Fortune52%
Wall Street is finally starting to buy ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott’s story as the company beats Q2 earnings forecasts 65%
By Jeremy Kahn46%
7/23/2026, 12:05:45 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 25 faulty reasoning types, including Self-Serving Bias, Post Hoc (False Cause), and Optimism Bias, with Attempt to Sell a Product or Service as the most egregious example at 19.1% saturation with 166 hits. Analysis detected 1,351 faulty-reasoning hits from 871 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 59.1% and a BS Rank of 65% (7,575 of 21,198 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 64.30% of the article peer group.
For most of 2026, ServiceNow has been Exhibit A for the “SaaSpocalypse” —the fear that autonomous AI agents will let companies build their own workflows and gut demand for traditional enterprise software.
The stock entered Wednesday down roughly a third for the year and about 50% off its 52-week high, even as revenue kept climbing north of 20%.
ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott kept saying his company was “the enterprise gateway for agentic AI,” and he kept showing impressive growth figures to prove it.
But the market just wasn’t buying .
During Wednesday’s regular trading session, before ServiceNow announced its second quarter earnings, shares fell another 6.5% following a report that OpenAI planned to build an enterprise product, called Presence, designed to weave AI agents into the internal machinery of large organizations—precisely the territory ServiceNow has staked out with its AI Control Tower product.
But then ServiceNow released its numbers.
And, perhaps finally, traders decided McDermott was not just blowing smoke.
Shares jumped as much as 7% in after-hours trading, wiping out the regular-session decline before paring the gains slightly.
“We are who we said we were,” McDermott told Fortune in an interview Wednesday, conducted hours before the results were made public.
“We’ve become the agentic front door to the enterprise, and we’re managing everything for our customers from workflow to cybersecurity.”
ServiceNow reported second-quarter subscription revenue of $3.88 billion, up 24.5% year over year, and total revenue just shy of $4 billion, up 24%.
Both beat the high end of the company’s own guidance.
Adjusted earnings came in at 90 cents per share, ahead of the roughly 86 cents Wall Street analysts expected.
The company raised its full-year subscription-revenue guidance to a range of $15.76 billion to $15.78 billion.
Current remaining performance obligations—a metric closely watched by investors that measures revenue that customers have already contracted for and which ServiceNow will deliver in the next 12 months—rose 21%, to $13.2 billion.
Total remaining performance obligations reached $29 billion, also up 21%.
ServiceNow’s AI products crossed $1 billion in annual contract value for the first time, a threshold McDermott has been promising for a year; the company says agentic deployments have grown ninefold in nine months.
It closed 123 deals worth more than $1 million in net new annual contract value, up nearly 40% from a year earlier.
The company’s non-GAAP operating margin held at 29.5%.
Management reiterated its long-term targets: $30 billion-plus in subscription revenue and a “Rule of 60” by 2030.
(“Rule of 60” means that ServiceNow’s revenue growth rate added to its profits margin would equal or exceed 60.
Investors traditionally expected enterprise software companies to operate with a “Rule of 40.”
McDermott said ServiceNow is currently running at a “Rule of 56.”)
Increasingly, McDermott sees cybersecurity as ServiceNow’s key enterprise sales driver.
He claims ServiceNow, bolstered by its acquisitions of Armis and Veza, has become “the fastest growing cybersecurity company in enterprise software” and the eighth-largest cybersecurity company overall.
“The attack surface is exploding because of AI,” he said, arguing that every ungoverned agent and machine identity widens the “blast radius” companies must police.
His pitch is that once customers buy the control tower to govern their AI agents, the rest of ServiceNow’s platform follows: “Everybody is going to need our control tower, and so I expect that to sell like hotcakes.”
Notably, McDermott declined to join fellow enterprise-software CEOs, such as Microsoft’s Satya Nadella and Palantir’s Alex Karp, who have been warning customers away from reliance on AI models from frontier AI labs over claims that the companies mine customer data to build competing products.
“I’m not agreeing with that narrative.
I actually fully support the frontier models,” McDermott said, framing ServiceNow instead as their distribution channel into the enterprise.
“AI thinks, but workflow acts,” he said.
Companies won’t “bet a business process on ‘probably it’s right,’” he argued, and most enterprise AI runs on cheaper, domain-specific models anyway: “We don’t need Lamborghinis to deliver the mail.”
The open question is whether Wednesday’s beat and share price jump is just a blip, or the catalyst that convinces investors to give the stock a more durable re-rating.
McDermott has been putting strong numbers on the board for more than a year without much reward.
“Innovating for the enterprise, it’s a lot like politics—it’s easy to make noise, very hard to make progress,” he said, casting the quarter as another entry in “seven years of defying all the naysayers.”
Some skeptics aren’t fully convinced.
Bears continue to flag the company’s rich valuation—the company trades at a trailing price-to-earnings ratio of close to 60—and concerns about the pricing of ServiceNow’s products.
Some analysts warned that the company’s July 1 pricing change pulled renewals forward, potentially borrowing backlog strength from later quarters.
ServiceNow itself acknowledged that part of the revenue beat came from on-premise deals—driven by strong U.S. federal demand—that landed in the second quarter rather than the third.
But the after-hours move suggests investors are willing to entertain the idea that ServiceNow as a winner of the agentic AI era, rather than a victim.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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