What is the plan to make SAP CX more prominent in the CRM/CX marketplace and what are main reasons that you see for customers preferring other CX solutions over SAP’s?
What do customers say that they are missing in the CX suite?
Where do you see the limits of agentic technology in the near to mid-term? Apart from adoption problems …
And where do you see most potential for agentic AI going forward?
What are adopted (agentic) use cases that concentrate on business transformation, gaining capabilities, uplift as opposed to “increasing efficiency”?
How does SAP deal with the dichotomy between “human augmented by machine” and mass layoffs?
SAP Consulting as well as SIs do face a need to change their business models away from billable hours. What do you recommend SIs do? How does SAP support them in this venture? How do you foresee the overall ecosystem change with an estimated increase of use and deployment of generative and agentic AI
But more about all this in a minute.
Of course, SAP took this event to announce a flurry of new capabilities across its suite of applications, AI, and technology, as evidenced in the long innovation guide and the theme-describing press release for the event, although I’d say that the event went well beyond “AI that partners with people, data that defies boundaries and applications that turn data into action”. To be sure, SAP Connect extended on the vision that got outlined during last Sapphire.
True to its name, SAP Connect was about connecting – or breaking, to use a stronger word – the silos that are imposed by different types of business software, predominantly, but not only, SAP’s business software and in extension the silos between business departments, The approach was to co-host conferences focusing on the different lines of business while providing the connecting tissue by means of cross references, supported by customer testimonials, in the keynotes.
And I want to say that this largely succeeded. Jon Reed wrote a great piece covering this using Heartland Dental as an example. Other customers like Migros or confirmed their success that got achieved through cross departmental collaboration. “Collaboration is a very, very key for service. We promote support cross-functional collaboration, that begins from idea, of course, but all colleagues from marketing, business and also colleagues from the stores […] but we work also together with other legal entities in our group, for example, of a work together, very tightly with the bank. And so, we work together with our financial colleagues in the context of practical credit card format is an integrated part of our loyalty program and so it's very important to get them common understanding and the common understanding is also based on a common technology. Baseline we work on a common data Lake. We have Cloud platforms, and this is also the key for a common understanding, for a 360-Degree of our customer view”. Similarly, Wella. Both of them part of the CX keynote.
Or, looking at supply chain processes, SLB, Red Bull and HP. All of them look at cross-functional cooperation as a critical success factor.
And these have only been some examples from the keynotes.
This is powerful support for the SAP E2E story. The only way to tell this even more powerful is to actually embed deep references into other lines of business within these key notes, e.g., closing the loop between demand (CX) and supply including finance. Basically, showing how the different SAP portfolios strengthen each other in a synergistical way.
This would emphasize on the power that the integrated capabilities that SAP commands have. After all, there are at best 2 to 3 companies that can dare telling a story like this: Oracle, to some extent Microsoft on an enterprise level, and Zoho with a bit more of a mid-sized focus for now. This is a tremendous opportunity for SAP, but one that requires not only having the capabilities – which SAP has – but also a messaging that does not disregard a crucial part of any business. An end-to-end story works only if it is supported by an equally strong story for each part of the business.
Ok, Connect works, but how about CX?
Having said this, let’s dig into a topic that is dear to my heart. For a long time, I have been saying that SAP treats its CX suite as a kind of Cinderella – the unwanted stepdaughter. The story being a fairy tale, it has a positive end. Does SAP’s CX suite now get the recognition it deserves?
Since last Sapphire, my view is slowly changing. CX appeared in Christian Klein’s Sapphire keynote, albeit not very prominently and had a more significant experience in Muhammad Alam’s keynote during SAP Connect, which you can revisit in Jon’s watch party with Josh Greenbaum and Bonnie Duncan Tinder that covers it extensively including valuable commentary. As said, giving CX a more prominent place is important, as it is a key ingredient of an E2E story and functionally an indispensable part of any business. There also have been significant announcements with a new loyalty solution, an engagement cloud, a digital service agent, WalkMe being made available for the CX solutions and an interesting revenue intelligence app on the SAP Business Data Cloud. My recommendation is to build on this momentum and to also have Christian Klein put more emphasis on CX going forward. No voice gets heard better and lends more credibility than the top dog’s CEO’s (sorry, Jon, I couldn’t resist using one of your techniques here). Having talked to the CP of SAP CX, Balaji Balasubramanian, SAP CX Head of Product Strategy Riad Hijal and the new SAP CX CMO Jessica Keehn, I see the outlines of a plan going forward. I am keen to observe it come to fruition (and perhaps help, too?). One thing is for sure, during Sapphire and also during SAP Connect, there was an emphasis on becoming category leader where SAP invests. And there surely are considerable investments into SAP CX.
What about AI?
As part of the press release for this event as well as throughout keynotes, Q and A’s and individual discussions with SAP executives, there is one consistent theme: “AI that partners with people”, or in other words humans are getting help from technology instead of being replaced. This is a very laudable messaging although it is doubtful that a vendor, even one as powerful as SAP, is able to prescribe customers what to do with its technology. It is the buyers’ choice whether they follow this philosophy … or not. Alam and other executives repeatedly emphasized that their objective for using their own AI technology is not replacement of people. Instead, they aim at increasing their organizations’ outcomes by making their team members more productive. SAP COO Sebastian Steinhäuser presented some impressive numbers during his keynote. Apparently, SAP made its flywheel of apps, data and AI work for itself. From a limitation point of view, SAP bets big on the Business Data Cloud that is to deliver clean, consistent, reliable data as the foundation for well-working and collaborating agents that “help execute complex workflows within a specific function”.
For SAP, as well as its competitors, the challenge remains to not fall into the trap of explaining major layoffs as a result of the efficiency gains through their AI. Doing so, would destroy the narrative of AI creating business results through being a helper, not replacement, of people, and thereby the credibility of the tellers of this story.
And what about partners?
SAP has always been strong about ecosystem and partnerships. Given, that AI is all about platform, it makes an ecosystem play even more important. However, the ecosystem changes. IP becomes ever more important, especially over integration services. These get increasingly supported by AI, which requires SI’s to rethink their business models. They need to change from IP that “lives” in the heads of consultants and enables billable hours to IP that is encoded into software and AI. This requires them to adapt to survive and to continue to thrive. SAP encourages them to do this change and to create their AI infused solutions. To be frank, I expect the importance of SI’s in the SAP ecosystem to reduce in favor of ISVs. In future, implementations will require less effort and will have a higher degree of automation. Consulting will be again what it was, becoming more strategic again and less about the nitty-critties about implementing the desired solution. Not having had the chance to go in depth into a detailed discussion, this is probably a topic for another article or a few LinkedIn posts.
Famous last words
I think that SAP came in strong during this conference. The flywheel tells a sound story, and SAP is uniquely positioned to make this vision a reality. Are there pitfalls along the way? For sure. Will SAP trip into some of them? Probably. Will it matter? Likely not. For SAP, as well as for other businesses the game to play is adapt and overcome. And this is something that SAP can do. The company has shown it numerous times.
The remaining proving ground remains CX. There is considerable investment, competitive, in some areas even leading functionality. What is missing is, credibility. As one colleague this week told me “As far as I am concerned, SAP doesn’t have CX solutions”. Ouch. That needs to change.
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