SAP CEO Christian Klein: Everything we do contains AI

SAP CEO Christian Klein kicked off the company’s Sapphire customer conference with the promise of a real productivity boost from AI.

“The innovations for enterprise AI that we will be announcing at SAP Sapphire in 2024 will redefine the way business processes are handled,” Klein said at the start of the event in Orlando, Florida, this week. For Europe’s largest software company, AI is currently the linchpin of its entire product strategy. The majority of the announcements at Sapphire concerned additional AI functions or further partnerships to continue to expand its own AI ecosystem.

According to Klein, it’s all about providing technology that delivers real results. “We don’t just promise, we deliver,” he assured the Sapphire audience. SAP wants to offer its customers the necessary flexibility and strengthen their innovative spirit “to be successful in today’s fast-paced business environment.”

A central component of this is SAP’s AI bot Joule, which it introduced last year. Klein described Joule as the new front end and user interface for all SAP applications. It is the “largest productivity engine for users,” he said. Around 300 million users worldwide currently interact with SAP systems. In the future, around 80 percent of tasks could be handled via Joule, the SAP CEO estimated, leading to a productivity gain of around 20 percent.

In his keynote, the SAP CEO repeatedly emphasized the concrete practical relevance of his AI strategy. To date, around 50 use cases have already been firmly embedded in SAP’s software portfolio. This year, the number is expected to double to over 100. The advantage of this approach is that the application scenarios are directly integrated into the software that supports the processes. There is no separate automation layer in SAP that runs decoupled from the workflows and data without deeper insights.

AI for certain personas

Klein pinpoints the use of AI specifically to certain personas and roles in the enterprise. The CFO can complete financial reports faster and more accurately, the COO can make entire supply chains more resilient, and the CHRO can plan personnel deployment more efficiently.

The digital assistant Joule will also be available in versions tailored for consultants and developers.

According to Philip Herzig, SAP’s new Chief AI Officer, Joule’s advisory function has already been tested internally by 4,000 SAP consultants. The result: On average, users would have saved about two hours a day searching for and finding information. The developer version could also offer some efficiency benefits. According to Herzig, Joule was trained with 250 million lines of ABAP code for this purpose.

In principle, customers and partners could also develop their own use cases. The generative AI Hub in SAP’s Business Technology Platform (BTP) can be used to connect large language models (LLMs) from major vendors, as well as customer-specific AI models and a wide variety of data sources and tools, for example for identity management. According to Klein, 27,000 customers are already using SAP’s Business AI.

That sounds like a large number, but it is not even seven percent of SAP’s entire client base. This is probably also due to the fact that SAP reserves its AI innovations for user companies with a Rise or Grow application management contract.

The central prerequisite for adopting either the Rise or Grow offerings is the switch to a cloud model, whether private or public, and the adoption of a “clean core” with standardized processes. Migration effort and customizing could be significantly reduced by the methodology behind the two offerings.

Courage to change

The key to this is SAP’s enterprise architects, who are placed at the customer’s side. Klein speaks of “new, best friends” of the companies, who would also challenge them.

Klein said it takes courage to change, and he wants to give CIOs in particular the strength to do that. These are ultimately the “transformers of the business,” he said: They need the necessary technology for this, but above all they also need the will to change. 

Among the customers who have taken the Rise path with SAP are, for example, the car manufacturers Hyundai and Kia, the pharmaceutical company Moderna, and the IT giants Amazon, HP, and Nvidia. Amazon uses Rise on AWS for its satellite subsidiary Kuiper, which plans to launch more than 3,000 satellites into low-Earth orbit to build a broadband network. The new AWS CEO Matt Garman emphasized on the big Sapphire stage how important a well-functioning supply chain is for this.

SAP partner Nvidia also relies on Rise. “We have one of the most complex supply chains in the world,” said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on a video link from Taiwan. As an example, he cited Nvidia’s own AI chip platform Blackwell, which consists of around 600,000 parts from countless suppliers.