SAP: Bringing the ‘Operating System’ of a Company into the AI Era with CTO Philipp Herzig

SAP’s enduring market leadership stems from its ability to standardize complex enterprise processes—finance, supply chain, and logistics—across global organizations. As the company integrates AI, the focus shifts from simple technology adoption to achieving measurable business outcomes. While LLMs excel in unstructured data tasks, they remain insufficient for predictive analytics, necessitating specialized relational pre-trained transformers to handle tabular data and complex forecasting. Scaling these solutions requires rigorous data harmonization and a shift toward agentic workflows that automate mundane tasks, allowing human teams to focus on strategic decision-making. Despite the hype surrounding generative AI, the true value for enterprise software lies in solving high-stakes, real-world optimization problems, such as supply chain resilience and demand forecasting, rather than merely deploying chatbots. Future advancements in quantum computing may further address these complex optimization challenges, marking the next frontier for enterprise efficiency.