SAP: Bringing the ‘Operating System’ of a Company into the AI Era with CTO Philipp Herzig
In a Nutshell
SAP CTO Philipp Herzig outlines SAP's transformation of its enterprise "operating system"—spanning finance, HR, supply chain, and more—into an AI-powered platform, embedding generative UIs, proactive agents, and a knowledge graph to blend structured/unstructured data for 30% efficiency gains and faster outcomes. Key innovations include Joule AI copilot for consulting/travel, Relational Pre-Trained Transformers (RPT) for scalable predictions outperforming LLMs on tabular data like demand forecasting, and evals-driven agent development to ensure verifiability at massive scale across 20,000 APIs. SAP prioritizes customer ROI through hybrid pricing, data harmonization, and upleveling roles by automating mundane tasks, positioning it to win the enterprise AI outcome race.
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There's a lot of exciting opportunities and new things you can build that we only dreamed of in the last 20 years at least since I'm a developer. SAP serves some of the largest customers with a lot of heritage and complex landscapes. They can reduce 30% of their efforts to get to the outcome faster, which directly reduces costs. The time is clearly over where you design software that requires the intelligence to sit in front of the computer. In classical software, you designed a user interface to teach a human how they get their tasks done by clicking through the UI. Essentially, this is over.
Hey listeners, welcome back to No Priors. Today with Philipp Herzig, CTO of SAP, the enterprise juggernaut. Topics: SAP's AI strategy, why SAP has endured and thrived through several technology transitions, why entrepreneurs underestimate challenges of scale, why AI is a business model transition not just a technology transition, why LLMs are not enough for predictive analytics, traveling salesman problem in the real world and Strait of Hormuz.
Welcome, Philipp. >> Yeah, it's a pleasure to be here. Thank you.
Everybody knows SAP but for lots of engineers or people not close to larger enterprise systems, they don't know the breadth and function of the platform. Describe what SAP does for customers.
SAP is market leader in enterprise software applications and platforms. 400,000 enterprise customers running finance, HR, supply chain, manufacturing execution, logistics, warehouse management, sales, services, commerce, procurement end to end. SAP has the broadest portfolio for running the business end to end. SAP started with giving real-time insight. SAP is the operating system of a company to manage everything from order to cash or source to pay end to end for companies around the globe.
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