Editors’ Note

Kellie Romack joined ServiceNow in September 2022 and is its Chief Digital Information Officer. In this role, she leads enterprise-wide business transformation to accelerate growth, create scale, and deliver amazing experiences built on the ServiceNow AI Platform. Prior to becoming CDIO, Romack was ServiceNow’s Senior Vice President of Digital Technology Experiences, leading the team charged with creating frictionless employee, customer, and partner experiences. Before joining ServiceNow, Romack served as Senior Vice President for Associate & Retail Product Experience for Walmart, supporting 2.1 million associates and millions of customers. She also spent more than 20 years working at Hilton, where she led technology and business transformation, and developed agile digital commercial products and global delivery teams. Romack earned a BS degree from Tarleton State University and an MS degree from Angelo State University.

Company Brief

ServiceNow (servicenow.com) is putting AI to work for people. The company moves with the pace of innovation to help customers transform organizations across every industry while upholding a trustworthy, human-centered approach to deploying its products and services at scale. As the AI platform for business transformation, ServiceNow connects people, processes, data, and devices to increase productivity and maximize business outcomes.

Will you discuss your career journey?

My 25-plus year career has spanned some incredible organizations and industries. I started out in tech at Hilton, where I pioneered digital experiences like the Hilton Honors app and Digital Key technology to transform how guests engage with the brand. Then at Walmart, I led digital transformation at scale, which included launching the “Me at Walmart” app and reinventing how returns work for millions of associates and customers. Now I’m honored to serve as ServiceNow’s CDIO, leading digital technology and innovating for our employees, customers, and partners.

The golden thread throughout has been my passion for building amazing experiences that make people’s lives better. I’ve always believed technology should serve people, not the other way around. Every step of my journey has been about listening, learning, and finding new ways to delight people and drive business value.

What excited you about the opportunity to join ServiceNow and made you feel it was the right fit?

ServiceNow’s mission to make the world work better for everyone really resonated with me. Coming in as a practitioner and former customer, I saw a company that was innovative with technology and deeply committed to its employees and customers. The chance to lead transformation here, using our own platform to solve real business challenges, was incredibly exciting – I couldn’t pass it up.

What sealed the deal for me was ServiceNow’s culture of hungry and humble. We practice a growth mindset, experimenting, learning fast, and sharing what works to keep getting better. Yes, we’re scaling incredibly fast, but we’re doing it with integrity and win as a team – those are non–negotiables to me.

Being “Customer Zero” – using our own products to drive transformation – also means I get to help shape the future of work from the inside out. We are our own best customer, so we’re deeply knowledgeable, use what we sell, and constantly innovate. That’s a rare and rewarding opportunity.

Will you provide an overview of your role and areas of focus?

As CDIO, I lead our digital technology organization and am responsible for serving, protecting, and delivering amazing experiences for our employees, customers, and partners. My team and I are focused on scaling smarter, moving faster, and transforming the business to drive the right outcomes.

On the tech side, we’re putting AI to work for people and creating secure, consumer-grade experiences in every corner of our business. A big part of my role is “drinking our own champagne,” which means using ServiceNow’s AI Platform to reimagine how work gets done, then sharing those learnings with our product teams, customers, and partners. We’ve got one of the most ambitious AI programs in enterprise software and are in full-scale adoption of agentic AI to transform work across the company. We’ve created more than $355 million in annual value from productivity and time savings. And we share our blueprint with customers, so they can scale and realize ROI from their own AI programs, too.

On the people side, I engage with every part of our business and partner closely across our executive team to understand their processes and pain points – from budgeting and planning, to talent acquisition and skills development, to customer enablement and beyond. That understanding helps me fully equip them with the right tech to solve their problems in the right way.

How do you describe ServiceNow’s culture and values?

As we like to say here, welcome to The Rocketship! We move fast, dream big, and stay anchored in values like winning as a team, keeping hungry and humble, and creating belonging. We believe in making the world work better for everyone, so there’s a real sense of purpose here. Everyone is encouraged to bring fresh ideas, challenge the status quo, and help each other grow.

As a company, we strive to create an environment where everyone feels welcome and empowered. Leaders and employees bring this to life through our “People Pact” every day. For example, we offer various employee Belonging Groups that everyone can join to celebrate cultural moments, learn from fantastic guest speakers, and take advantage of mentorship opportunities. It’s part of our commitment to help everyone live their best life, do their best work, and fulfill our purpose together.

We balance human-centered culture and cutting-edge innovation, making ServiceNow such a special place to work. I’m honored to lead and serve with courageous thinkers who push the limits of what’s possible and set new industry standards.

What have been the keys to ServiceNow’s industry leadership, and how do you define the ServiceNow difference?

I connect regularly with customers and industry peers. What’s top of mind for them right now is breaking down silos across the business; delivering secure, consumer-grade experiences; and driving value at scale without ripping and replacing existing technology. And those challenges resonate across industries and sectors.

As a CIO, ServiceNow checks all the boxes for me, and I hear that from our customers every day, too. We have deep workflow expertise coupled with speed of innovation. We’ve spent more than 20 years perfecting the combination of AI, data, and workflows and unifying it on one platform in a secure, scalable way that removes complexity. Everything I need is built in, not bolted on. We also work closely with our customers to navigate their transformation journeys. They trust us because we help them take AI from a concept with lots of hype, to a competitive advantage with hard returns.

A big part of our success is that we moved quickly to adopt AI. While other companies were still weighing options or dipping their toe in, we jumped into generative AI pilots early on, evolving to 230+ agentic AI use cases in production today and hundreds more in the pipeline. That commitment to driving the right outcomes, and the ability to deploy and deliver fast time-to-value, are big differentiators for us.

How critical is it for the Chief Digital Information Officer to be engaged in business strategy?

I’m living it every day, and my goal is simple: be in all four corners of the business, ensuring technology drives growth and delights every stakeholder. Technology is a growth engine, and every strategic decision today has a digital dimension. I make sure those decisions translate into measurable, meaningful outcomes. That means sitting at the table with my C-suite peers, understanding the nuances of every business unit, and connecting the dots between technology, people, process, and results. When we do this well, we anticipate needs before they arise, spot opportunities others might miss, and deliver value where it matters most.

My team and I deliver the right tools for every team to do their best work, break down silos, and drive transformation at scale. A great example is our sales compensation process, which we reimagined and automated for sellers to get responses to inquiries in seconds instead of days. We also achieved an autonomous IT service desk with 90 percent of requests handled by AI, enabling our human help desk agents to focus on more customer-centric interactions. That’s exponential impact.

Making experiences simple is what makes them powerful, like resetting a password in seconds or approving expenses from your phone. When something feels effortless, but is secure and reliable, that helps build trust across the company.

As CIOs, we have a huge opportunity to think bigger than automating old processes, and instead create new value streams and enable agility across the enterprise.

Will you highlight ServiceNow’s platform direction, as both a product incubator and revenue generator?

ServiceNow’s AI Platform is a strategic engine for innovation and growth internally and with our customers. What excites me most is how we use our platform and product innovation ourselves before bringing it to market, shaping our product roadmaps from the inside out. Our AI Control Tower is a great example of this flywheel of product innovation, originally launched as an internal tool to govern, monitor, and measure our full AI ecosystem. It’s now commercially available and gaining traction with customers for linking AI investments to tangible business outcomes. We’re proof that AI can move beyond hype into impact, and we’re constantly incubating new products and features that solve real problems for our customers across IT, HR, CRM, legal, and finance use cases.

We turn everyday processes into intelligent experiences that deliver measurable ROI and meaningful results for our customers, while driving revenue for ourselves. Organizations across all industries and sectors are using our platform to handle more case volume, reduce resolution time, and save thousands of work hours annually. It’s exciting to see the value we’re creating for them along with the same amazing experiences we enjoy.

We’re proud to be a catalyst for transformation across the enterprise, giving organizations the ability to innovate and scale quickly and responsibly. We promote freedom of choice with our open, flexible platform that supports any data, any cloud, and any AI model. Most importantly, governance and trust are built in, so leaders can innovate without compromise.

What do you feel are the keys to effective leadership, and how do you approach your management style?

For me, it starts with gratitude and clarity. I believe in being approachable, transparent, and accountable. My goal is to empower my team, giving them the space to grow themselves and our business. That’s why I encourage open dialogue, smart risk taking, and progress over perfection. One of my mantras, “clear is kind,” helps set transparent expectations and unite people behind a shared vision to win together – we win as a team.

It’s also important to me as a tech leader that we remain human-led and AI-enabled, finding that balance with technology in the service of people. Technology is reinventing how work gets done, but it’s humans who bring creativity, empathy, and purpose to the table.

What advice do you offer to young people beginning their careers?

My biggest piece of advice is to stay curious and adaptable. The world is moving fast, and the ability to learn, adapt, and grow is more important than ever. Don’t be afraid to ask questions, seek out mentors and build relationships, and raise your hand for opportunities outside of your comfort zone. Skill evolution is a continuous cycle, and we should all strive to get smarter and do better, regardless of whether we’re in a technical role or not.

Your career is a journey, so take time to celebrate the wins, learn from mistakes, keep moving forward with an attitude of gratitude, and make a positive impact on those around you. Let’s leave this world better than we found it.