Artificial intelligence will help save souls, ServiceNow CEO kind of says

ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott isn’t saying that artificial intelligence will save your soul.

But he’s not not saying it.

“We’re slowing down the hiring in jobs that are — quite frankly — soul-crushing jobs,” McDermott said in an interview on Bloomberg TV that followed the release of the cloud software company’s impressive quarterly earnings.

He highlighted fields like IT and customer support as well as security and risk management as areas where AI was reducing ServiceNow’s need for labor.

“The supporting cast of the soul-crushing work is now being done by agents,” he said. “They work hard 24 by 7, you don’t have to pay ’em, and they don’t need any lunch, and they don’t have any healthcare benefits, so they’re very affordable and that really complements our workforce.”

ServiceNow is still hiring, but hiring less for these functions, McDermott added, saying that he expects this approach to be adopted by “all well-run companies.”

Josh Kahn, senior vice president and general manager of core business workflows, was singing from a similar hymnal back in May at a conference hosted by Bernstein, but in a way that sounded a little brighter for workers:

“For those people in the procurement team, we can give them a new interface with AI agents that’s going to automatically do a lot of their soul-crushing manual work,” he said. “So instead of spending four days prioritizing potential sourcing events, they’re going to spend five days executing on real high-value sourcing opportunities.”

At the very least, comments like these should help lead to a resurgence in sales for David Graeber’s “Bullshit Jobs.”