When Christian Klein became sole CEO of SAP almost five years ago, the top customer priority was for SAP to help them integrate their mismatched technology.
Today, customers’ top expectation is that SAP will help them transform.
“Four years back, integration was the key because without it you cannot offer end-to-end solutions and you cannot offer, in my eyes, a great customer experience,” Klein said in our recent interview for this CEO Outlook 2025 series.
“But now it’s about, how can the customer transform?”
That shift toward an extreme focus on change and adaptation for emerging needs rather than on feature superiority is one of the major forces driving enormous change among all of the Cloud Wars Top 10 enterprise-apps vendors — SAP, Salesforce, Oracle, Workday, Microsoft, and to a lesser extent ServiceNow and Google Cloud.
And from my conversation with Klein, I would say he believes two market dynamics are behind all that disruption:
- the explosive emergence of AI as a business imperative, and
- the existential need for companies to engineer end-to-end processes and end-to-end visibility.
(You can view my full interview with Klein here.)
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The AI Era
“Today, there is no C-level discussion without AI,” said Klein, the Cloud Wars CEO of the Year for 2023.
And Klein says customers are particularly excited by how easy it has become for businesses to deploy AI and for their employees to quickly master it.
“Today, you can work with SAP software via human language, which means you can feel the productivity which is now embedded in the solutions. You feel how you get your job done easier,” he said.
And those big wins at the level of individuals will quickly accelerate to an enterprise-wide scale.
“The topics around AI are now emerging towards how can now SAP help me solve the tough, challenging business questions I have, and how I can steer my company better, and how to orchestrate my end-to-end business processes with SAP Business AI.
“That’s what is really at the top of the agenda of every C-level discussion.”
The End-to-End Imperative
But, Klein warned, these remarkable new capabilities will be squandered if they’re applied to existing siloed functions and processes rather than across the entire organization, with optimized processes and outcomes as the essential goal.
“When you talk about a typical process, what many customers want with SAP is a complete quote-to-cash solution,” Klein said, “and that means a certain offering.
“But then they need to know which offerings to combine to win more deals in the future and at what price? Then you need to also of course have the fulfillment there for the quote in the order management, and you need to bill, and you need to book the revenue in your accounts,” Klein said.
“But now we can prove, hey, we not only help you now to run this end-to-end process, but we can also help you with generative AI and embedded AI. We really make sure that you can quote more intelligently, that you can sell more, that you can price more effectively, and that you can run all the fulfillment processes in the back end and be way more productive.
“If we can deliver that, then the customers are saying, ‘I’m all in for buying more AI units from SAP because we see this end-to-end process is not only transforming my company, it’s also helping me to be way more productive than before.”
‘Super-Agent’ Joule
As those transformative capabilities take hold, the role of agents–plus what Klein called SAP’s “super agent” Joule — will help to drive superb business outcomes.
“Let me give you one concrete example: in 2025, we will ship Demand Supply Chain Planning, which is obviously a set of very strategic capabilities for many companies when it comes to better predicting demand, but also having a resilient supply chain which can deliver on time,” Klein said.
“Today with Business AI, we’re helping with generative AI but also with machine learning and others to better predict demand. And of course, we have an AI embedded so when you do your inventory management in the future, with Joule becoming a so-to-say ‘super agent,’ then you have an agent who helps you to predict your demand but this agent is actually also collaborating with your supply chain agent and saying, ‘Hey, I’m predicting real-time demand based on billions of data points and unstructured content, and here, dear supply chain agent, is my output.’
“Then the supply chain agent takes that output from the sales agent and says, ‘Okay, where’s my inventory? How do I now need to manage inventory, to first deliver on time, but then also to optimize my inventory?’
“And then the supply-chain agent takes this input and gives it to the procurement agent and says, ‘Hey, we need to be able to deliver next day’.”
That, Klein said, is the model to which business leaders across many industries are aspiring: end-to-end data flows and decision-making handled by agents and orchestrated by SAP Joule.
“That’s what we’ll be shipping: Agentic AI capabilities with Joule coming on top, orchestrating the various sub-agents and making sure the customer gets an extremely valuable output end to end and not only talking about sales, not only talking about supply chain, not only talking about procurement, but how all these agents work with each other and collaborate and contextualize data,” Klein said.
For customers, he added, that end-to-end agent-powered model will prove to be “an extremely significant output for our customers.”
Final Thought
As I noted throughout 2024, SAP was by far the fastest-growing enterprise-apps vendor in the Cloud Wars Top 10, and the hard-charging Klein is clearly not simply hoping that SAP will be able to meet the challenging new requirements and demands from customers.
Instead, he’s pushing as hard as he can to ensure that SAP’s customers will be able to transform on an end-to-end basis using a broad set of AI solutions powered in large part by SAP’s own 007, known as Joule.
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