CNME Editor Mark Forker spoke to William O’Neill, Area VP for the UAE and GCC at ServiceNow, during Knowledge 25 in Las Vegas. O’Neill believes the Middle East marketplace is more than ready to capitalise on the plethora of opportunities in the new era of Agentic AI – but says a big challenge remains the fact that many businesses are still encountering issues when it comes to the governance and compliance that is needed.
William O’Neill joined ServiceNow in October 2024, and is regarded as one of the brightest sales leaders in the technology industry across the Middle East region.
Prior to joining ServiceNow, O’Neill was Vice-President and General Manager of Qualtrics.
During Bill McDermott’s opening keynote, the main flavour of the day was unsurprisingly Agentic AI.
Many workflows remain largely manual, and many businesses are missing that orchestration layer, but the portfolio of solutions on offer by ServiceNow is accelerating the Agentic AI movement.
However, O’Neill conceded that the issue of governance is going to be a challenge moving forward.
“I was the Web Summit in Qatar, and Eduardo Saverin, who was one of the founders of Facebook, and who now heads up an investment firm called B-Capital Group was discussing Generative AI and Agentic AI, and what that all means to organisations across the enterprise space. He pointed out that there is a huge volume of businesses out there that are really struggling to understand the compliance and governance that is required – and it’s not going to be solved overnight. We have 65bn workflows per-year, so we own that space, and when you embed Agentic AI into the workflows then the time to value is instant and it’s understood. There is a runway and it’s incredible scalable, and it’s very digestible for the organisation to be able to roll that out widespread across multiple business units and the business case is there.
One of the big announcements that emerged from Day 1 of Knowledge 25 was the launch of ServiceNow’s new AI Control Tower.
He fundamentally believes in the capabilities of the AI Control Tower to govern, manage, secure, and realise value from any ServiceNow and third-party AI agent, model, and workflow on a single unified platform.
“The AI Control Tower is a big announcement for us, but every player is trying to sell you their agents, but if you just jettison an agent into one area then inevitably those agents becomes siloed and disconnected. The AI Control Tower enables enterprises to govern, manage and secure those agents across every single corner of your business to drive maximum value. Jim Cramer on Mad Money has said that ServiceNow is the future of Agentic AI, and I genuinely and personally believe that,” said O’Neill.
O’Neill’s views were reinforced by NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang declaring that ServiceNow is the Central Nervous System of the 21st century for the enterprises space.
The conversation pivoted back towards the thorny issue of data governance when it comes to the big players in the Middle East marketplace.
“We are definitely having a lot of high-level conversations when it comes to the issue of governance around data, and how we advise and educate our customers on it specific to their industry, and our very widespread partner ecosystem certainly helps us with our messaging in terms of what we can do, and that partner ecosystem is also enabling us to grow at scale. A lot of organisations across the Middle East are embedding AI strategies that is being driven by the pioneering vision of the Middle East to be a global hub for AI innovation, so in many ways it’s a perfect synergy,” said O’Neill.
A challenge for many businesses when it comes to AI has been a failure to see ROI on their AI investment, whilst 60% of AI projects in 2024 were abandoned due to incomplete data.
O’Neill said that a key differentiator for ServiceNow is their uncanny ability to deliver ROI, and drive incremental growth in both revenue and productivity.
“We solve complex problems, and we are driving incredible productivity across the board. We saved Siemens over 1 million hours in AI-powered workflows. In terms of the productivity that we yield for our customers the ServiceNow platform is very, very tangible and it happens imminently. We are transforming processes that took 30 minutes into seconds, and work that took days is being done in hours. From a top down perspective we are mitigating risk, reducing cost and increasing revenue, and that’s ultimately what businesses care about,” said O’Neill.
O’Neill praised the leadership across the UAE and GCC region for their bold aspirations and ambitions to be the global leader when it comes to AI.
“In the UAE, and across the GCC they want to be the first at doing things. They want to be the No.1 leader, and they want to be that lighthouse for AI. A perfect example of the type of leadership that really exemplifies how the region is so unique, is the decision by Abu Dhabi to become the world’s first fully AI-native government by 2027, and I mean it’s just an incredible statement. They are investing $3.5bn into the program, and are planning to automate all government processes and deploy over 200 AI solutions across all sectors, and we want to be part of that, and we want to help them get there. They want to completely reimagine and revolutionise citizen experiences that’s never been seen before,” said O’Neill. 
In terms of the ensuring businesses are ready for Agentic AI, O’Neill believes that enterprises across the Middle East are better-positioned than most again due to the mindset that exists across the region.
“During the keynote Jensen said that he wants to get to a point that his business still operates if everyone of his employees call in sick, and honestly that’s where we are building to, and that’s where we are headed. The Middle East wants to be a leader in AI, it wants to be No.1, and when you foster that sort of environment in terms of leadership then it trickles down and touches everything, and that attitude makes the region so unique.The Middle East is where everyone is going, and that’s where the investment is going. The Middle East is more than ready for the Agentic AI era, in fact it’s more ready than most.”
O’Neill concluded an excellent discussion his satisfaction at the progress that has been since the launch of their UAE Cloud in partnership with Microsoft Azure.
“We launched our UAE Cloud in October, and it’s just been a fantastic partnership in terms of catering for the demands around sovereignty. We really believe in what we are doing and we want to make sure that’s known, and we’ve managed to get a huge number of our customers onboard and have migrated onto our UAE Cloud, and we have many more in the pipeline. It’s a relatively seamless process too, and the benefits far outweigh any pain that may be experienced in relation to the migration, and there’s a lot more to come,” said O’Neill.
