ServiceNow Picks Its AI Leader Michael Park To Lead Global Channels

‘I think we all came out of ServiceNow Knowledge saying the metrics we set out to drive the acceleration of AI within the company go-to-market have been achieved, and now we need to go out and bring that knowledge to partners to continue to scale the AI journey. So it was a logical setup to go from CMO into the AI go-to-market for the field into the partner aspect as we scale the AI platform for business transformation,’ says Michael Park, ServiceNow’s new senior vice president of global partnerships and channels.

AI-based digital workflow transformation technology developer ServiceNow Thursday said it has appointed its former chief marketing officer and head of AI products to be its new global channel chief.

Michael Park, a five-year ServiceNow veteran, is taking over as the company’s senior vice president of global partnerships and channels following the departure earlier this month of Erica Volini, the company’s former executive vice president of worldwide industries, partners, and go to market. Volini until January of this year held the title of senior vice president for global markets.

Park told CRN he has been working with enterprise software for 25-plus years, with related roles during his past stints at Microsoft, SAP, Siebel Systems, and HP, including running Microsoft’s channels for North America.

[Related: ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott: ‘We’re Putting AI To Work For People’]

Park also ran the data center transformation business when Microsoft moved from Windows Server to Azure, he said.

“The constant is enterprise software in product, sales, and marketing roles,” he said. “The CMO job at ServiceNow was really designed to build the presence the brand, the purpose of ServiceNow, how to move from selling individual products into more business outcomes, how to lead with the strategic platform.”

Volini told CRN that she is incredibly proud of the partner ecosystem ServiceNow has built.

“I believe it is world class by every definition, and I look forward to seeing it continue to grow and thrive as part of ServiceNow’s strategy moving forward,” she said.

Volini said she is taking time to evaluate her next move.

“I think it will be working for an organization that is looking for a different way to grow,” she said. “That’s what I feel like I did at ServiceNow, gave them a different way to grow than they had grown.”

ServiceNow, in an emailed response to a CRN request for more information, said: “After nearly four years with ServiceNow, Erica Volini is leaving the company. Erica has contributed significantly to ServiceNow’s success over the past several years. After conversations about the future direction of our sales and go-to-market organizations, we concluded that now is the right time for Erica to pursue interests outside of ServiceNow. We wish Erica the best in her next chapter.”

Ryan Crosby, vice president of sales for the intelligent ops practice at Ahead, a Chicago-based ServiceNow channel partner, told CRN that Volini did a great job at changing the dynamic and evolving partnerships with ServiceNow.

“Erica really lent herself well to helping to grow the alliances with the channel partners that are working with ServiceNow,” Crosby said. “She did a great job helping to evolve the metrics and how they’re measuring partners and empowering partners to be able to do more resell in the business. She did a great job at helping evolve what was already a very growing business with partners in the ecosystem.”

Crosby also said he sees the potential value of an AI-focused executive like Park heading channels going forward.

“The puck is going towards AI as a company for them, and all of our customers are thinking about AI,” he said. “Taking somebody at the forefront of AI is a good candidate for this job, because most of our customers are trying to figure out where they’re going with AI in general. It’s good to have someone who can potentially go after that with partners and help enable and empower their partners to do a lot more with AI because it’s on every single customer’s mind.”

Ahead has fully bought into ServiceNow’s AI strategy, Crosby said.

“They’ve made significant growth initiatives towards it by acquiring Moveworks, but also building it in and making it native into their platform,” he said. “They’ve got a very good strategy around AI, and we as a company are also moving towards the goal of helping customers to evolve with these newer applications that are going to need AI in order to be able to do the things that they’re trying to do. We are heavily invested in working with our customers around AI.”

Bringing Park into the channel role is exciting, Crosby said.

“They’ve chosen Michael because he understands their go-to-market initiative, and he can further empower partners to be able to understand that dynamic,” he said. “It’s changing fast. The whole AI initiative for companies is evolving tremendously fast. So having somebody that is really in the inner workings around ServiceNow’s strategy will help empower partners to be able to go and have that conversation.”

One of Park’s most recent projects was launching ServiceNow’s “Put AI to Work for People” campaign, Park said.

“That kind of gave me the foray to say, ‘OK, we’ve now set the marketing path. Now we need to accelerate the go to market, because this AI stuff’s moving fast,’” he said. “So the last year I’ve really been focused internally on building and accelerating the capabilities of our own go-to-market. This year alone, I’ve had over 200 customer meetings in the different geographies looking at how to accelerate the consideration and adoption of AI.”

This has included working closely with ServiceNow’s product teams on pricing, packaging, field enablement, how to think about the whole process of customer engagement, working with partners, and training with customers and partners in how to drive engagement, Park said.

“I think we all came out of ServiceNow Knowledge saying the metrics we set out to drive the acceleration of AI within the company go-to-market have been achieved, and now we need to go out and bring that knowledge to partners to continue to scale the AI journey,” he said. “So it was a logical setup to go from CMO into the AI go-to-market for the field into the partner aspect as we scale the AI platform for business transformation.”

Park said he has just started his new role, and has no plans to make immediate changes to ServiceNow’s channel focus.

“I think in this era of AI, change is the constant,” he said. “The team, together with Erica, have built a foundation that’s very strong with regards to how we’re taking a partner-friendly approach to scaling ServiceNow with and through the ecosystem. The work will continue. But change is the constant. The AI stuff is moving so fast. We really have to think about how to build on top of the strong, strong foundation we have, moving from enablement to empowerment in how we really put the platform front and center in the conversation for how partners can actually deliver business transformation better, faster, cheaper, in a more agile way than the industry has ever seen before, and actually make a good, solid business out of that.”

ServiceNow is doubling its AI capabilities every 90 days, Park said.

“And when you reflect that down to how what a customer needs to receive it, it’s really important that we are increasing the rate of learning and enhancing the speed at which we’re actually able to move, which is going to require us to rethink how we deliver information and transfer knowledge transfer,” he said. “This requires fewer moving parts, more connective tissue, clear objective to goals, more empowerment behind objectives, in addition to the enablement. The game is very different now. It’s about an AI platform that we’re driving business transformation on versus just selling into one buying center with a workflow solution.”

Park plans to do a listening tour internally and externally to understand where ServiceNow is in that journey.

“The truth is in the field, and so getting out to the partners and getting out to our frontline resources to really understand how we are doing, where are we, what needs to change, will come with time,” he said. “The one thing I think is absolutely true in this domain is that the backdrop of what we saw even in my AI go-to-market job is speed. AI is just moving faster than any technology transformations ever. So we’re going to have to focus on knowledge transfer and translation from strategy to execution faster than ever before.”

ServiceNow’s channel partners are still in the early stages of AI engagement, Park said.

“We have the adopters, about 55 or 60 partners who’ve actually taken the first step, as you saw at Knowledge, to go build with our platform AI agents,” he said. “They were demonstrating that on the floor. I think we’re largely still in the batting cages on the first effort out. So it’s early days, but that’s the job at hand. It’s, how do we make this stuff easy for our partners to evaluate, to understand, to adopt. And how do we make sure that measurably we can help translate that into tangible business outcomes for our customers.”

ServiceNow and its channel partners are first movers when it comes to AI adoption, Park said.

“We have to make sure that those early adopters are wildly successful, and that we use the learnings from that to create repeatable patterns, to accelerate the consideration and adoption of other partners as we move forward to be an AI platform for transformation that can help deliver that kind of transformation for our partner’s customers with greater speed, agility, and cost savings,” he said. “It’s going to be a race that everybody’s running in the industry. I think ServiceNow is well positioned because of the single platform, single architecture, and single data model. … We’re in a really good spot in leading with AI, because it’s not a bolt-on. We built it into the platform.”