJ, but I was hoping you could expand on your new AI Lighthouse program with NVIDIA and Accenture. You guys announced this initiative a couple months ago. It’d be great just to get a bit more color on the undertakings around this program, and how these particular partners are helping to drive more kind of generative AI investments on the ServiceNow platform.
Bill McDermott: Yes, Derrick, you know, I’ll start off, and then CJ can build on it. I’d like to first acknowledge NVIDIA, in particular, has been such a great partner, really taking their fantastic GPU technology, and then working hand-in-glove with them on fine-tuning these large language models, especially beginning in IT, but even more recognized that one of the great brands, and great companies the world is using ServiceNow, to transform their company on our platform with generative AI is such a complement. And so, I just want to say thank you, Jensen. Thank you, NVIDIA, for being a great partner. And yes, with regards to Accenture, and Julie and so forth, we are really doing some great things with Accenture. They are a fantastic partner, and we’re building now generative AI use cases across 300 different customers with our ecosystem, and that doesn’t even touch on the broader pipeline.
