aheadCRM

SAP Sapphire 2026 was a major platform announcement, a competitive shot at ServiceNow, a coherent acquisition story across Reltio , Dremio and Prior Labs . It featured an Anthropic partnership that puts Claude at the center of the SAP Business AI Platform . For anyone who cares about customer experience, it was also a missed opportunity dressed up as ambition. If you watched only the keynote, you concluded SAP barely talks about CX. Klein did finance with JP Morgan. Herzig demoed pharma pricing. Industry AI showcased RWE wind turbines. The named flagship was the Autonomous Close Assistant. CX got line items . That reading is incomplete. Here is what actually happened for CX at Sapphire 2026, what it means competitively, and what SAP and SAP CX customers should do about it. What SAP actually shipped for CX On the same day as the keynote, Balaji Balasubramanian , SAP's CX President and Chief Product Officer, published a substantive announcement listing ten named Joule Assistants ...

We have reached a point in the hype cycle where "AI" is being sprinkled on enterprise software like a seasoning on a cheap steak: it masks the poor quality of the underlying meat but doesn't make it more nutritious. In the latest CRMKonvo , Bhawani Shankar and the CRMKonvo team tore into the reality of what it actually takes to make "Agentic AI" work in a Customer Experience (CX) environment. The analysis? Most enterprises are trying to drive a Ferrari without wheels. Bhawani used this metaphor that I find particularly apt: the AI model is the shiny red car that gets the CEO excited; but the data is the wheels, the engine, and the fuel; and they come as options. If you buy the car without ensuring the wheels are attached and the tank is full of high-octane, verified data, you aren't going anywhere. You are just sitting in an expensive garage making engine noises. TL;DR If you want to watch the full CRMKonvo, please go ahead here (optimized for smartphon...

Marketing has always suffered from a volume addiction; however, the advent of generative AI has turned a bad habit into a terminal condition. In the recent discussion with Volker Hildebrand in our CRMKonvo , we explored the uncomfortable reality that while AI has made marketing faster and cheaper, it has largely failed to make it better. The cynical view, which I happen to hold is that marketers frequently confuse the amount of content produced with the actual impact on the customer. We are now in an era where everyone has the same tools to flood the market with what in the words of Volker just “ multiplies mediocrity ” – or in mine creates instant mediocrity. The core problem is that generative AI multiplies mediocrity by definition. It ingests existing data and spits out an average of what is already there; consequently, when every startup uses these tools to build their websites and social posts, they all end up saying the same. If you look at the CRM space today, the messaging is ...

On May 4, 2026, SAP announced two acquisitions in the same breath: Dremio , an Apache Iceberg -native agentic data lakehouse, and Prior Labs , a pioneer of Tabular Foundation Models. Neither acquisition is exotic. Together, they are contributing to the most coherent enterprise AI platform strategy any major vendor has shown this year. Let me unravel what each company actually brings, why the combination matters, what it means for the competitive field, and — most importantly — what buyers and SAP customers should be doing right now. The Problem SAP Is Solving Before diving into the deals, let's formulate the problem addressed. SAP's CTO Philipp Herzig said it clearly: " Enterprise AI doesn't stall because the models aren't good enough; it stalls because the data isn't ready for AI agents ". That is not a marketing line. It describes a pattern analysts and practitioners see constantly: AI pilots perform in a sandbox and fail when they hit production. T...