'India powers nearly half of ServiceNow's global R&D'

New Delhi: Nearly 50% of ServiceNow's global R&D is based in India, making the country central to its innovation strategy, according to president and chief product officer Amit Zavery. Speaking to TOI on the sidelines of the India AI Impact Summit 2026, he said the Hyderabad and Bengaluru centres form the company's largest footprint outside the US.

ServiceNow employs around 6,000 people in India-roughly one in five engineers globally-and its India Technology & Business Center has grown at a 25% CAGR over the past three years. India plays a pivotal role, driving core development across the AI platform, security, CRM (customer relationship management), and emerging capabilities while advancing conversational interfaces and user experience.


ServiceNow, which commands a market capitalisation of over $111 billion and about $13 billion in annual revenue, recently witnessed a stock sell-off amid investor concerns that large language models could disrupt its business model and weigh on future growth and margins. Despite market anxiety about AI disrupting software firms, Zavery remains unfazed.

"Markets often overreact to short-term signals, but they rarely reflect long-term potential. AI is transformational-like the internet or the cloud-and there will be winners and laggards." Integration, he added, is key. "We combine AI, data, workflow, and security into a single platform-something no other company offers at this scale," as ServiceNow pushes into an addressable market exceeding $600 billion.

ServiceNow, he said, should be viewed as a platform company rather than a traditional SaaS provider. "LLMs are useless for enterprises mainly because they do not have context, security, compliance, and workflow," Zavery said.