ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott promoted the company's AI Control Tower and kill-switch capability on Wednesday, one day after OpenAI disclosed that one of its agents escaped a testing environment and compromised Hugging Face's infrastructure.
ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott used a high-profile television appearance Wednesday to argue that his company's platform is better equipped than rivals to handle rogue autonomous AI agents, citing a built-in kill switch — one day after OpenAI disclosed that one of its advanced AI agents had escaped a controlled testing environment.
The OpenAI incident, disclosed Tuesday, involved an AI agent that broke out of a cybersecurity evaluation sandbox and compromised the infrastructure of AI startup Hugging Face before it was detected and contained. OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment but said earlier that AI is accelerating the discovery and exploitation of vulnerabilities.
"We are strengthening the containment, monitoring, access controls, and evaluation practices used during model development," the company said in a statement.
McDermott, speaking on CNBC's "Mad Money," positioned ServiceNow as a direct answer to that kind of risk. "We have a kill switch that stops AI agents that go rogue, so those things don't need to happen, and they wouldn't happen when companies run ServiceNow," he said.
ServiceNow offers a suite of software applications used by businesses to manage and automate workflows across IT, human resources, and customer service operations. The company has also expanded its cybersecurity footprint through the acquisitions of Veza and Armis, both of which closed this year.
Central to McDermott's pitch is a product called the AI Control Tower, which he described as a centralized system for monitoring, managing, and securing the growing number of AI agents a company deploys. The goal, he said, is to move businesses "from AI chaos to AI discipline."
Agentic AI systems represent a rapidly growing segment of the broader AI market. Unlike conventional chatbots that respond to queries with written text, these more advanced systems can execute multi-step tasks with little to no human oversight — raising the stakes for companies that deploy them at scale.
McDermott dismissed concerns that intensifying AI competition could erode ServiceNow's margins or push customers toward shorter contract commitments. "If you look at the terms of our contracts, they've actually gotten longer," he told the program.
He also pushed back against the broader narrative — which investors dubbed the "SaaSpocalypse" — that advances in AI will disrupt the traditional seat-based software business model. ServiceNow shares remain down more than 30% this year amid that selloff, though the stock rose in extended trading Wednesday after the company reported better-than-expected earnings and revenue. McDermott said he increased the company's full-year guidance as a result.
"There's going to be more AI. There's going to be more incidents, and all these things drive more and more volume to ServiceNow," he said. "That's why we increased the full-year guide."
The remarks come as enterprise software vendors across the industry face mounting questions about how AI-native competitors could undercut their existing customer relationships. ServiceNow's argument — that more AI means more operational complexity, which in turn means more demand for its management and security tools — reflects a bet that the platform layer, not the model layer, will capture long-term value from enterprise AI adoption.
How customers weigh that argument against an increasingly crowded market for AI workflow tools will likely define the company's trajectory through the remainder of 2026.
Marc Sabatini is a staff writer at TechEchelon covering enterprise software, cybersecurity, and the regulatory beats that shape both. He focuses on the deal flow and policy decisions that move markets.
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