ServiceNow's Amit Zavery: AI flattens silos, models commoditize

Amit Zavery's comments come as worries about the long-term future of enterprise software have more or less faded into the background, according to the interview. In that setting, he is describing a shift in how ServiceNow wants to be seen: not as a set of point tools, but as a horizontal platform whose value comes from giving customers outcomes with choices built in.

Zavery ties that shift to two forces he says are already at work. One is AI flattening corporate data silos, which makes data accessible across different business units and reduces the friction that once kept enterprise software fragmented. The other is the inevitability that AI models turn into commodities, which would make the underlying model less of a differentiator than the platform around it.

The stakes appear to hinge on whether enterprise buyers follow that logic. If models really do commoditize and data keeps moving across silos, customers may judge vendors less on model performance and more on how cheaply and automatically they can get a job done. Zavery's bet is that a horizontal ServiceNow captures that demand; the test is whether customers who still say they want all the performance they can get are willing to trade some of that for a simpler platform.