As the president and CEO of ServiceNow, Frank Slootman has a lot to say about workflow, Big Data, and the future of tech. With constantly changing technology and customers demanding rapid innovation, it’s a struggle to stay on top of the industry, but Slootman considers it a marathon, not a sprint, despite recent dips in their stock value.

“Our focus is not just on modernizing what people are doing. It’s focused on transforming what people are doing,” he says—and many of those changes, especially when optimizing established workflow processes, involve a “massive sea change.” But up to 40 percent of managers’ time is spent on administrative tasks, so every automation and intuitive improvement can be an investment in internal productivity.

When it comes to managing “Big Data,” Slootman says that real-time data is more central to their business model. “The real-time dimension is something that’s going to become huge, because people are demanding real-time information. It’s just not interesting to look at data that’s 12, 24 hours old. And because we are sitting on live data, the ability to represent that so you can see your business in action is exceptionally exciting to businesses and managers.”

That real-time information can drive continuous innovation in business, and that is a trend that is likely to stay. Companies like Amazon and Tesla Motors, Inc. have set the standard for this kind of constant change, changing the experiences of consumers as well as their expectations with the constant addition of new experiences, features and products. Rather than considering those examples outliers or one-off successes, Slootman believes that “rapid iteration is the new normal. Back to the real-time thing—it gets really boring when you get an update every 18 months. We don’t tolerate those timeframes anymore.” To survive in today’s global digital economy, companies need to be willing to innovate, and they need the tools to do it at a moment’s notice.

Watch Slootman’s entire interview below.