Jim Lesser

You have long argued that in the age of AI, creativity is still the last unfair advantage. You believe it because you have lived it—you came in as ServiceNow’s first-ever Chief Brand Officer and built the brand function from the ground up. The most valuable creative act left on the table is not a campaign. It is a single word.

The Last Unfair Advantage Is a Noun

If creativity is the last unfair advantage, the most valuable creative act available to ServiceNow right now is not a campaign—it is a noun. A single, hard-to-copy word that the market adopts without noticing who introduced it. “Work-Native” is a candidate for that word. It turns a brand strategy into a category strategy—and category strategies outlive campaigns by decades. This is the kind of creative act a first Chief Brand Officer comes in to make.

Generic Language Gives the Category Away

Our own analysis of how AI systems answer enterprise questions points to a plain pattern: distinctive, branded vocabulary surfaces in those answers far more reliably than generic phrasing does. Every time the market hears “Now Assist” as a generic feature, some of that visibility leaks out toward every other assistant in the category. Owning the category’s vocabulary keeps the value at home—and it costs nothing but discipline: the same budget, pointed at language that compounds instead of expiring. Within a year, how often the category is spoken in ServiceNow’s words becomes something a brand leader can actually watch.

The Masterpiece a First CBO Comes to Paint

You came in to build something that did not exist before—a brand function worthy of the company underneath it. The category name is the capstone of that work. It takes everything you have built—the team, the measurement, the creative infrastructure—and gives it the one thing a campaign refresh never can: permanent vocabulary that belongs to the brand. This is that work, finishing itself.