For most of 2026, ServiceNow has been Exhibit A for the “SaaSpocalypse”—the fear that autonomous AI agents will let companies build their own workflows and gut demand for traditional enterprise software.
During Wednesday’s regular trading session, before ServiceNow announced its second quarter earnings, shares fell another 6.5% following a report that OpenAI planned to build an enterprise product, called Presence, designed to weave AI agents into the internal machinery of large organizations—precisely the territory ServiceNow has staked out with its AI Control Tower product.
But then ServiceNow released its numbers. And, perhaps finally, traders decided McDermott was not just blowing smoke. Shares jumped as much as 7% in after-hours trading, wiping out the regular-session decline before paring the gains slightly.
“We are who we said we were,” McDermott told Fortune in an interview Wednesday, conducted hours before the results were made public. “We’ve become the agentic front door to the enterprise, and we’re managing everything for our customers from workflow to cybersecurity.”
ServiceNow reported second-quarter subscription revenue of $3.88 billion, up 24.5% year over year, and total revenue just shy of $4 billion, up 24%. Both beat the high end of the company’s own guidance.
