Twenty-Five Seasons. One Jersey.
When Gavin King finally left Microsoft, he didn't describe it as a career move. He called it leaving "25 seasons in the same jersey - a place that shaped over half my life." That's the language of an athlete who played until the last whistle, not an executive hunting a LinkedIn headline.
In those 25 years, King held a variety of marketing and communications leadership roles inside one of the most important technology companies on Earth. He helped upgrade an entire industry to Office 365 and Windows 10. He helped establish the Microsoft 365 value proposition - a rebrand that required translating a sprawling product portfolio into language that millions of IT buyers and end users could actually grasp. That's not a design problem. It's a narrative problem. King solved it.
Along the way, he became Chief of Staff to Satya Nadella - the CEO who turned Microsoft's entire trajectory around. In that role, King led operations for Microsoft's $20 billion-plus cloud business, sitting at the intersection of strategy, culture, and execution at the highest level. He coached leaders. He built teams. He helped shape how tens of thousands of people worked and thought about their roles.
He left a company that had shaped half his life. He joined one that's trying to reshape an entire industry.
The move to ServiceNow wasn't random. ServiceNow sits at the center of enterprise AI - not as a storyteller about AI, but as an operator of it. The company's Now Platform is already embedded in the workflow infrastructure of thousands of organizations. The challenge isn't building the product. It's building the narrative that explains why the product matters, how it connects across an ever-expanding portfolio, and what the future looks like for customers navigating a genuinely confusing landscape.
That's exactly the kind of problem King built his career solving. Within two months of joining ServiceNow as VP of Portfolio Marketing, colleagues were already describing him as "the one business partner all of us in our creative studio wanted to work with" - someone who "cleared the way to give us a global platform to do our best work and drive the business." That kind of credibility doesn't come from a job title. It comes from having done this before, at scale, over decades.
His role at ServiceNow is to connect the threads: platform launches, AI vision, product releases, market positioning - all of it needs to resolve into one coherent story. Enterprise buyers are overwhelmed by competing claims about AI. King's job is to cut through that noise with precision, not volume.
Colleagues describe his approach as "mastering the art of finding the story in a sea of ambiguity and legacy perceptions." That phrase alone tells you something important. Legacy perceptions are one of the hardest things to move in enterprise marketing. Customers who've thought about ServiceNow as an ITSM tool for a decade need a genuinely different mental model to understand it as an AI platform. King's built exactly that kind of model-shift before.
He brings what he calls an "AI-native mindset" to a company whose entire strategy now revolves around AI workflows - from ServiceNow's Virtual Agent to IT Operations Management to Security Operations. The portfolio spans IT, HR, finance, legal, procurement, and beyond. The unifying story connecting all of it is, as of 2026, Gavin King's responsibility to tell.