Name: ServiceNow Career and Ecosystem Trends in 2026
Uploaded: 2026-03-02T16:31:25.076Z
Duration: 30 min 12 s
Description: ServiceNow Career and Ecosystem Trends in 2026

Transcript for "ServiceNow Career and Ecosystem Trends in 2026": Hello, everyone, and welcome to another Malvern this time with a very special guest that I'll get into in a moment. But thank you very much for joining us today. This session had nearly 300 people signed up, so I'll give it a second just to let people dial in. But let us know where you're dialing in from in the chat. We've got the chat box, and then we've also got the q and a box next to it. So if you have any questions for our special guests, then feel free to drop them in the q and a box, and we'll try to get as many of them done as possible at the end. Thank you for joining. Those that have sunny Wolverhampton. Look at that. It's sunny London as well after forty days of rain or whatever it was since the start of the year. So right. Good to see you guys. Hey, Mark. Brooklyn, New York. Lovely. Welcome to Rome. Alright. Let's get started. So today, we are gonna be talking about ServiceNow career and ecosystem trends. So we all know that the only constant in the technology ecosystem is change, and we are seeing a huge amount of it at the moment. There's also a lot of scaremongering around the AI bubble, the death of staff death of SaaS, sorry, and just which of your skills are gonna be relevant over the next few years. But in my humble opinion, we are living in very exciting times. I think the AI bubble and the death of SaaS are majorly overstated, especially when it comes to mission critical systems like ServiceNow. You're not gonna buy a code ServiceNow. And in terms of your skills, well, I think this is one area which we are gonna see a huge change. Some skills are gonna be commoditized, and others are gonna become more valuable. So with that being said, we have the perfect person to talk us through this upcoming shift. So please welcome Pascal Fontaneta, VP of global learning solutions at ServiceNow. Hey, Ben. How are you? Hey, Pascal. Doing good. Thank you. How about yourself? Good. Good. Yeah. Nice to see you. Thanks for having. me. Is the sun shining where you are? It's okay. It's a little overcast. I'm in the Dallas suburbs, and so I'll take it, though. Like, you know, folks in the Northeast are still buried under a little bit of snow, so it's it's every day I wake up is a good day is how I think of it. Yeah. Great. Well, thank you so much for joining us today. Just to introduce myself properly, my name is Ben McCarthy. I'm founder and CEO of of SFP Ventures, which includes a number of tech media websites. And, yeah, I'll be your host today. So let's kick off with this one for Pascal. Can you briefly share your intro introduction to who you are as well as your journey at ServiceNow? Sure. This is a layup, so thanks for letting me start easy. I'm a learning nerd. I've been in learning development and ops for twenty plus years. I'll answer this in two ways. Like, one, like, why did I get into this? Early on in my career, I had you know, I probably would have been, a philosophy or a theology major, but I I didn't wanna be poor. No offense to any philosophy. Like, I have some really great friends who are great for a cup of coffee, but, philosophy doesn't really pay their bills. And so I found industrial organizational psychology, which I thought was this, like, perfect marriage of, you know, my passion for people and kind of, like, the how we interact in the work environment, and then I could afford, you know, support supporting your family. And so I've been lucky and fortunate to lead learning and development at some great companies like Google and and Meta and ServiceNow for the past three and a half years, including, you know, design, delivery, operations, credentialing, certification. So if you're on ServiceNow University, and you like what you see, it goes through my org. If you don't like it, yeah, feel free to give me some feedback, but, hopefully, there's more folks that, are enjoying it than that. Yeah. Amazing. Thank you very much. So so ServiceNow University, I believe, was launched at Knowledge last year. Is that correct? It it was. And for those of you who were there, I mean and I don't wanna, I, give any there, so I should know. yeah. So so, Ben, did you spend a lot of time on the floor space at all or no? I did. Yeah. I got a tour around the ServiceNow University area, so it's very impressive. I I did a did a lot got my little avatar thing, so it's good fun. That's cool. So I was gonna say I don't wanna toot my own horn, but I guess that's what these things are for. So I will it was great. It exceeded expectations from every from the when we opened every morning until when we closed, we literally had a line in the section. Now this year, we're planning some things to make it even bigger and better, but we wanna avoid the lines and increase the the flow. So it it's it was it was a smashing success, and I think we're just gonna build on it for this year. Yeah. Fantastic. So ServiceNow University kind of, you know, kind of, you know, does what it says on the tin. It's all about skills. It's all about learning. Why did you start ServiceNow University? Was there, like, a moment, a catalyst, or, you know, what was the kind of reason behind this huge project? So when you log in, you you get this thing. It says the University of You. So if you're named Ben, it'll say, like, Ben University. Or if it's Pasquale, it's Pasquale University. That's the ethos behind Service Cloud University in the sense that so many of these platforms are arduous or burdensome. You know? And don't get me wrong. We've made huge strides, but we wanna continue to go in that direction. You I was at a conference a couple of weeks ago, and I'm stealing this from someone, but I don't remember who it is. So if you're watching, put it in the chat. But he said something like, you know, all of the curricula for Harvard University and Yale has been online for, like, I don't know, let's say a decade. Right? It comes there. And why didn't we have a huge increase in folks that are, you know, the equivalent of a Harvard PhD just because they did it on their own? The answer is is because the burden is still on the learner. Right? So a lot of these platforms still have curated content and all the things, but we're still forcing the person to, like, go in there, figure it out, click through. And we wanna get to the point where ServiceNow University, the university of you, knows who you are, like, what your aspirations are, what skills you have, what skills you need, like, what you wanna get promoted to, and then create a unique and dynamic learning experience that's tailored to help you get there, the wind beneath your wings. And so and, also, you know, maintaining this like, the playful theory of of learning. You know, when we know that we can fail in a safe space, it's more exciting, and and we and we learn. And so you you when you compare it to other platforms, you'll see that it's much more playful and vibrant, and we go out of our way to hopefully, not just make it informative and educational, but exciting. Yeah. Amazing. Thank you so much. And maybe this is a good time. You know, there has been a lot of talk about death of SaaS, which I can imagine for the many tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people working in the SaaS industry, that can be a a little bit scary. And I'm sure on this call, there's a mixture of people who have got, you know, ten years ServiceNow experience where they're just starting, maybe they haven't started. But, you know, with all this talk at the moment, why should someone kind of you know, why should someone pick ServiceNow to start their careers or maybe continue with ServiceNow as their, you know, as their tech career? Wow. That I was waiting for that one. So I was, like, two, three questions in. We haven't talked about AI yet, so we're here. Let's start with I think that's a two part question. Right? So the the SaaSpocalypse, like, is it a real thing? And for those of you that are you know, I am, like, down the AI rabbit hole. I always joke my wife thinks I'm having an affair, which I GPT. I'm not. I love my wife dearly. But look. These tools are amazing. I I we, you know, we use you name it. Right? Whether it's Claude or Copilot, and and then we have a bunch of AI built into our our platform. I think the idea that it's going to displace the platforms is is overblown, and I'll explain to you why. So our it's really good timing. Our chief product offer product officer, Amit Zayvi, sent a note on this, like, last week, and he used a really good metaphor. So think of some of the things that you build with LLMs if you're, like, vibe coding are point solutions. So I don't know. You might have GPS in your car, right, which before GPS existed, that was revolutionary. It's like, oh, man. I used to have this map. I'd have to figure it out. When you make a wrong turn, you'd have to look at the map again. Or now you just walk in and this beautiful symphony of things happen to get you to from point a to point b. But that's just one solution. Right? And so when you think of the ServiceNow platform, we have we pretty much automate and make life easier for so many workflows across the business, whether it's CRM or ITSM or, you know, financial services, all of the things. And so think of that almost like, you know, to stick with a metaphor, air traffic control. Right? You're not just managing one thing from point a to point b. You're managing this sort of symphony of activity across your entire organization. And the the last point on this part of the question, I think it's important. So apologies, Ben, if I'm a little bit long winded on this one, but there's so much news on this that I think it's it's important for folks to hear is that if you did say, okay. I'm gonna, you know, bootstrap this or, you know, in my organization have a bunch of ChatGPT solutions. Like, when something goes wrong, who do you go to? Right? And so you have a organization that's, you know, tried and and true that you can you know, you one throw up to joke or one person to go to. And lastly, the decades of experience on these platforms, you know, every time you have a great experience, you thumbs up. And when you don't, maybe if something doesn't work the way that it's intended, you thumbs it down. And there's an army of very intelligent people trying to refine that. Whereas if you just build something over the weekend, you could probably refine it, but you don't have that infrastructure that's making the platform fun and and and great. So that's what I would say. So let me pause there. Does that let you know where I stand on the SaaS populace, Ben? Does that answer your question? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. 100%. Thank you very. much, and I completely agree. And then in terms of why picking us, I think this is kind of, you know, if I drew a Venn diagram, it overlaps with my last answer in the sense of there's so many players out there that are strong, but they're very much point solutions. They do one thing or two things very, very well. And so when you're looking to you know, whether you're a customer and you wanna get, you know, better informed or, more dangerous, I would say, on a ServiceNow platform or you're, you know, a reseller or you're one of our partners, I think knowing that you can basically solve any problem that, an enterprise has with the ServiceNow platform makes it really attractive compared to some other more niche tools. Yeah. No. A 100%. And completely agree. You know, I was kind of running through the scenario in my head like, oh, what if someone did wanna get rid of a, you know, big platform like ServiceNow? Like, how many developers and what kind of project team would they need in that enterprise company? And how much resource and time and stress would it take to build the ServiceNow platform and then support it for the next, you know, decade. You know, I'm sure businesses have other things to do than that, to be honest. Yeah. And and, you know, we used to talk about we used to be talking about technical debt when you have, like, a bolt on ecosystem where you have all of these tools. And we hear. these success stories all the time with our customers when they're go from, you know, a 100 tools to, like, maybe 12, you know, and and and ServiceNow is gonna not gonna displace everything. Like, we work with any platform, any database. But imagine, you know, prompt debt is the new technical debt. So imagine you have an environment where everything that you're running on is created through prompts and vibe coding, that's you know, could get out of hand pretty, pretty quickly. And so anchoring on a tried and true platform like ServiceNow, I think, makes you more future proof. Yeah. No. A 100%. And kind of why we're why we're on this topic. You know, and and we kind of wanna talk a bit about this webinar about skills, you know, ones that may be becoming less relevant or more or more relevant. But, you know, there's obviously a lot of talk around entry level roles at the moment. And and, you know, I'd I'd there was obviously a huge kind of shock to the system when AI came out and people were saying, you know, entry entry jobs aren't gonna be there anymore. A lot of companies now are kind of doing one eighty because they've laid people off, they've realized actually they, you know, they need they need these kind of more junior people. So, you know, do you have a view on that in terms of, you know, kind of know? Because I could you could combine kind of those things. Right? Like, if some skills are becoming more relevant and some are less, you know, what can these entry level people be doing to really demonstrate value when they join the job market? So this is a big issue, and we think a lot about it. Right? And because my job is not just the platform. It's yeah. Well, I'll take a step. Philosophically, the reason I've devoted my life and my life my blood, sweat, and tears to l and d is not because, you know, just for the fun of it or I wanna spend time in spreadsheets all day or all of the things that we do in business. It's because it is vehicle that empowers people through education to, you know, buy a house or pay, you know, pay for their vacation and all of the beautiful things. And so I I really think the way that we enable p you know, people, especially early in the career, like, we don't wanna crash and burn their dreams before they even started their career. Like, the the metaphor I like to or not metaphor, but story here is, like, if you use legal firms as an example, the reason people spend a lot of money or pay a high premium for a legal firm is because, guess what, they've got a bunch of really experienced attorneys, let's say 20 experienced attorneys. But all of those folks were paralegals at one point, right, because they went through all that time. But now a lot of companies are just skipping that first step altogether. Like, why would I hire a paralegal? I could have one of these LMs do that work quicker, faster, cheaper. And so this is a there's two sides to this coin. Like, what should organizations like ours do to invest in people that are early in career? And then for the folks that are listening, like, what should you do, right, if you are early in the career? And so what we're doing is we're thinking long and hard around, like, what is the curated offering that we can give for folks that are early in career? I think, you know, at one point, you'll probably ask me, like, well, how do you get started on ServiceNow? Where should I go? I won't I won't steal your thunder there, Ben. We can get to that. But there's ways that you can on the platform, we've packaged things for you to get started with. And then the second thing is to make yourself useful. You know, the you can future proof yourself by playing with AI every day. Right? And so the metaphor I like to use for this is, you know, imagine you have, I don't know, a caveman with no tools, and then right to the right of them, you've got someone with a hammer and a screwdriver. That's pretty much that's better than stone tools. Right? And then you look over to the right, and there's someone, you know, say a lady with a power drill and a power saw, and you're like, oh, man. I thought I was cool because I had a hammer. And then just when you think you're amazing, you look to the right, and there's, you know, someone using, like, a three d printing tool to print a house or whatever. Like, none of these things are inherently bad or good. Right? Would you as an employer, would you rather have the person that knows how to use all of those tools or knows how to use just a screwdriver? And so when you pick up every day, I think, you know, you should be actively thinking about, like, how do I increase the skills available to me in my toolbox? And folks that, you know, Jensen Huang, the CEO of NVIDIA said, you know, AI won't take your job. Someone who uses AI will take your job. And so I know it was very long winded, but I I think folks need to have that fire in their belly, that passion, with the pace of innovation that they've gotta learn as much as they can and stay on top of it. Yeah. Yeah. Great answer. Sorry. A question just came in actually. And and if you guys do have any questions, feel free to drop them in, and we'll try and get to them at the end or or throughout. But Grace just said she has gone through the ServiceNow University, which is a great resource, and also the rise up sixteen week program. It's very challenging finding an entry level level opportunity. Most roles are based outside of Spain where she lives. Any advice for entry level jobs? So the RISE UP program is tremendous. It you know, we have basically a a program that works with various universities or placement, platforms to work with, you know, underprivileged or underrepresented communities to help find them, roles in the ServiceNow ecosystem. I I would say if you're it would've been my advice if you weren't involved in Rise Up, and there's a you should have a POC on that side of the house that can help you. But if you our career site is always great. And then, you know, I hate to just point you to LinkedIn, but there's a lot there too. I mean, know, there's nothing I can say that will automatically you know, we could we could even go into, you know, how you how you tailor your LinkedIn profile or your resume to get past some of these bots that that scan resumes. But I just saw a thing in mind, which was like it's like bots talking to bots. So for a while before the advent of AI, people would try to get their resume tailored so it could get past the bots that are reviewing resumes. But now we're using AIs as consumers, so they're refining their resumes with AI. Bots are using it. It's like, are we removing humans from the loop, which is scare that part of it's scary. I don't have a perfect answer for that, but I would say is I would spend a lot of time tailoring to the specific specific role that you're looking at. I think one of the the advice that I give to folks that are early career in my life are don't just, like, blast your resume to, you know, every job. You've gotta think through what is this rec specifically and how do I tailor my background specifically for this role. Yeah. Definitely. I I think that there's also a lot of ServiceNow events. I'm not sure of the specific ones in Spain, but, obviously, you've got the user groups. Right? And then you've got the world forums that that travel around. So those are some events which could be pretty good to network as well. Yeah. To that end but if if you Google, world ServiceNow world forums, you can see where those are going on. And, hopefully, there's one going on in a place near you. And to that point, just before we move on from that, I'm like, it's not just us that are is there. So all all of our partners are there too. So they'll a lot will have booths, and you can just strike up conversations. And they're all hungry for talent. So and we do them regionally because not everyone can make it to our largest conference that we do in May in Vegas called Knowledge. And so, hopefully, that gives you an opportunity where something's nearish to you to go explore. Yeah. No. It sounds good. And and and just one more point on that. Like, you know, I've I've been tracking the entry level job, the job market in general in tech for, like, quite a long time, and, you know, it is hard for everyone out there as we've just spoken about entry level. Like, you know, there was the huge COVID boom and then the subsequent crash in layoffs that I think we're still recovering from plus layer of AI over that with employees. Not sure whether they should be hiring entry level or not. But I think as as Pascal has just said and, know, a lot of other people agree, you know, you need to focus on entry levels. Like, otherwise, who is your workforce gonna be in in the next few years? Cool. Alright. So let's, move on. And if you got any other questions, please drop them in. Let's move over to the AI bubble then. This is obviously a a huge topic at the moment. So, you know, do you think we are in a bubble? Do you think we're kind of under or overestimating how disruptive this is gonna be in three to five years? You know, how how do you look at these things? Well, if I could tell the future, I'd, you know, I'd play a lottery. So this is a I don't know exactly, but my gut my gut says that it's the SaaS apocalypse is is overblown. I I I don't know if we're in a bubble per se. Like, I'm gonna get the models wrong, but one of the stats that stood out to me is that that they're directionally accurate. Claude code, the the efficiency or, like, basically, the capacity of Claude code from, I think, from December to January, like, was two x with the model releases. And then when they went from that to four OPUS 4.6 in from January to February, I think it was, like, five x in terms of the computing power efficiency. Yep. And so we've we've essentially broken Moore's Law. And I I don't know about you. Like, it's super exciting. Like, I'm giving my self goosebumps, which, like, tells me complete nerd that I am. But, like, who it's like, every time I'm playing with these tools, like, it feels like I'm growing an extra arm. You know? Like, it's so great. And I think that's the way that you should look at it and, you know, how much more useful you can be. Like, even for small companies, you know, you you used to need to maybe outsource a lot of work where you can do some of this thinking in house. I think I I'm bullish on what what this means for us. We well, we can uplevel our work. So, you know, if if they're our our CEO talks a lot about soul crushing work. Everyone has a part of their job that they absolutely hate. Right? Myself included. And so we're getting to the point where we can delegate some of that to AI. And and not even with autonomous agents, like, you know, OpenClaw, I know they're trying to work to make that safer environment, but where this it works with a human in the loop but in the background. And so what do we do as humans, as professionals, when that work has been delegated to agents? Right? How much better can we be? We what we end up doing is right. And if you put your sales ad on for a second, like, the drudgery of, like, having to, you know, put stuff in the tool and, like, do all the comply like, well, maybe we won't we won't delegate the compliance stuff to agents. We still have to do the humans have to do that. But but if you're no longer doing that, then you can spend time with customers. Right? You can spend time with each other. You can have the build the relationships that matter. And so I think it's just gonna it's gonna create almost like a renaissance. If we can offload the the full crushing work, then as humans, we can we can focus on relationships. Yeah. No. A 100%. I I do completely agree. Like, I do tend to be quite optimistic and yeah. But, I mean, you know, people compare this to the .com bubble. Right? But in in the .com era, no one was making any money. It was you know, all these companies were new, but you look now and OpenAI's revenue is 20,000,000,000 or something and Claude's is 10 and, you know, Google and yourselves and, you know, all other a lot of tech companies make a lot of money from AI, so I don't think, you know, it's kind of a a bubble in the in the classic sense. And I you know, the way I I don't really understand compute and, you know I mean, I understand at basic level, obviously. But the the way that I think of it is if you look at I use ChatGPT Pro, and if if you look at it on, an instant model versus a thinking model that thinks for half an hour or something, give it a complex task. Like, it's just insane, the output. Like, the you know, everything is sourced. It's all accurate. There's no hallucinations. So, yeah, I am I am the same. Very bullish. And, Beth, you you again, and and you didn't tell me I had a limit on a metaphor, so apologies if I've gone over it. But that's just how my brain works, I think, in pictures. But I made a post a few months ago on, like, the fact that they I don't wanna just paint, like, a rosy picture. Like, everything is gonna be amazing. There will be some disruption. But the example that I used in a post that I made on LinkedIn, I don't even know, a few months ago, was lamplighters in, like, medieval England. Right? Like, you know, when you had instead of electric before electricity, you had lights where people would go by in the evenings and light them with a fire and then turn them off in the morning. Of course, with the advent of electricity, like, that role no longer exists. And so if you were doing that, if you're making a living doing that, that job doesn't exist. That being said, electricity was created. And what happened? You could have light bulbs in places that you otherwise wouldn't before. And so if that person, skilled themselves and took the initiative and said, oh, before, I just had this, you know, these streets that I would do, but now people have these in their houses. Like, it it created an industry that didn't exist there before. And so there's things that will come up that we don't even know are possible yet because I think AI will create just like in that example, will create, you know, industries that we don't know are coming. And as professionals, we have to think to ourselves, alright. What am I passionate about, and can I get skilled in that that new thing? Yeah. Completely. They also used to have a pea shooters that shoot shop peas at Windows to wake people up before alarm clocks. So alarm clocks came along. Didn't need those anymore. Alright. A couple of questions left then before before we have to end. But I wanted to talk about, CRM. So, you know, big announcement from from ServiceNow, last year was announcement of CRM. You know, some people might think this, you know, this is a technology that's been around for a very long time. Like, why why now in the era of AI? So, why is ServiceNow so well positioned to compete in the CRM space? Yeah. So I don't know if this and we we made an announcement. I don't know how much of it was like we're always innovating a project. So that on our product, so that part of it's new. But we were just putting a name to something that we already do. Like, we've always had, you know, client relationship management. I think the the reason that we're uniquely positioned to to win in this space is because a lot of the tools that are great really focus on the front end. Right? So it's like customer interaction, logging that, making sure that you have that pipeline. Of course, we do that well too. But back to what I was talking about earlier, behind that, you know, that that's not where the customer interaction begins and ends. After you have that, whether they they buy or don't buy, let's let's just assume it's a buy scenario, all of the other things that happen in the enterprise. Right? So, like, implementation or deployment or IT solutions or security. And so the great thing about ServiceNow is it has that entire gamut that can be offered. So I think that's really our competitive advantage. And not to mention the pace of innovation that we have that is, you know, second to none. You know, I I give big credit to our engineering team that they'd like, they don't sleep every every month. I get something where I'm like, wow. That's cool. We gotta figure out how we're gonna bring that to market. But so that I mean, I think that's the feather in our cap that it's not just that CRM piece. It's how it plugs into the wider ServiceNow ecosystem. Yeah. Fantastic. And great for people on the call as well. You know, there's nothing better than attaching your career to a company that is growing very fast and releasing new products. You know, great for a career, keeps things interesting. Alright. So final question then, unless there's none from the audience. But what's one piece of advice you would give to ServiceNow professionals this year? You know, a lot's changing. We've talked about a lot. What would your what would your one bit advice be for kind of professional professionals of all level all levels this year in 2026? I would say own your own career. Know, where I thought you were gonna go with this is, like, how can I get started on ServiceNow University? And I might get maybe that's just the way that I'll take the question. So whether, you're. early in your career and you're ServiceNow curious and you're you're on this call, like, how do I get started? I would just go on the platform. There's career journeys where we've curated a bunch of, content for you. And in addition, we've actually, I think there's metrics there on the average income. I think it's in US dollars, but I'm sure you could do the conversion for that job, for that role. Right? And so you can think to yourself, this is how long I think this is gonna take me. This is potentially how much I can make. That's that's super easy. And on the flip side, there's also, like, a AI learning guide. So if you go in the bottom right, there's a little star. And so it opens up just like a chat window for, you know, any LLM that you're used to. And you can ask it questions like, hey. I'm at this point in my I'm in the middle of my career, and I've got my, you know, PMP certification. Like, what should I take next? Like, you can have a conversation the same way that you would with your favorite LLM and get guidance on what you should take. And and those were two big advancements, I think, in terms of making the information on the platform easier to find and more digestible. And then, you know, a huge effort on also modularizing content, so, to make it easier to consume. But I I think that's the easiest way is to get in and and spend time there. And then the one that's not, you know, necessarily ServiceNow focused is just, like, be relentless about your pursuit of AI kind of upskilling. You know, every morning, at least consume five, ten minutes of, you know, what's new in AI to to make sure that you're not left behind. Yep. Great. Thank you so much, Pascal. And that brings us perfectly to the end. I can't see any questions. So, yeah, thank you so much for attending, everyone. This has been great. Pascal, this has been amazing. Thank you so much for joining us today. I'm guessing you're gonna be at Knowledge. If anyone's also attending, they can see you there from there. Yeah. Yeah. If you're at Knowledge, if you're making the trip to Vegas, I will be there, and I'll be presenting at a couple of sessions. And so I'll be on the agenda too, you can come find me that way, or you can find me in the ServiceNow university space running around like a madman trying to make sure everyone has a a good experience. Cool. Fantastic. Well, thank you so much, Pascal, and thank you so much for everyone for attending. We'll see. you on the next webinar. Bye bye. Bye.