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In today’s bonus Cloud Wars Minute, filmed at the SAP Sapphire event, I talk to Sebastian Steinhauser, chief strategy and operations officer, SAP. We cover a broad range of topics, including business agility, supply chain resilience, and sustainability outcome.
Highlights
00:56 — Sebastian Steinhauser relates how SAP’s strategy largely remains consistent: Bring out the best in customers by delivering business agility, supply chain resilience, and sustainability outcomes through its integrated portfolio. Now the strategy is being taken to the next level, with a focus on execution and delivering value to customers.
01:52 — Sebastian gets to test SAP’s Business AI as a first user and realize efficiencies. He understands what’s working in its product strategy. He has the long-term view and can ensure SAP’s executing on the long-term vision.
02:22 — Business AI is top of mind of customers. Many are leaving the experimentation phase and asking, “Where’s the business value? What are the outcomes?” They don’t want to, experiment anymore. They want to real-life outcomes.
03:13 — When Sebastian thinks of SAP’s 300 million end users, he sees potential for Joule, its digital assistant, that cuts across all SAP. Joule reads all of SAP’s internal documents. As Joule becomes smarter, SAP employees can start to use it more to execute their daily tasks (commercial, administrative, sales development, etc.)
04:17 — Voice and text will be the primary interface so you don’t have to be a business analyst or data scientist to use Joule. It should be your daily companion. And to Sebastian, it’s probably the next evolution of SAP’s user experience (UX).
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04:38 — SAP said at Sapphire that 80% of the transactions end users are doing in its systems will be automated by end of year. It’s a massive step forward in terms of end-user experience and productivity. “Of course, it’s ambitious,” says Sebastian, “but it also shows the transformation that we have done as a company as we move to the cloud.”
05:55 — Sebastian says SAP has put a strong focus on what he calls an AI-first and suite-first approach so that the business users, the CFOs and so on, really understand that having one plus one from SAP equals three.
06:28 — That’s most important for Sebastian and what SAP focused on in the keynote: How do we co-create business value with customers? That’s what people ultimately care about, and that’s what SAP’s there for, to bring out its customers’ best.
