September 25, 2026
Acuity Adds Software Executive to Its Board
ServiceNow Vice Chairman Nick Tzitzon takes the company’s tenth board seat
Acuity's board has added a tenth seat, and, it went to someone from well outside the world of building products. The company announced Tuesday that Nick Tzitzon, Vice Chairman of software company ServiceNow, an enterprise software company with more than $13 billion in annual revenue, joined as an independent director effective September 24, expanding the board from nine members. He will serve on the Audit and Governance Committees.
His initial term runs to the next annual meeting, expected in January. Like many public company directors, he is taking part of his compensation in deferred stock; a Form 4 filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission shows 296 shares, worth about $90,800 at $306.74 a share, vesting at that meeting.
A Strategist From the CEO's Office
Tzitzon spent roughly seven years at SAP, finishing as an executive vice president and senior adviser to then-CEO Bill McDermott. He joined ServiceNow in January 2020, shortly after McDermott took over as CEO, and became chief strategy and corporate affairs officer in 2021. He was named Vice Chairman in January 2025 and leads the company's AI Institute.
ServiceNow sits in the S&P 100, the index of the largest U.S. public companies, and is worth many times what Acuity is. Tzitzon's career has centered on strategy, communications and advising the chief executive. For a company that describes itself as an industrial technology business, that experience has obvious uses in the boardroom.
The Intelligent Spaces Backdrop
Ashe said Tzitzon's experience helping organizations use software, data and AI aligns with how Acuity creates value for customers and shareholders. Tzitzon went further, saying Acuity is positioned to lead "the next wave of AI value creation" and calling industrial intelligence a massive global opportunity. Neither statement described a specific assignment beyond his committee work.
The appointment arrives nearly two years after Acuity agreed to acquire QSC for $1.215 billion, the largest deal in company history, adding a cloud-manageable audio, video and control platform to Intelligent Spaces. That segment accounted for 7.6% of sales before the deal. In the fiscal third quarter, it posted $303.5 million, up nearly 15%.
Software and recurring services are part of that growth equation. A director who has spent six years inside an enterprise software company brings a familiar vocabulary to that side of the business, and a seat on the Audit Committee puts him close to how it gets reported.
What Lighting People Should Watch
Tzitzon joins a board already weighted toward technology, including a former American Airlines chief information officer and a former New Relic chief financial officer. He also arrives six weeks after Acuity named Siemens veteran Ruth Gratzke president of Acuity Brands Lighting, extending a run of leadership picks drawn from systems and infrastructure rather than industrial high-bays.
For distributors, specifiers, and agents, a new director changes little on this Tuesday morning. Lighting still generates roughly three-quarters of the company’s revenue, and the quote desk does not report to the Governance Committee. The longer question for lighting people is how quickly a leadership bench built around software and systems reshapes what Acuity sells, and through whom.
Disclosure: The author of this article, Al Uszynski, is a shareholder of ServiceNow, Inc. (NYSE: NOW).
