Bill McDermott

You spent a decade building a company so singular you had to invent the language for it—“a class of one,” “Rule of 55+,” the AI control tower for business reinvention. Every word landed. We think there is one more you have been circling the whole time—and it is yours, not ours, to say.

A Class of One, Still Missing Its Noun

On your Q4 FY24 earnings call you told analysts that ServiceNow’s innovation, growth, and profitability put the company “in a class of one.” You were naming a category without spending the word for it. The founders who define categories drill one piece of vocabulary for years, until the market forgets anyone introduced it—Benioff with “cloud,” Nadella with “intelligent cloud,” Huang with “accelerated computing.” The thing is already built. The word is the last part of the work.

The Distance Is the Words, Not the Work

You already speak in the register of infrastructure—“Rule of 55+,” “mission-critical,” “elite-level execution.” The instinct is exact. Yet the market still reads ServiceNow as a SaaS application and prices it that way, while the infrastructure companies it most resembles—Visa, Mastercard, ASML—carry materially higher multiples on the same kind of economics. The distance is narrative, not performance. Nadella moved Microsoft by changing the words, not the numbers. A category name would simply let the market price what ServiceNow has already become.

The Category Is Unnamed, and the Moment Is Yours

The category does not have a name yet—and the proof of why it needs one is in plain sight. MIT’s NANDA research found that the large majority of enterprise AI pilots fail to scale, because they run without an operating picture of how work actually flows. ServiceNow is that picture, and has been for years. This is not a race to win against anyone—the market is wide enough for everyone in it. It is simply a true thing waiting to be said plainly, and no one alive is better positioned to say it than you.