CRMKonvos - Bob Stutz and Esteban Kolsky of SAP are talking straight

In this episode Ralf Korb, Marshall Lager and I had two very special guests: Bob Stutz, president of SAP's CX group, who shapes the CRM industry for more than 20 years now and Esteban Kolsky, former analyst, both independently and at Gartner. Esteban has deep roots and a passion for customer service processes and now leads the sales and service products at SAP CX.

And then there was a special star, perhaps the youngest guest who we will ever have.

Again, and as usual for our CRMKonvos, we did not stick to one hour. Bob and Esteban actually shared their insights for a full 90 minutes, which is something for which we are deeply grateful.

We covered a lot of ground starting with how 22 years of experience in the military services can help in the software industry - and not ending with why it took him and his team that long to publish an SAP CX strategy.

You are interested in the state of AI and machine learning? Ask Esteban - or listen to his statements in this episode. Same for what we are doing wrong in customer service for five decades now. And he needs to know, having a service centre background and having covered the service arena for 20 years now in various roles.

Did the acquisitions that SAP did in the past years make sense? Why did it take SAP that long to figure out some of the gems in their portfolio?

How should pricing look like and why would make this pricing vendors build better software?

Why Emarsys? Where does it fit into the stack - and why?

Ever wondered what the real purpose of a CDP is? Well, let Bob explain it.

Will SAP go with Thunderhead?

And why does Esteban think that SAP is actually the only(!) company around that can create CX the right way?

All this made up for a more than fascinating CRMKonvo with two of the most outstanding brains in the industry.

A little spoiler: Not surprisingly, the key success factors that matter in both environments - military as well as software industry - are "focus and execution".

The episode is in English, barring some introductory words in German - and after Esteban switched to his headset his sound quality went up considerably - so do not get disturbed by his first few statements.

Comments

Last Year's Top 5 Popular Posts

You are only as good as your customer remembers

As you know, I am very interested in how organizations are using business applications, which problems they do address, and how they review their success. In a next instance of these customer interviews, I had the opportunity to talk with Melissa Gordon , Executive Vice President, Enterprise Solutions at Tidal Basin about their journey with Zoho. You can watch the full interview on YouTube. Tidal Basin is a government contractor that provides various services throughout the government space, including disaster response, technology and financial services, and contact centers. Tidal Basin started with Zoho CRM and was searching for a project management tool in 2019. This was prompted by mainly two drivers. First, employees were asking for tools to help them running their projects. Second, with a focus on organizational growth and bigger projects that involved more people, Tidal Basin wanted to reduce its risk exposure and increase the efficiency of project delivery. This way, the compa...

SAP Draws a Perimeter around Agentic AI and What That Means for the Rest of US

The most consequential enterprise AI governance document published this year arrived in late April with surprisingly little fanfare. SAP's updated API Policy, version 4/2026 , is a short document in plain English. The clause that is most interesting is Section 2.2.2. It restricts how autonomous and generative AI systems are permitted to interact with SAP APIs. Read literally, it has the potential to change the architecture of agentic AI projects across every SAP customer landscape. Read carefully, it is also more interesting than the lock-in headlines suggest. The policy targets a specific category of AI behavior, not AI as such. It connects to commercial mechanics that go well beyond API stability. And the literal text, in its current form, will probably not survive the next two policy revisions intact. There is a lot to unpack. I will walk through what the policy actually says, how the SAP-watching community is reading it, what the rest of the major enterprise vendors are doin...

The Illusion of Value: Why Salesforce’s Agentic Work Unit is the New "Bad Query" of the AI Era

The News On February. 25, 2026, Salesforce announced a pricing and metrics update . During the company’s Q4 FY2026 earnings call, CEO Marc Benio ff, together with CMO Patrick Stokes , unveiled the Agentic Work Unit (AWU). Positioned as a metric to quantify the labor performed by autonomous digital systems, Salesforce defines an AWU as one discrete task accomplished by an AI agent. According to Salesforce, this discrete task represents the exact moment " raw intelligence is converted into real work ". It is not a fixed unit but measured as a processed prompt, a completed reasoning chain, or an invoked tool. Salesforce explicitly designed the AWU to move the industry conversation away from the raw consumption of Large Language Model (LLM) tokens. As Benioff noted, tokens only measure "how much an AI talks," whereas the AWU is intended to measure actual business execution. The scale of this rollout is massive. Salesforce reported that its platform has already processe...

Data Wars: SAP Vs. Salesforce In The AI-Driven Enterprise Future

The past weeks certainly brought a lot of news, with SAP Sapphire and Salesforce's surely strategically timed announcement of acquiring Informatica , ranging at the top. I have covered both in recent articles. The enterprise software landscape is crackling with energy, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) is certainly the star of the show. It isn't anymore about AI as a mere feature; it's about AI as the strategic core of enterprise software. Two recent announcements underscored this shift: SAP's ambitious AI-centric vision that was unveiled at its Sapphire 2025 conference, and, arriving hot on its heels, Salesforce's agreement to acquire data management titan Informatica for $8 billion. Both signal an intensified battle for AI supremacy, where trusted, enterprise-wide data is the undisputed new monarch. Of course, SAP and Salesforce are not the only ones duking this one out. SAP's Sapphire Vision: An AI-Powered, Integrated Enterprise At its Sapphire 2025 event in ...

CPQ, Meet Price Optimization: Your Revenue Lifecycle Just Got Serious

The news On October 1, 2025, Conga announced its intent to acquire the B2B business of PROS , following PRO’s acquisition by Thomas Bravo . At the same time, ThomaBravo and PROS announced that PRO’s travel business segment will be run as a standalone business . The bigger picture Revenue operations, revenue management and revenue lifecycle management have become a thing in the past years, as evidenced by the number of specialized companies that solve parts of the overall problem of optimizing revenue. It also got abused to some extent (e.g., surge pricing models) when the users of the corresponding capabilities consider optimizing being the same as maximizing. Reality check: It is not. While optimizing involves a bit of identifying how much a customer is willing to pay, it also involves the thought of repeat business, or in other words customer loyalty, even without a formal loyalty program. And that involves the customer experience, part of which the speed of creating a quote with mat...

aheadCRM

Search This Blog