SAP Business AI: Helping You Achieve Real-World Results | The Six Five Summit

Juergen Mueller, CTO, and member of the executive board at SAP. Welcome to this year's six five Summit. Daniel.

Hi everyone. It's a pleasure. Yeah, it's great to have you here.

This has been a really significant year across just about every part of every business. You know, 2022, we had chat, GPT sort of come into our conscience and, and, and, and, and into our conscience, I should say, and sort of change how we thought about doing business. But 22 was a bit of a, oh my gosh.

And then 23 was a build, build, build. And 24, though Jurgen has been implementation and companies are spending, thinking, doing, dreaming of what's possible with ai. But it's not just ai.

It's looking at their whole stack, their whole business, everything they do and how they can do it better. First and foremost, Jurgen is the CTO of SAP. Thanks for joining us.

Tell us a little bit about what's going on, what you're thinking about these days as you are leading and working so closely with your customers around the world. Uh, Daniel, it's an amazing time. I mean, it was never more exciting being a CTO or in our industry in general.

'cause as you mentioned, um, you have to rethink everything basically. Um, and good thing is that, um, at SAP, we are in a very, very good starting point for our customers. Actually, let me share with you that a couple of weeks ago, we bid farewell to one of our co-founders, Hassel Ner.

And when you recap the, uh, 52 years of SAP, that's how young SAP is, is as a startup. Um, if you recap that, SAP has always been super close to the end users, and that is what we continue to do. We continue learning from end users, of course informed by technology of then how the world runs.

And this is how SAP has built the broadest portfolio of enterprise applications. And now of course, as you mentioned, we are rethinking that. And for us, we deliver last year, um, already like a dozen or so in AI cases, um, building on top of the eight years of experience we have with narrow AI in production as well.

Yeah, I love that you pointed out five decades that SAP has been a leader in enterprise software. And of course, uh, you know, congratulations on the transition. Mr.

Platner was a tremendous contributor to the SAP community. I remember, I think I've been doing, uh, sapphires for almost a decade, and I remember every year listening to one or more of his various keynotes, always a thinker a bit, you know, a bit of a, of a, of a dreamer, an innovator, thinking about how to take this product forward. And you started to allude to it a bit here, uh, in, in that first, uh, sort of answer here again, but talk to me about staying relevant five decades.

You know, you've got changes in your leadership team, you have, uh, changes in what customers need. You've gone from prem to cloud. Like what's the secret to to SAP and how has it been so successful at staying relevant through these 50 years?

Yeah, over time, SAP learned how the world runs. And what I always find super exciting is the different application areas, of course, with, uh, S four HANA at the core when it comes to finance, to manufacturing, to quality, then everything around HR and procurement. Also, um, the supply chain side of the house and customer experience.

Um, this is so broad. And then you have the business technology platform with all the supporting technologies for SAP and non SAP. And then what I also like a lot and why, why we are so relevant, SAP kept reinventing in the different industries as well.

'cause of course, uh, retailer is very different than in higher education or professional services company. And, um, SAP learned how all those companies run and is part of so, so many mission critical business processes in those companies. And now with of course, what, what do these business processes create?

These end-to-end business processes. They create data and data now talking about, uh, gen AI is the fuel, is the treasure trove. And we have, uh, tens of thousands of customers who trust us enough to give us access to their data, to train machine learning models to make our software even better.

And that is a positive flywheel effect that we see here. 'cause that we give to users, they give feedback. And this is how actually in that world of gene ai, we are infusing generative AI capabilities into all of our enterprise applications.

And at the end, it's always, again, about getting back to those end users. And we stand up every day because we wanna improve the end users' life at our customers. Yeah, I've started, uh, I started working with SAP advising the company, uh, over a, over a decade ago.

And I've always admired the depth of industries that the company is focused on. You know, a lot of companies have gone vertical over the past several years, many of which have picked a few, what I'd call vertical pains, maybe financial services, maybe healthcare, um, SAP for, you know, it's changed little bits, but usually more than 20, sometimes as many as 25 industries that it's focused on. That's because of the specialization.

And I think with ai, kind of what you were alluding to is that specialization will become even more important because that data, being able to apply it to models, smaller models that are industry specific, and we're gonna come back to talking about that in a minute. But I also wanna talk about your platform strategy. You mentioned the word platform, you said BTP, the business technology platform.

The world is kind of looking at this moment, you know, I alluded early on Jurgen to the great reset that is going on. AI is making every company on the planet sort of rethink who they're gonna partner with, who's gonna integrate for them, which ISVs will they work with, where will the data sit? Will they do it in the cloud SaaS and sort of hybrid iteration of it.

SAP has hundreds of thousands of customers, five decades plus of experience, but at the same time, vendors, um, are selling, Hey, you can do this easier, different, simpler. It's the time to change. You're fighting to keep your customers and of course grow them.

How's that strategy going? How are you keeping customers with SAP during this really important inflection? Some of our customer CIOs, they say, Hey, there's like a swarm of MO mosquitoes attacking you.

Everyone now claiming to do everything with gene ai, everything easy, everything done, but you don't wanna have a dozen or a hundred POCs with different vendors and then trying to stitch everything together. Again, we know that this will cause such high integration costs and data and consistency issues, et cetera. Then you rather want to pick a few partners, SAP being one of them, such that you can rely that latest gen AI capabilities are being infused into the enterprise applications where gen AI is needed and relevant for the end users.

I mean, if you are in finance and you work on your, uh, your financial close, it doesn't help that you have 10 different tools. You want to have this in the best tool that does their mission critical job that has all the data. You actually also don't necessarily want to replicate data out of that system.

It's cost, it's efficiency, it's also potential compliance challenges with data leaving, uh, those systems. So therefore, our strategy here is, is very simple. We, uh, continue offering our customers the best end-to-end business processes.

We infuse gen ai, we have a digital copilot experience called juul. We already embedded JUUL into many of our solutions and announced even more where this will happen, such that you get the gen AI support where you need that right in point in of time. And you can imagine that when you have your application open, let's talk, um, hr, you have your HR application success factors, open gen AI already understands the context you're in, it understands what you wanna do, and therefore that cannot be a more efficient way of doing gen AI in that context.

And then on top, Daniel, you know, our ecosystem is very important to us. SAP wouldn't be where we are without a great ecosystem. So everything we do ourselves in the area of gene ai, we also offer after vetting to our customers and partners with the, uh, generative AI hub on SAP business technology platform.

So therefore, with this, customers then can do the same and they can use the data they have in SAP, they can ground models, they can do fine tuning, and we have vetted those models already for, um, reliability, for enterprise application readiness. And that that is what you want. You want a partner, very strong partner in instead of like thousands or hundreds of mosquitoes, uh, attacking the CIOs claiming to solve everything.

Yeah, I think, I think of course there will always be innovators that will rise. You were at one time one of those. And then there's always this great battle of innovation that goes on.

Companies that have significant provenance and large customer bases are always kind of fighting off what you're calling those mosquitoes. And sometimes there's a, there's a very clever mosquito that finds a way to create and enter. And by the way, some of those become your partners down the line and they end up becoming really important.

And many of those will deter or, you know, take CIOs and companies off their mission, distract them, create complexities and problems. And, and one of the advantages I think that you have is companies have a big enough challenge with their data already as they're trying to figure out how to move forward. Taking one of the big complexities off the table in enabling the existing database to proliferate into the, the platform for AI is so important.

And I think you have a very compelling case to make that you are one of, if not the most important for most of those companies. I think you also mentioned a few really important things because you're a cloud slash hybrid solution, is that there is data that needs to, you know, of course go to the public cloud for maximum value for generative ai, but we're also seeing this trend line around privacy and this trend line around hybrid and this trend line about keeping some data on-prem for economic value, for security value, for privacy, for, uh, compliance. So all these things together give you a really compelling story to tell.

Um, you know, you've sort of given me, and you've alluded to me where AI fits in the platform. And it sounds to me like what you're doing yurigan is you are making AI accessible. You're asking your customers to sort of, you know, modern, modernize their SAP instances so that they can embrace all of the capabilities.

Um, but you're also giving them a pathway to do that. You know, what do you see as sort of the trends now once they get modernized, their a data becomes accessible, they're able to take advantage of JUUL and all the integrations you've built with the public cloud and the, what are the tech and innovations that you're looking as CTO of SAP building forward for your customers? Daniel, you mentioned a a couple of things, so let me, let me comment on a few of those.

So, um, SAP is an innovation powerhouse, and as you mentioned, we want customers to be with us on their journey or to modernize their states to actually leveraging all that, uh, innovation capability that is in SAP. And when you talk about data, um, with SAP Datasphere, we make it insanely easy to combining SAP and non SAP data in a federated way. Again, you don't want to replicate all these important data that has business semantics to it and then redo all the semantics somewhere else.

But with, uh, data sphere, you can do that, um, in a federated manner. And then when you, uh, talk about pla the platform once more on this topic, really it is about a combination of challenges that CIOs, CDOs, et cetera have. And at least in an SAP context, but also beyond we help with that.

You mentioned that SAP for so, so, so many companies is amongst the, or the most important, uh, system to run their mission critical processes. And therefore, I, when I ask them, how many applications do you have? Oftentimes it's a lower, um, four digit number, like two to 3000 applications.

So SAP being so important, what do we need to do? You do need to integrate those with each other. And which better integration technology could you use than the one, uh, from SAP with the integration suite then it's about automation.

SAP and non SAP, again, we have SAP build, we help with that. You wanna build extensions because you want to have a clean core being super fast in upgrading customers now sometimes have a 10 times, um, faster upgrade si uh, cycle, not doing upgrades every 10 years, but doing those every year. And it doesn't take like, um, three, four or five months, um, or even much longer to do that, but it takes a couple of weeks to do that.

So the extensions you wanna build, um, in a way to not modify the system and that you do with SAP build as well. Then, uh, it's about data. You mentioned that maybe now the most important part and some companies are further ahead.

'cause everyone knew. Everyone knew that you need to invest in your data to have a clean, uh, data and a good data strategy. But now it's a compelling point in time because without great data, there's no great generative ai.

So doing that with SAP where that data actually originates from, and being able to combine this with non SAP data helps tremendously in getting the job done. And then of course you have analytics and planning on top, and we already talked about ai, so therefore this is super important. You have an amazing application, um, company here with a fantastic platform, the business technology platform underneath.

And then of course, there's so much more than you, you could be talking about sustainability, so many challenges, uh, still ahead then when it is about business transformation management, because everyone now understands the go-to the two B picture. But the reality of is very complex. So how do you use leading, uh, tools like SAP signo for assessing, uh, processes, SAP linex for looking at your enterprise architecture and more to driving adoption, uh, of new solutions.

So how do you do that? And then of course, it's about continuous intelligence on the data side of the house, such that the system actually does more and more of the job for you. And then there's quantum computing, and we could spend the rest of the day here, but I know you have a fantastic program as well.

Well, I appreciate you teasing some of the things and some of the directions. I, I agree with you. We do need to think about, of course, all the exciting gen AI opportunities, but there's a much broader analytical AI that still exists by the way, and has existed for over four decades, that companies require the best data, the most, uh, accessible data on the planet to benefit from.

And as you head into other areas you mentioned like sustainability, uh, the future of, of, of qubits and quantum and how they will be able to solve big problems in many industries. You're absolutely right. Jurgen, I do appreciate by the way that, you know, you, you've taken a little time out of your, uh, Europe SAP Sapphire to join us here for this year's six five summit year again.

And also, uh, you had your big Sapphire event last week. Tell me a little bit, you know, tease everyone out there a little bit. What were the big things that you announced, um, at this year's Sapphire and, uh, what can you share with our audience before we let you get back to, uh, your European event?

Yeah, the overall theme, Daniel, um, for Sapphire this year was bring out your best. And we want to help everyone bringing out their best. And now talking about ai, that is of course the, um, technology of our generation, maybe at least of the decade.

And SAP is business ai. So we really look at the business side of the house. You have many ingredients, but we want to make it useful and relevant for the end users.

And when it comes to juul, our generative AI copilot, we announced, uh, JUUL in September last year already with, um, initial integrations into SAP SuccessFactors and SAP start. And since then, SAP has integrated J into, um, S four hana, private edition, S four HANA and Public Edition, as well as in multiple applications across our supply chain portfolio, our BTP portfolio. Um, and in the second half, JUUL has also planned to be integrated into Ariba, into SAP Analytics cloud, many other supply chain, uh, solutions as well from SAP, and then it's about languages, accessibility and dual will be able to, uh, uh, converse in multiple languages, of course, English, German, Spanish, French, port, Portuguese, um, as well and many more.

Also, we announced, um, new partnerships, um, at, uh, Sapphire, which are amazing. And now when we look at generative ai, let me give you a few examples. Um, for example, SAP Analytics Cloud, we announced our generative AI capabilities such that everyone from boardroom to shop floor actually can ask analytical questions.

And that creates the transparency everyone needs to then also, of course, taking the right decisions in the integration space. And Jule will help you to create integration flows, for example, between SAP and the government system because they created newer rules and regulations. And of course you wanna integrate that super quickly.

Um, with the SAP integration suite, when you think about Lean IX or signo, we launched, um, gene AI capabilities, for example, process recommendation in signo, or also we will have prompt based, um, process mining, um, as well. And then we have, uh, 2 million plus ABA development community and we upgraded, um, ABA and language to AAB Cloud as well. And here we help with generative ai, we work together with NVIDIA on training, um, our model, and now we support developers, um, with generative AI as well to help them in their development process.

So you do see a lot is happening. This is just a small bite of what we announced at Sapphire, and there's something in it for everyone. And what is important to take away when it comes to Gen I, but also all the other important topics.

SAP is not just announcing, but we are delivering. Jurgen. I wanna thank you so much for joining me at this year's six five Summit.

We've had so many great conversations over the years. This was another wonderful one and for everyone out there, I hope you had the chance to really take all of this in Juergen Mueller, CTO and member of the executive board at SAP. Thanks for joining us at this year's summit.

Thank you, Daniel. Have fun, everyone. And now back to you.