More than fifty years ago, the modern idea of the standard enterprise software was birthed at SAP. Now, after managing companies through technological shifts from the mainframe to mobile, SAP is at the forefront of closing the AI adoption gap for their customers. SAP Chief Technology Officer Philipp Herzig joins Sarah Guo to talk about how SAP has remained a durable end-to-end “operating system” for its more than 400,000 customers from finance to supply chain. Philipp argues that the AI transition in businesses should focus on customer outcomes, UI changes, business processes, and the data layer. He also explains the challenges in enterprise AI adoption, including security, scaling, and data fragmentation, as well as the importance of evals and verifiability. They also discuss SAP’s suite of AI products, limitations of predictive tabular models, how SAP is shifting its pricing models in the AI era, and Philipp’s interest in quantum computing optimization.

Chapters:

00:00 – Cold Open

00:42 – Philipp Herzig Introduction

01:18 – What SAP Does

02:51 – Why SAP Endures

06:53 – CTO Priorities and AI Push

12:14 – Scaling AI in Enterprise

17:06 – Verifiability and Agent Mining

20:42 – Tool Calling vs. Computer Use

22:11 – Domains Where Agents Deliver Value

24:58 – Limitations of Predictive Tabular Models

29:07 – Barriers to Enterprise Adoption

31:54 – How AI Will ‘Uplevels’ Work

34:03 – How AI Changes SAP’s Pricing Model

36:41 – What Makes a Winner in the AI Era

38:53 – Day in the Life of a CTO

40:08 – Customer Challenges

42:36 – Business Problem of Quantum Computing

46:21 – Conclusion

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