Pros
I've been in the ServiceNow ecosystem for over a decade. What has kept me in the ecosystem was the platform and how customers were empowered to develop their own applications and workflows on it. Being in the ecosystem led me to a job at ServiceNow corporate. I've found that the company does provide one the autonomy to take on challenges and grow, and the past few years have been a major growth opportunity for anyone who wanted to get in on the ground floor of enterprise AI.
Cons
This is a eulogy. The culture is unrecognizable. The ethos of Fred Luddy and Phillis are a distant memory. ServiceNow has seemed to turn its back on the employees, customers, and community that made it a success. Leadership at the top, in the form of the P5, are completely disconnected from their employees. Internal events are popularity contests, and dry runs for executive meetings and events. When times are good stock wise, they're outspoken, when times are bad - they're silent in denial. The recent round of layoffs signaled to employees that the company simply does not care. They don't care how long you've been there, they don't care how much revenue you bring in, they don't care if you're a high performer. They will indiscriminately lay you off due to an opaque formula. The method in which they chose to lay off the recent round of employees was completely devoid of any human decency. Their cognitively dissonant external explanation is "AI efficiencies". Internally, the reality is much different. Employees are expected to do the work of two, using tools such as Claude with tight usage caps. In much of the company, any efficiency coming from ServiceNow's own AI products is non-existent. ServiceNow does not use ServiceNow to power much of it's own processes. It does not empower it's employees to use ServiceNow, it does not deploy AI Agents to employees to do actual work outside of marketing stories, it does not future proof its processes in the world of AI. It simply let's employees burn tokens creating duplicates, triplicates of the same output for the same process without preserving any of that work for the future. ServiceNow is missing out on the largest opportunity to transform it's own business processes with the lackadaisical way it has deployed AI in it's own company and their shortsightedness to take advantage of the unique gift it's been provided via AI to be an actual thought leader in the space. As it continues to fall behind, attempt to guess at what actual work is, fails to understand the shift of the market when it conflicts with it's narrative, the denial will increase. Employees and customers will continue to suffer, leaders will get huge payouts and leave for competitors, and ServiceNow will be a cheap carbon copy of the platform it has been for 20 years. We're seeing an acceleration of enshittified products that break with every release, closed-walled gardens that customers can no longer configure to their own needs, product strategy aimed at a usage based consumption model where customers are expected to pay for functionality that was once included in one's seat based license, and and overall deterioration of what was once a useful platform. It's employees are subject to AI experimentation, as psychological wellbeing suffers due to the relentless grind of AI, its lack of coordination, and a strategy that is continually reactionary to it's competitors. ServiceNow, an enterprise work company, puts no effort into understanding the impacts of AI on it's own employees. It conducts no surveys, no research, and doesn't even know it's own ROI on AI spend. Management provides solutions to work/life balance and mental wellbeing concerns due to workload such as "use AI." The lack of transparency internally regarding layoffs, is a deliberate tactic to keep employees working harder and accepting less due to the imminent fear of "being next." ServiceNow used to be a company I loved. It helped to develop my career, and the community provided a space of knowledge sharing and belonging. It provided the opportunity to problem solve, critically think, and develop new products and features that actually helped people. That ServiceNow is dead.