[Amit Ahuja] You're in for a treat. I'm actually very, very excited and pleased to introduce Colin Fleming to the stage. He's going to share ServiceNow's Experience journey, but also his personal journey, which is awesome, by the way. You're going to hear a lot of great things. But let me introduce Colin. [Music] [Video] Only ServiceNow connects every corner of your business putting AI to work for people. Every corner? Every corner, Nick. So, Kate in HR can focus on people, not process. I actually, I have a question. If you have to be sick to take a sick day Patty in IT is using AI agents to deal with the small stuff so she can work on the big stuff. Agents like secret agents? Secret agents I control. It's your mind. You know, I played the secret agent once. I know. Oh, gosh, I like it over here. AI gives Tina the info she needs to get the job done. Nick, what did we say about touching? No touching. Good. AI helped Jim solve customer problems before their problems. For reals? For reals. ServiceNow is the only platform that connects every corner of your business putting AI to work for people. Oh, so we all work better together. My work here is done. Excuse me, which way back? Follow him.
[Music] [Colin Fleming] Well, thank you so much for that warm welcome. This is my first Adobe Summit. Pretty amazing. It's not because I didn't want to be here. This looks like a fantastic event. It's because it's the first time Adobe's let me in the door. I spent the last 13 years of my career competing with Adobe. So to be here on stage is kind of a surreal experience for me, I have to admit, I feel like I'm with my people, a group full of marketers. What could be better? Now, my career has been defined by one simple thing. We all have it, let's be honest. Mine might be a little closer to the surface, imposter syndrome. From the age of eight years old, I've been faking it 'til I make it as a young American trying to make his way into the sport of Formula One, the European-dominated sport of Formula 1 to now and almost, but didn't quite make it, Formula 1 driver, as a CMO of a top five software company, it has been anything but a linear career journey.
But what I've learned in that time is that driving a car at 230 miles an hour and leading a large marketing organization. Ironically, it's not all that different.
And I thought I would, don't worry, I'm going to get there. I thought I would share a few of the lessons that I've learned along the way, as well as some of the cool stuff that we're doing with Adobe. Now, I've been super, super fortunate to be surrounded by and worked for and with some of the most incredible marketers that our industry has to offer. Big awards, big degrees, big jobs. But I've learned one thing about marketing, we're full of it, absolutely full of it. And don't worry, I'm complicit. I'm a member of this club, but we are the worst. We spent the last 20 years finding increasingly convoluted ways of communicating the value of our organizations in ways that nobody seems to understand. We've allowed our media partners and tech vendors to invent new acronyms every year to measure our businesses that might benefit them more than it does us.
We find ourselves marketing to attribution models instead of the humans that actually buy our products. And we stand on stages just like this one all around the world, talking about how we need to be more human or more culture-shaping before returning to our offices and doing exactly the opposite.
Now, I've also learned that it's brand and demand, not or. This is not a binary decision, and it has never been a binary decision. The more I've learned, the more I think we've confused ourselves. We can walk and chew gum at the same time. We can generate relevant awareness and capture the demand in market.
We know that the buying decision often happens at first thought. In fact, 81% of the time brands buy the first company that comes to mind.
So why do we spend so much time on the last step of the journey? Great marketing builds demand before people even know it. And it's much more fun that way. I've learned that none of the Bs in B2B stand for boring. 70% of the GDP is created from business-to-business transactions. And yet, for some crazy reason, we've decided to allow ourselves to be measured by a lower standard and a lower bar. There's no reason, and yet here we are. I've spent the last 10 years of my career trying to change this perspective, and I will spend the next 10 if I have to. But maybe Summit, you'll help us change this perspective starting here.
I believe that B2B can be just as provocative, just as creative, and just as thought-provoking as any of our friends in B2C in the room we share at an admiration for great storytelling, a bold point of view, and deep, wonderful customer experiences that should be the standard in our industry, not the exception.
I've learned that friction is ultimately marketing's Kryptonite.
Customers have zero patience for complexity, and every extra step we put our customers through, drives our customers away. Too often, we design our marketing organizations around the org charts or the systems we use instead of the humans that actually buy our product. Magic happens when we remove that friction, not add to it. People don't like being marketed to. They like being helped. And when we help, the results ultimately do come.
Now I'm told for my final one that it wouldn't be a keynote if we didn't throw in an ancient proverb, but I couldn't find the right one, so I modified it for my own benefit. It takes a village to raise a brand, doesn't it? A village, it needs the whole company, every single employee and one employee in particular, the CFO has got to be a ride-or-die partner. It requires us to have a thoughtful about our employees and make sure that every employee is on the journey. And I've got my wonderful team here in the audience with us as well.
There is one of them.
And we have Adobe. Adobe is absolutely our ride-or-die partner in this transformation, a truly trusted advisor. And Adobe is helping us with all kinds of things right now.
I thought I could share a couple of those examples that you may have seen earlier in the demo. We're moving from a product-led organization to a brand-led organization. That's not the marketer's words, that's our CEO's words. It requires a huge culture shift to make this change, though. It has to happen across the entire organizations. It has to think about how we change, how we think about making decisions, how we invest in our businesses, and ultimately how we measure success. And we have to reimagine everything, including how we deliver experiences. And with Adobe Experience Platform helping us do exactly that and helping us not only keep pace with the industry, but set it and hopefully win this battle for relevance in AI.
Now, I hail from San Francisco. It is my home, I love it to death, but I really don't like fog. Fogs is the worst. Fog is the only acronym I will let myself use in this presentation and it stands for Fact-deficient Obfuscating Generalities, also known as how B2B tends to talk. And look, we were no different. We are absolutely no different. You walk the hallways of ServiceNow and you hear phrases like HAM and SAM and ITAM and these crazy acronyms. It sounds more like a Doctor Seuss novel than it does enterprise software. But as our business has grown, as we've added more complexity and new technologies and new audiences, we've tried to strive for simplicity, to ditch that inside baseball, that fog, and try to speak the language of the customer. We're putting AI to work for people, which sounds great, but how do you do this at truly global scale? As we introduce ourselves to new audiences like in HR and finance and CRM and security like you saw in the demo, how do we do this at true personalization? Well, Adobe Journey Optimizer B2B Edition is helping us do that. Finally, real world personalization coming to life in real world scenarios, it's pretty awesome to see. Look, you've heard the phrase AI a lot. In this new era, if you were standing still, you are ultimately falling behind.
We're doing all kinds of things, and we're investing in AI, in every hire we make and every investment we make. Things like synthetic research to more deeply understand the personas in which we market to. We've even identified 76 new category entry points that we didn't know of before. with the use of generative AI. Of course, we have AI agents in every corner of our business, and it's helping us move much more quickly. And now, as of yesterday, we've got all kinds of new AI agents from Adobe to connect to, which will be really amazing. Of course, we're governing the brand at scale like I never thought possible, and hundreds of new use cases that we're experimenting with every single day. I truly believe that now we are only limited by the curiosity in this room, by the curiosity in all of our organizations. What a great opportunity for us all. And of course, Adobe is super central to this. But the biggest shift of all you saw in that demo. I'm on a mission to increase marketing's strategic role inside the organization. Gone are the days of throwing leads over the fence and in this case, down the stairs and living and dying by the MQL. We're collaborating with sales as true business partners and looking at the full picture in buying groups. We're saying goodbye to the idea that one lead will help us make the year, make the quarter, and finally realizing that it's dozens of people, sometimes obvious and sometimes not obvious, that actually influence the decision. We're at the table with sales and marketing together and reinventing that relationship. As you saw in that ad in the picture, we're actually bringing these buying groups to life in our creative as well, personifying the very people that we market to, giving them personalities, identities and actually using them as distinctive assets. And all of this comes together to bring marketing closer to the transaction and earning our seat at the right table that we've always known.
We're just getting started with Adobe, and I cannot wait for all the new innovation to come. But as you've heard from so many people, this industry will never move this slowly again. And maybe this time you'll believe me that driving a car at 230 miles an hour and leading a large marketing organization isn't all that different. Back to you, Amit, thanks so much. [Music]
