In a revelation aimed at persuading customers to begin investing aggressively in its Business AI solutions, SAP expects to slash $100 million this year by automating internal processes with Business AI, CEO Christian Klein said recently.
The disclosure came during SAP’s recent Q2 earnings call, and Klein no doubt shared those details to convince customers to jump into the GenAI Revolution and also to impress investors with SAP’s ability to drive internal costs downward even as SAP’s cloud growth has hovered around 25%.
For business leaders in a wide range of industries and across the C-suite, the experiences shared by Klein on the earnings call are among the sharpest and clearest examples of how thoughtfully applied AI can rapidly and significantly accelerate operations while also slashing costs.
“We are making major progress with the automation of internal processes through AI by using the GenAI Hub” on SAP’s Business Technology Platform, Klein said.
“The expected savings are in the triple-digit million range, and given the increased scope of our transformation program, we are confidently raising the operating-profit ambition for 2025.” Klein added that “Business AI is embedded in all of our solutions and we are confident it will boost success across our portfolio with new and more-powerful use cases on their way.”
SAP has released more than 60 GenAI use cases, Klein said, and is “on track to deliver more than 100 scenarios by the end of this year.”
Across SAP, that $100 million that Klein expects AI solutions to generate come from HR, finance, supply chain, expense reports, document management, contract management, and more.
“What we clearly see resonating very well are the first use cases that are live for Joule in HR, finance, and the supply chain space,” Klein said.
“Everything that we do in order management is already enabled via Joule, and the end users will benefit a lot from efficiency gains. They do a lot of content search, whether that’s in HR content or travel or supply chain-related content. All of that is, of course, a massive efficiency booster.
“And then last but not least, we see a lot of interest in everything around document management,” Klein said.
“I mentioned the Concur example with a customer where 150,000 end users are already benefitting from embedded AI, but really by itemizing the hotel bills and processing them real-time automatically in the system.
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“And then second, everything that customers are doing around supplier contract management, employee contract, and customer contract. We ourselves are already seeing massive efficiency from this.”
The business outcome, Klein said, is that far fewer people are needed for mundane tasks such as compliance checks and document checks.
The GenAI use cases that are “resonating really well,” Klein said, “taking over tasks that today are pretty manual.”
