Making enterprise technology feel like something people actually want.
Most brand marketers at enterprise software companies are translating product specs into slides. Sydney Williams is doing something harder: making people feel something about workflow automation.
As Vice President of Global Brand Marketing at ServiceNow, Williams oversees everything the outside world sees - creative, content, media, events. That is not a list of deliverables. It is the full surface area of how a $13 billion enterprise software company tells the world what it stands for. Right now, that story is about AI: putting it to work for people, not just for companies.
She arrived at this role with credentials from three very different worlds. At mcgarrybowen - the advertising agency where she spent more than eight years - she worked the accounts that agencies fight for: JPMorgan Chase, The Walt Disney Company, Chevron, Marriott. That is not a list of blue-chip names to drop. That is a training ground where you learn, in real time, how to hold a brand together when the audience is cynical, the budget is visible, and the CMO is watching.
"To be in two (or three!) places at once. Any working mom can most likely relate to feeling like there is never enough time."- Sydney Williams, on her wished-for superpower
Then came GE. Nearly a decade at one of the oldest industrial companies on earth, working as Head of Global Media and Creative Strategy. GE is an unusual place to become a brand innovator - it is a company that makes jet engines and MRI machines, not sneakers or streaming services. Yet that is exactly the challenge Williams embraced: reimagining how a B2B industrial giant talks to engineers, investors, and talent. She created campaigns that brought the GE narrative to life in ways that unlocked real commercial value. She found audiences where they were and gave them something worth stopping for.
That decade is the clearest signal of what Williams can do. It is relatively straightforward to sell a brand that already feels cool. It takes a different kind of skill to make a brand feel essential when it makes things people never think about until they break. Williams did it. Repeatedly. Across global markets. At a company managing its own identity transformation in the middle of the industrial-to-digital shift.
Before joining ServiceNow, she spent several years at Salesforce in senior brand and industry marketing roles, sharpening her understanding of enterprise SaaS marketing - a discipline that asks you to tell a credible story to a buyer who has heard a hundred credible stories. From there, the move to ServiceNow, another enterprise platform betting everything on AI, had a clear logic.
There is a long-running assumption in technology marketing that enterprise brands must be serious to be credible. Williams has spent her career disproving this quietly, in the only way that convinces anyone: results.
At ServiceNow, her mandate is broad. Creative direction. Content strategy. Media planning. Events. The span is intentional - brand is not a department in her view, it is a through-line. When the company runs a campaign with Idris Elba asking why work is not working the way it could, Williams is among the people ensuring that message lands consistently from a Times Square billboard to a developer conference booth to a LinkedIn sponsored post in Singapore.
She is energized by creativity. She is drained by meetings that could have been emails. Both of those things are visible in how she talks about her work - a person who measures her day by what actually got made, not what got discussed.
On hard days, she walks. Then she starts fresh. It is an uncomplicated reset for a complicated job, and it says something about the person: no catastrophizing, no spiraling. Process the difficulty, move.
The working-mother dimension is real in her public persona too. She has said plainly that she wishes she could be in two or three places at once - the kind of admission that gets nods at every seniority level from people managing ambitious careers alongside family. It is not a lament. It is an honest accounting of what the job actually costs, offered without performance.
GE in the 2010s was not an easy assignment. The company was in the middle of a contested identity: was it an industrial company, a digital company, a software company? The marketing team's job was to tell a coherent story in the middle of institutional uncertainty. Williams spent nearly a decade there as Head of Global Media and Creative Strategy - long enough to live through multiple brand pivots, C-suite changes, and the eventual breakup of the conglomerate itself.
What she built there was not just campaigns. It was frameworks for how a legacy industrial brand could speak to a generation of engineers and customers who grew up expecting brands to behave like media companies. Audience engagement built from the brand up, with commercial outcomes tracked. The kind of work that does not make headlines but changes how a company is perceived across a decade.
When she eventually moved into enterprise SaaS - first at Salesforce, then ServiceNow - that background became an unusual asset. She had already solved a harder version of the problem: making something genuinely unsexy feel necessary, relevant, and even aspirational.
"I love the women who dedicate so much of their precious time and energy into making a difference."- Sydney Williams, on why she joined NYWICI
ServiceNow is not a brand that needs explaining to CIOs. It is the platform that runs the workflows of some of the largest companies on earth - IT service management, operations, HR delivery, customer service, security operations. The customer knows what it does. The challenge is not awareness. It is meaning.
In 2024 and into 2025, ServiceNow built its brand story around AI - specifically, AI that works for people rather than alongside them or instead of them. The 'Put AI to Work for People' campaign, created by BBDO and anchored by a partnership with actor Idris Elba, posed the question bluntly: why isn't work working the way it could? Williams oversees the global execution of that brand thesis: making sure every touchpoint - creative, content, media, event - delivers the same answer.
In 2026, ServiceNow unveiled an autonomous workforce platform, positioning the company as the connective tissue for AI agents operating across the enterprise. The brand story has to keep pace with a product that is moving fast. Williams is the person responsible for keeping it coherent.