SAP CEO Christian Klein on company's pivot to AI

To the AI boom. Spending on generative AI expected to reach $143 billion by 2027. That’s according to the International Data Corporation. One key player jumping on the AI trend is Germany based software giant SAP stocks at more than 20% just this year as it works to restructure the business, focus on a ISAP also just announcing it will extend CEO Christian Klein’s contract and joining us now the CEO Christian Klein. Welcome, it’s good to have you oppose 9. Thanks for having me, Sarah. So talk about this pivot that you’re making within the company to focus on AI. How big is it? I mean our transformation is actually a reflection of all to what our customers aspire to do. I mean when you look at the way how we code software today, the way how we service our customers, the way how we sell, the way how we do one finance, I mean this job profiles will change. Yeah. When you look at code automation, when you look at automated content creation in sales, when you look at you know placements of ads, of marketing ads, I mean this will all change will be heavily supported by Chen AI and we will be a more productive SAP and it’s a reflection what our business AI can also do for our customers. So you just spelled it out, but maybe an example of what you are doing from customer for customers if they can’t go to Microsoft or Google or Amazon to do. When you look at first, I mean the best example is our digital assistant tool. So this will be our new font. And so today you are typing a lot of data into SAP systems, you are extracting a ton of data and you have to take care about the quality. In the future, you will do this all via our digital assistant tool. It will be completely run by human language and the system will not only allow you to do this more efficient, but also with higher quality. So for example, if you use Concur and you do today compliance checks on your travel expenses that will be done by the system. If you do bookings in South for HANA with finance, the system will make sure the bookings are ending up in your balance sheet in the right way. And or when you do recording or you’re doing employee services with our HR success factor solution, the system will make sure that you can deliver that as an HR business partner with the right quality. That’s actually what ACP can do. And why is our digital assistant there much better served? Because it will come out-of-the-box. I mean we know the data, we know the workflows of our customers. We are wanting those workflows today. So we will deliver it out-of-the-box with the highest data quality that Concur example hits close to home. Yeah, here at NBC. So what are you seeing in terms of enterprise spending? Is it, is it cyclical or is it more structural because of these AI tailwinds that everyone needs to get into? Yeah, I mean, so it really depends on the industry. I mean, first of all on IT spending, if you can really prove a strong business case, meaning strong business case means you are an energy company and you are in the midst of a big transition and your supply chain needs to be reshuffled, needs to be redesigned, then of course the business case is very strong, so customers are willing to invest. If you can prove that Chennai is not only a hype, but it’s embedded into the system and you can use it out-of-the-box and you can show the value the customers are willing to invest. Obviously we see in some other areas you know where actually customers are more cautious with IT spending like where for example take the the auto industry, I mean when you look at you know contingent workers, when you look into you know what they do around internal travel which is a reflection of what happens in our systems there, you can see there is more cautious spending. But on it in general I’m very confident when does this migrate to a small medium sized business decision or do they want to see large players do it first. I mean we have both, I mean we have 27,000 customers using business AI today here now and we have very small customers who actually use you know our solutions to really quote their business all over the world. So we allow them with generative AI to be much smarter in the way how they go to market in the way how they service their customers. We have the larger enterprises like oil and gas here in the US They’re using our Gen. AI to improve asset management to reduce production downs. And so it’s really both. And I guess it’s really important to also show that we drive adoption in the lower market but also in the upper market.