Thomas, Vikas, thank you so much in advance for the conversation.
How is GenAI,
Thomas, reshaping customer expectations?
It’s clear that they change, because we see AI will change how people work,
how businesses work,
and with that, naturally, the customer expectations are different.
And now if we see even the first advancements of generative AI
towards agentic AI, leveraging agents getting the job done
fundamentally, this is also an expectation.
And if you think about yourself in your private life, you just
expected every service, every product is intelligent by default.
And customers of SAP
are leveraging AI to differentiate in the market.
So, I believe it’s super exciting to be here.
So you mention that and SAP's role,
how is it helping businesses to advance?
I think if you think about our portfolio, we help the entire enterprise
—from HR to finance to production, supply chain—
in all aspects to run their business.
And now with the power of AI, we can rethink business processes.
We can rethink business models actually, indeed, leveraging AI.
And agentic AI is, for us, an opportunity to drive a total
different level of productivity in the companies together,
tapping into the huge data set. Because in the end of the day,
AI is only as good as the data in that sense.
And that's something, if you think about your data treasure
in the company, it's in SAP systems. And we basically, with
our technology, enable that you use the most relevant, reliable,
and responsible AI using the data in the context of the
business, in the business process, in the business
decision-making processes of our customers leveraging our software.
And that's something where we are super excited, together with
our partners like BCG, to get the most out of that value for our clients.
So picking up on that data point, Vikas, how, what are you
hearing from your clients, and how are they navigating this
very rapidly changing landscape?
One of the things that I'm hearing a lot is customers are
now moving from a conversation around experimentation and
proofs of concept to really asking about value creation and ROI.
And so we've gone from, you know, an AI
experimentation discussion to very much a focus now on value creation.
And I think Thomas is exactly right.
The quality of your AI outcomes is essentially tied to the quality of your data.
And that's where companies, such as SAP, which have an incredible
trove of extremely actionable customer data, have a huge
advantage, because you know that the data quality is going to be
extremely high.
Yeah, so the building blocks are there.
So Thomas, when you think about the organizations that are doing this well
—cloud, AI— what are they doing correctly?
I think two aspects, which are important.
The one is, first, just do it. Really embrace the future,
embrace the innovation.
Don't wait for regulation, don't wait for something being
perfect, but embrace the innovation early to differentiate early.
Second is you need a strategy.
Just trying to embrace AI is not giving you the most value.
So having a strategy about
basically, the four dimensions you need to do a true
business transformation—data, application, processes, and the
people change management aspect—is critical.
And the last one I just mentioned, people change, is critical.
I mean, AI will fundamentally change the roles of every worker in the future.
But it's a leadership task to take everybody with us to have
education, learning, enablement.
And this is something which we should not forget in the topic about AI.
So education, learning, enablement.
From your point of view and this
idea of leadership, giving advice, how are you helping them
to really leverage these potential tech solutions?
I would say two things.
One, I really love Thomas's point around the
importance of change management.
You know, at BCG, we have this framework around 10/20/70, which
is, if you look at a large-scale technology change, about 10% of
the challenge is around the algorithm, 20% importantly on
the data, you know, which was also Thomas's point from before,
but 70% is actually the change management to actually make sure
all of the technology implementation sticks,
the incentives that changed, and so on and so forth.
The other thing I would just say is focus.
One of the things we found, it's maybe a bit counterintuitive, is
companies that have done a lot haven't necessarily been the
ones that have been the most successful.
It's those that have actually focused on three, four of the
highest, most value-creating use cases and then really done all
the hard work that Thomas was describing to make sure that
they got to the implementation and the value at the other end.
But Thomas, what is the role of partnerships when you think
about it in driving adoption and success of new technologies?
I mean, as a company, we are absolutely convinced that you
only can innovate together with partners.
We have 26,000 partners around the globe.
And if you think about AI, you've so many different nuances
and layers from the application side, then you have the large
language models, then you have the infrastructure side with the
GPUs and everything.
So fundamentally, only if you line up the partnership
entirely, then you get the most out of that.
So for us, partnerships in AI, it's the most critical one to be successful.
And then on top of that, as Vikas said, to really get the
value out of that, we need also the partners like BCG to lead
the way with the value conversation.
So I believe it's all about partnerships.
Vikas, how do you see partnerships?
I don't think I can say it better than it's all about partnerships.
I totally agree, Thomas. The landscape is changing so rapidly
and the competency and the skill set that's required is such a
moving target,
you have to work actually in an ecosystem of partnerships.
And so we're thrilled with our partnership with SAP, and we're
excited about the prospect of partnering with them going forward as well.
A good business partner actually once told me:
we need to get away from ego-system to ecosystem.
There's no better way to wrap up this conversation. Well said. Thomas,
Vikas, thank you for sharing your expertise with us.