About this episode

Pat Casey discusses his journey from the first engineer at ServiceNow to CTO, exploring AI's impact on engineering productivity and the challenges of scaling technology.

Pat Casey was the first person besides founder Fred Luddy to write code at ServiceNow back in 2005, when it was called Glide and lived above a friend's restaurant. Twenty years later, he's CTO of a company where 85% of the Fortune 500 are customers, and until recently ran all of engineering: 10,000 people, 7,000 of them writing code. Almost nobody survives the journey from first engineer to public-company CTO. Pat did. Tobi and Pat dig into how ServiceNow actually works under the hood: a metadata processing engine running 90,000 single-tenant databases and over 25 billion queries an hour, why they bought a 15-person German database company and turned it into RaptorDB, and why tearing apart a 20-year-old monolith is harder than every senior engineer thinks. Then the conversation turns to AI. Pat bought 7,000 Windsurf licenses and measured a real, but unglamorous, 15% productivity bump, with a small subset of engineers going 5–6x while most barely changed. His thesis: AI coding is like playing five chessboards at once, and it's reshuffling the deck on who the top engineers will be. On agents, ServiceNow's answer is disarmingly simple: create a user called "AI Pat," assign it cases…

People in this episode

Host: Tobias Schlottke

Guest: Pat Casey

Topics covered

• AI in engineering
• ServiceNow architecture
• Productivity in tech
• Scaling engineering teams
• Monolith challenges
• Metadata processing

Keywords

• ServiceNow
• AI productivity
• engineering management
• monolith
• metadata processing
• Fortune 500
• RaptorDB
• Windsurf licenses

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: ServiceNow, RaptorDB, Fortune 500

Products: Windsurf

Places: Germany

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