ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott isn’t saying that artificial intelligence will save your soul, but he’s not not saying it.

“We’re slowing down the hiring in jobs that are — quite frankly — soul-crushing jobs,” he said in an interview on Bloomberg TV that followed the release of the cloud software company’s impressive quarterly earnings.

“The supporting cast of the soul-crushing work is now being done by agents,” he said. “They work hard 24 by 7, you don’t have to pay ’em, and they don’t need any lunch, and they don’t have any healthcare benefits, so they’re very affordable and that really complements our workforce.”

He highlighted fields like IT and customer support as well as security and risk management as areas where AI was reducing ServiceNow’s need for labor.

ServiceNow is still hiring, but hiring less for these functions, McDermott clarified, saying that he expects this approach to be adopted by “all well-run companies.”

“For those people in the procurement team, we can give them a new interface with AI agents that’s going to automatically do a lot of their soul-crushing manual work,” Josh Kahn, senior vice president and general manager of core business workflows, said back in May. “So instead of spending four days prioritizing potential sourcing events, they’re going to spend five days executing on real high-value sourcing opportunities.”

The Takeaway

It’s not controversial to assess the state of AI and surmise that it’s going to cause a lot of job loss, and understandably people are getting skittish about their job getting the axe. The data out of ServiceNow, if anything, is an indication that at least some of the work that’s getting automated away is indeed boring, tedious, and unpleasant.

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