Welcome to this exclusive interview with Jan Gilg, Chief Revenue Officer for the Americas and SAP Business Suite. In this conversation with Bob Evans, founder of Cloud Wars, Gilg shares how SAP is transforming enterprise data strategy through its partnership with Databricks, enabling AI-powered innovation without duplicating data. He also offers an inside look at what to expect from the upcoming Sapphire event.
Highlights
SAP Business Suite Evolution and Integration (01:01)
Gilg, Chief Revenue Officer for the Americas and SAP Business Suite, explains the rationale behind the recent changes in SAP’s product offerings. He outlines the history of the SAP Business Suite, noting its origins 20 years ago as a monolithic on-premise solution with various satellites like CRM and HCM. He discusses the transition to the cloud and the challenges of maintaining end-to-end integration as SAP acquired competitors like SuccessFactors and Ariba.
Cloud Adoption and Customer Growth (03:44)
Gilg attributes the growth in SAP’s major applications to both existing on-premise customers moving to the cloud and new customers adopting SAP’s SaaS solutions. He mentions the significant number of new logos gained over the last couple of years, particularly in the SaaS-only world. He underscores the need to capture new market share by focusing on SaaS offerings.
Customer Reactions to GenAI (08:29)
Gilg notes that customers are excited about AI’s potential to improve efficiency, save costs, and make better decisions. Customers have several challenges and questions regarding the reliability and autonomy of AI agents, especially in the enterprise space. He discusses the increasing number of AI agents being added by vendors, which could lead to integration complexities for customers.
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Autonomous Agents and Business Processes (11:46)
Gilg discusses the potential of autonomous agents to significantly impact business processes. He explains that while automation of simple tasks is a starting point, the real value lies in autonomous agents that can handle complex decision-making and reasoning. He provides an example of how AI agents could help companies navigate supply chain challenges caused by tariffs, by simulating scenarios and providing recommendations. AI needs to be embedded in business processes to drive meaningful outcomes for customers.
Business Data Cloud and Its Impact (13:34)
Gilg explains that the focus is shifting from processes to data, as operational data generated by business processes holds significant value. He describes the Business Data Cloud as a Data Fabric that allows customers to extract data from SAP systems, maintain semantic integrity, and build intelligent applications. He talks about the Databricks partnership to merge structured and unstructured data, enabling the development of AI applications without data duplication.
Sapphire Event and Future Directions (17:56)
Gilg mentions that the upcoming Sapphire event will focus on the dynamic marketplace and the role of GenAI and data in driving business processes. He talked about the importance of omnipresent business AI and the role of Joule as the new interface into the SAP world. He discusses the significance of extensibility and the ecosystem, and how customer-specific and partner-specific capabilities are needed to add value to SAP customers.
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