Wall Street is finally starting to buy ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott’s story as the company beats Q2 earnings forecasts

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.

The stock entered Wednesday down roughly a third for the year and about 50% off its 52-week high, even as revenue kept climbing north of 20%. ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott kept saying his company was “the enterprise gateway for agentic AI,” and he kept showing impressive growth figures to prove it. But the market just wasn’t buying.

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........

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