The former SAP global CRO brings the deal-closing pedigree and regional depth that ServiceNow needs as it moves to embed its platform at the heart of India’s GCC boom
ServiceNow has appointed Kulmeet Bawa as Managing Director and Group Vice President for India and SAARC, effective 6 April 2026. Based in New Delhi, Bawa will oversee business operations across the region with a mandate to accelerate enterprise adoption, deepen partner and customer relationships, and expand the company’s footprint in AI-led digital transformation. The appointment is not a routine succession — it is a deliberate escalation, made at a moment when ServiceNow is treating India as both a significant commercial market and a proving ground for its global product ambitions.
The Hire and What It Signals
Bawa joins from SAP, where he most recently served as Global Chief Revenue Officer — a role he reached after running SAP India as President and Managing Director from 2020. Under his leadership, SAP India became one of the company’s fastest-growing markets globally, with a particular focus on large enterprise accounts including 50 Indian unicorns running on SAP’s platform. Before SAP, he served as President and Managing Director for South Asia at Adobe, where he led regional growth and enterprise expansion.
The competitive subtext of the hire is hard to miss. SAP and ServiceNow are increasingly converging in the same enterprise conversations, both competing to become the AI-powered workflow layer running beneath large organisations. Recruiting the executive who scaled SAP India and then ran its global cloud and AI revenue strategy is a pointed statement about where ServiceNow intends to compete — and against whom.
Adrian Johnston, ServiceNow’s President for APAC, described Bawa’s combination of global CRO experience, regional expertise, and the discipline developed through military service as uniquely suited to driving the company’s India mission forward. “India is more than a growth market for ServiceNow,” Johnston said. “It is a critical engine for the company’s global ambitions.”
The GCC Opportunity
The strategic logic sharpens considerably when set against ServiceNow’s positioning in India’s GCC market. India has emerged as the world’s dominant hub for Global Capability Centres, and ServiceNow has been building infrastructure around that reality with notable speed.
In November 2025, ANSR — backed by ServiceNow’s 150-million-dollar Ecosystem Ventures fund — launched 1Hub, an AI-powered GCC command and control platform developed in collaboration with ServiceNow and purpose-built for the 50-billion-dollar-plus GCC market. Positioned as the first platform of its kind globally, 1Hub had already onboarded over 10,000 users at launch. The product is a concrete expression of ServiceNow’s broader ambition: to become the orchestration layer running beneath enterprise India’s GCC expansion, managing workflows, compliance, and operations across the full lifecycle of a capability centre.
Bawa’s track record of closing at the top of the enterprise stack — with the CFOs, CIOs, and boards that make platform-level commitments — makes him well-suited to convert that infrastructure investment into long-term revenue contracts.
The Numbers Underneath the Appointment
The commercial context is also relevant. ServiceNow reported full-year 2025 subscription revenue of 12.883 billion dollars, up twenty-one per cent year on year, with Asia Pacific remaining a key growth region. A market growing at that pace, and carrying that level of strategic weight, warrants leadership with a genuinely global operating profile rather than a regional management appointment. The elevation of the India and SAARC role to MD and GVP level reflects that recalibration.
“India sits at the heart of ServiceNow’s global strategy, and I look forward to helping enterprises unlock the full value of the platform,” Bawa said.
What Comes Next
The immediate question is execution. ServiceNow’s India thesis — platform as GCC backbone, AI-led workflow automation as the enterprise value proposition — is coherent and well-timed. The GCC market is expanding rapidly, multinationals are under pressure to show that their India centres generate genuine innovation rather than just cost savings, and ServiceNow’s platform is well-positioned to address both needs. Whether Bawa can translate that positioning into the kind of large, multi-year enterprise agreements that move the needle on APAC revenue will be the measure of whether this appointment delivers on its billing.
