Damian Stirrett sparkles with optimism about AI’s extraordinary potential to transform business. As ServiceNow’s UK and Ireland Group VP and GM, Stirrett shares his excitement about the company’s landmark £1.25 billion investment in British and Irish innovation, and charts ServiceNow’s inspiring journey toward becoming the fourth enterprise platform leader alongside SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft.

In this exclusive interview with The Executive Magazine, Stirrett shares powerful insights into successful leadership in today’s dynamic business landscape, drawing from three decades of pioneering technology transformations. From his early entrepreneurial spirit in sales at Compaq to 14 years of breakthrough leadership at Microsoft, he reveals the empowering qualities leaders need to excel, while showcasing ServiceNow’s visionary strategy to help businesses unlock AI’s remarkable possibilities.

During your 30-year career, technology’s become more and more important for every business and every business leader. But what first drew you into tech as an industry and how has it developed over three decades?

“My initial interest was in sales and marketing, and I found a sales role at a business called Compaq. I realised there that I got my energy from talking to people, customers and partners. And that’s still true today. But over the last 30 years, tech has become increasingly central for every organisation and, of course, my interest in what technology can achieve for our customers, and more broadly for everyone, has grown with it.

“The technology industry is so fast-moving and exciting. Once you see the impact that technology can have, and you are part of that fast-moving, innovative industry, it becomes a bit of an addiction. I remember that when I was first starting out in my 20s, I was a little envious of my friends that were in banking. Now they envy what I’m doing! I couldn’t think of a better industry to be in terms of the opportunities it gives you, the pace at which it moves and the importance of the role it plays.”

You’ve come into your leadership role at ServiceNow at a time of huge change, not just in the technology industry but across every dimension, from business and economic to political. What do you think are the qualities that leaders need to thrive in this dynamic and uncertain environment?

“I think that adaptive leadership is really just table stakes now. So, if you’re not an adaptive leader and you can’t work in ambiguity and roll with change then you’re going to struggle. We’ve moved from a time when what you knew mattered most. Now, I think it’s essential to be okay with not knowing all the answers, but you have to have curiosity and a learning mindset to be able to continuously adapt and develop in line with the speed at which your environment is changing.

“That’s something that I experienced at Microsoft, which went through a huge cultural transformation, with that business shifting from a fixed to a growth mindset.  That was a massive change, but I learned so much from it.”

What advice would you give to someone who’s newly into a leadership role? What are some of the key lessons that you’ve learned?

“I’d say that for anyone, no matter what their role or industry, it’s essential to be yourself. That sounds obvious, of course. But it’s very easy to forget. I think I’ve learned that the hard way. I was promoted into a senior role at Microsoft, perhaps a little earlier than I felt I was ready for. I compensated for that by trying to be like my predecessor, who I really admired. But it wasn’t me. A friend and colleague actually called me out on it, and so literally the next day I turned up as myself, and everything went well from there. You have to remember why you’re there are as a leader. Someone has put you in that position because they believe in you. Trying to be someone you’re not is the worst thing you can do.

“I also think that one thing we all need to do better as leaders is talk to our customers more. Many businesses spend a lot of time talking about their customers, but perhaps not enough talking to them.  Bill McDermott, ServiceNow’s CEO, recently said that there is only one boss, and that’s the customer. And I agree: it’s absolutely vital that leaders – and everyone else – never lose sight of the customer.”

How do you encourage everyone at ServiceNow to maintain that customer focus? Are there ways that you find particularly effective to make sure your people keep the customer top of mind?

“How you evaluate performance is important here. Obviously, we’re focused on achievement – the ‘what’ – but it’s also important to look at the ‘how’. For a business like ServiceNow, we need to think, for example, about how we’re helping our customers get the most from our platform and everything that it can do for them.

“That’s particularly the case now that everyone – and I mean everyone – is thinking about how they can make the most of AI and GenAI in their business. We’ve gone over the peak of the hype phase, and now the focus has shifted to exploring questions like ‘What can AI do for my business?’, ‘What are the business outcomes we should be thinking about?’, ‘What are the use cases in my industry?’. So to help them answer those questions and more, spending time with customers to understand what they really want and need to achieve is becoming even more important.”

And how is ServiceNow specifically helping your customers to work out how they can use AI in their business?

“I really believe that we can play a pivotal role here. We’re starting to talk about ourselves, and to our customers and partners, as being the AI platform for business transformation. We connect people to products, devices, data and workflow and at the heart of our platform is automation, which is key to generative AI. 

“One example is our work with a major telecoms business here in the UK. Their customer service agents are using Now Assist, our AI solution, in all of their call centres. That’s offering agents things like case notes and summarisation, helping them to better understand the customer they’re talking to and what’s the next best action to take. Overall, it’s made agents 55% more productive. But to get to that level of productivity increase, we first had to automate all of their processes, and they went from having 27 systems to just one.”

So before businesses can make the most of what AI can deliver for them, they need to make sure that they’re properly prepared and set up for it?

“There is justifiably a lot of excitement about what AI will be able to do. But it’s also the case that organisations need to work on the foundations they need in order to make the most from AI’s promise. That means automation, having data in the right shape and so on – and we can help with that too.

“Helping our customers make the most of the tech they have is probably the biggest challenge for our industry as a whole. There are businesses with a ton of ‘shelfware’, they have significant technology debt and they’re only using a small percentage of what the platforms they’re licensing can do for them. As an industry we need to support customers with the foundational work so they can optimise what they already have, drive their deployment, consumption and ultimately value. That’s absolutely how as an industry we’ll grow the trust our customers place in us.”

ServiceNow are investing £1.25 billion in the UK and Ireland over the next five years. What’s the focus of that investment; where are you placing your bets?

“We’re investing in people, real estate and datacentres – and it’s all about growth. I think we have a huge opportunity to become the fourth Enterprise platform (along with SAP, Oracle & Microsoft) for customers to run their businesses on.

“And that’s my ambition for ServiceNow in the UK & Ireland. We have got a super-strong GenAI story, with GenAI infused across the whole platform. Gartner’s saying that 80% of tech vendors will have AI infused in their technology in two years. We’re already there. What we need to do is build on that and our heritage to showcase to business decision makers our value proposition that now addresses functions right across the enterprise. We have an enterprise platform story to tell, rather than a service management tool to sell.”

Being a fast-growing business is obviously an exciting place to be, but what are some of the challenges that raises. How do you address those?

“We’re evolving as an organisation, and what has got us here in the last five years won’t get us where we need to be in the next five. So, it’s important that we recognise and nurture our talent, but equally important that we hire new people with the new perspectives and new skills we need as we evolve from a product company to a platform company. To that end, I want ServiceNow UK&I to be the best place to work in the industry, I want it to be a destination for the talent in our industry.”

How do you keep people motivated?

“We have a great culture at ServiceNow and deservedly a strong employer brand. We take employee wellbeing really seriously. We have something called Quarterly Growth Conversations, which are regular check-ins with all our people. The top area we focus on in those is all about wellbeing. We also have four wellbeing days a year that are in addition to annual leave, and I have culture champions within the UK business that really think about employees every day in terms of events and initiatives to support them. We also have nine employee belonging groups that represent and advocate for people with shared characteristics. So I think it’s a really great place to work!”

How do you make sure that you maintain your own wellbeing? What are some of the lessons that you’ve learned over three decades that might be useful for other business leaders?

“I think this is personal for each individual. But for me there are some areas of balance that I have to achieve. One is about how I spend my working time. If I become too internally focused and my time is spent on internal meetings and reviews and so on, then I really notice the difference in how I feel. So, I need to make sure that I’m seeing customers, meeting with partners and continuing to learn.

“But the nature of my role means that I could be attending dinners five times a week, for example. And at one time in my career, that’s exactly what I was doing! But it’s not healthy or sustainable. So, I’ve learned that you need to balance your schedule, carving out the time for yourself and your family and friends to make sure you stay in good shape, both physically and mentally.”

How do you set priorities for how you want ServiceNow to develop in the UK?

“You need to set priorities that are leading indicators of how you’re building a sustainable business.  Sometimes, if you’re making your numbers and growing, that success can actually obscure the focus on what’s really going to drive growth in the longer term. For ServiceNow, we need to pay more attention to adoption and consumption, enabling our customers to get the most from this powerful platform we’re providing them with. And we want to be doing bigger, more transformational deals. That means continuing to build deep relationships with our partners. These aren’t the things that I’m measured on, but I am measuring my people on them. That’s because if we improve there, we’ll carry on building a good business.

“And it’s important to check in on those indicators all the time. It’s great to do your offsite at the beginning of the year where you set out and present them. But you have to keep checking in and communicating those leading indicators and strategic priorities, or the organisation will just revert to its standard performance metrics.”

The UK government has just announced an ambitious AI strategy. How do you think about ServiceNow working in that space, what are some of the opportunities that you see?

“Companies within an industry are beginning to learn from one another, but perhaps more significantly, we’re seeing cross-fertilisation across industries. Banks for example, want to learn from retailers, and vice versa. That’s important. But perhaps more significant is that the public sector is more open than ever to learning from the private sector. That makes total sense. For example, DWP operates the largest call centre in the UK. What, for example, could they learn from the telecoms industry about how to automate and bring in the AI-driven approaches that can help improve the service they provide to people who really need it, at the same time boosting efficiency? I think the public sector in the UK is making a very wise and welcome move to centralising their thoughts and strategies on technology.

“But today, the biggest challenge facing them is that hardly anything is automated and there’s a lack of data sharing. We have a platform that can connect data, people and processes and bring in automation. So I feel that we have a role to play in addressing some of the big challenges that the UK public sector faces.  And, what’s more, we can help to realise the promise of GenAI in the public sector to which the UK government has just made such a strong commitment.”

With GenAI, we’re in a market defining era. This is a business changer, not just another technology. It’s a board-level discussion. I can’t think of a more profound time in our industry than right now. ServiceNow EXECUTIVE CIRCLE is a community of industry experts, visionaries and leaders who activate and shape business strategy, from the world’s most innovative organisations. Explore events, networking opportunities, articles, and podcasts on the website.