Welcome to SAP Connect Virtual. I'm your host, Nicky Dean.
I'm Babatunde Ojo, reporting for Team SAP.
Over the next hour, we'll be connecting you to all of the action from right here at the first-ever SAP Connect, right here in fabulous Las Vegas.
You'll get all of the latest announcements, real-time reactions, plus all of the content that you need for a full virtual program exploring the power of SAP Business Suite.
Speakers will be coming right from the keynote stage to here in our virtual studio.
I'll be hitting the show floor to put you in the heart of all the action.
That's right. We want to hear what SAP customers from around the world have got to say. Babatunde, are you ready?
Nicky, I am ready.
In that case, consider yourself officially welcomed. SAP Connect Virtual starts now. For the first time ever, SAP Connect is bringing together every line of business in your organization. Success Connect, Spend Connect, and Customer Experience Connect are all here, joined by the brand new SAP Finance and SAP Supply Chain Connect events, all together in one place so you can connect everything and achieve anything. That was the theme of the inaugural SAP Connect opening keynotes, and we have an exclusive first look at those highlights right now.
Please welcome to the stage, Muhammad Alam.
AI, with the broadest context, provides the deepest value. Simply put, we see five patterns of AI-driven innovation. The first is seamlessly embedded AI and agentic experiences. Next is the emergence of agent-driven autonomous execution capabilities. Another pattern is what we call truly AI-native applications that are built from the ground up. We will also see appless experiences driven by AI and agents with an evolving conversational engagement layer. Finally, there are no-apps experiences where the app either, in fact, doesn't exist or rather can be generated real-time with AI and byte coding. Across all of these, you will see a new emerging conversational AI-driven engagement layer, what we call Gen UI. That becomes the one place for users for almost everything.
We have to collaborate proactively with the other functions in the organization. What is beautiful about the SAP Business Suite is not just the ability to solve that problem, but to do that at scale, with much greater pace, and also to break down the silos in an organization where these functions come together and work better together.
If I look at AI and bring that into context, I ask myself, isn't AI the engine that can give me that kind of transparency a pilot or co-pilot has in the cockpit of a modern aircraft? You see all the instruments in front of you. The data is actually coming to you as opposed to you having to chase the data. Basically, AI gives us this unique opportunity to establish a suite of solutions that are kind of the avionics of an enterprise.
No block of countries can create the same benefits the globalized economy, the interconnected economy has created for us. From an economist perspective, the answer is not to raise barriers. It will always be to lower barriers, to allow more connections, to build bridges, not to tear them down.
The story of AI in the workplace is both encouraging yet unfinished. Today, 44% of workplaces report using AI tools, yet only one in five employees have a clear understanding of how to apply them in their daily jobs. That is where SAP plays a vital role, helping organizations take AI from isolated pilots to creating a business-wide advantage.
It's not about human versus AI; it's human with AI. What we're seeing is the value is in pairing the scale and speed of AI with human creativity, empathy, and judgment. We're already seeing this shift. AI is breaking apart rigid job descriptions so that tasks, not whole jobs, are being automated.
By integrating AI's capabilities with human creativity, empathy, and also judgment, we move beyond simple automation into real human-AI power couples. Ultimately, the future will favor those who embrace orchestration, delegation, but also creative problem-solving, reimagining work from ground up to synergize with AI advancements.
This human and AI partnership is critical for realizing the value of your AI investment. We are making SAP Joule deeply aware of the person it's partnering with, their role, and the business process context in which they operate. Today, we are introducing AI assistants: a receivable assistant for your accounts receivable colleagues, a controlling assistant for your controlling colleagues, a sourcing assistant for your sourcing colleagues, an AI assistant for every role.
Imagine now if every leader can have their own SAP Joule assistant that takes away the administrative work off of their shoulders so they can focus on what truly matters: coaching, mentoring, and leadership. In the age of AI, we can simplify all of this to minimize disruptions across the value chain. We have insights from one agent that can trigger actions across an entire network of assistants and agents, with humans in the loop, of course.
Interconnected apps are driving real productivity gains, and the opportunity is even much, much greater. For example, PwC found that industries most exposed to AI are achieving a four-fold increase in productivity growth. When you're a smaller, mid-sized organization, the impact is even greater. That's because every hour of time saved or productivity gained means you can spend more time focusing on the things that move the needle in growing your business.
When we set up this strategy and we started executing on the strategy, the breakthroughs were ones we didn't even think about at the time we were doing this. Solving things end-to-end actually brings your business together, and it creates a collaborative environment.
We're really excited to announce an expanded set of intelligent applications with SAP Business Data Cloud. Finance intelligence, supply chain intelligence, revenue intelligence, and one specifically designed for the CPG industry called Consumer Products Intelligence that really brings the power of app data and AI to life.
In enterprises, the real test is how smartly we handle everyday touchpoints, and this is where SAP Engagement Cloud comes in. SAP Engagement Cloud transforms scattered interactions into AI-driven journeys across the entire SAP Business Suite, ensuring every touchpoint is timely, personal, and measurable.
To create exponential value and to get to the global maxima for your enterprise, the whole matters. That is what we are focused on, providing you with best-in-class applications seamlessly integrated across the breadth of finance, spend, supply chain, HCM, and customer experience, along with a seamless application data and AI flywheel that comes together as one to create unparalleled value. This is the unmatched value of SAP Business Suite that brings together the power of best-in-class applications with a semantically rich, harmonized data layer to power high-value AI as, again, a singular, seamless experience. It helps you manage uncertainty, evolve your workforce, and break down silos to create amazing customer value.
Wow. As you can see, we have got a lot to dig into. Of course, you can check out the SAP Connect on-demand catalog to watch the opening keynotes in full for all of the major announcements and news from SAP. Stick with us right here in the virtual studio for more highlights and special guests, starting right now with Babatunde reporting from outside the keynote theater. Babatunde, what's the buzz like out there?
Really great keynote, and there are a lot of product innovations that were announced. However, there were three key main themes that we want to take away: number one, dealing with uncertainty; number two, evolving workforce; and number three, customer centricity. Nicky, back to you.
Thank you, Babatunde. Now, with every line of business represented at SAP Connect, SAP customers have the opportunity to gain insights and make connections across the entire SAP Business Suite ecosystem. That combination of content, connection, and innovation has long been a hallmark of SAP Customer Experience Connect's experience, helping businesses create the kind of seamless customer experience that turns casual buyers into lifelong advocates of your brand. Joining us now to talk about the big news from the world of CX, we're joined by Balaji Balasubramanian, SAP Customer Experience President and Chief Product Officer, and Prakash Nanjori, Global Head of Product Management for SAP Business Data Cloud. Thank you to both of you for joining us here in our studio. Great to have you with us. Now, Customer Experience and SAP Business Data Cloud, what a pairing, a perfect pairing to kick off our show.
Before we get into it, tell me a little bit, if you would, about how you actually work together.
You know, Balaji and his team do amazing work in bringing real business outcomes in the world of customer experiences. In order to get those business outcomes out, you need data. The SAP Business Data Cloud is what powers the data that drives those outcomes. That's how we work together.
Excellent.
Very well said. For us, the future of SAP Customer Experience is built on SAP Business Data Cloud. That's the pairing, and there is no better way for me to answer that, saying customer experience is better served through an integrated, harmonized enterprise-wide data provided by Prakash and team through SAP Business Data Cloud.
Now, one of the common themes that we've seen here at SAP Connect, of course, is all about AI. Balaji, let's come to you first. How are autonomous agents and embedded AI changing the way that businesses engage with customers? Also, what's the key message from SAP Customer Experience?
No, it's a wonderful question. I think for us, when we think of customer experience, we fundamentally at SAP believe the best-in-class customer experience can be provided when you bring front-office-facing teams, right? People who are in sales and service, marketing. When you bring them together, both people and assistants, and connect them to the operational backend of it, that's the best way to drive that experience. In an increasingly agentic and Gen AI world that we live in, obviously, AI plays a much, much critical part to it. We have been experimenting and learning from the majority of these agents. For example, earlier this year, we released a case classification agent and a Q&A agent that allows customers to get the best-in-class service from these agents. Increasingly going forward, we are also planning on orchestrating multi-agent across multiple domains, coming together to solve the business outcome that customers expect.
That's some of those announcements that we're making here at SAP Connect.
Excellent! Prakash, let's bring you in here now as well. What role does SAP Business Data Cloud play in supporting customer experience, as we've just heard here, and especially the kinds of AI agents that are making such an impact for customers?
When Balaji speaks of the customer experience, the two types of agents, they're agents that actually get the work done and agents that give you insights to what you can do with your business. For both of those outcomes, what you need is complete, contextual, and consumable data that just doesn't come from one source, but from multiple sources in SAP. When there is some change that's going to happen because of what the agent does, it needs to be reflected downstream in other applications and in other systems in the enterprise. The SAP Business Data Cloud is the single SAP source for unifying data across all our processes, ensuring that we have the right customer experience, but then also taking the outcomes to the rest of the organization and making that happen too.
Here at SAP Connect for Customer Experience, we're announcing a digital service agent, which allows a customer to get the best-in-class service experience built on SAP Business Data Cloud and the data that he's talking about, as well as for a sales leader, a Chief Revenue Officer, a sales leader. We are also announcing an account planning, deep research, SAP Joule-based deep research capability, again, built on SAP Business Data Cloud as well.
The power of the SAP Customer Experience plus the SAP Business Data Cloud is that SAP Business Data Cloud is able to bring and harmonize data across all your processes. Some companies have some specific particular topics, but what SAP does is bring all your processes together. That is really the power of the SAP Business Data Cloud plus the customer experience that Balaji speaks about.
That's great. Thank you for explaining more about that one. We've not heard from Babatunde, our roving reporter, for a while, so we're going to cross to him now. He's with our CX customers. Babatunde, great to see you. What are you hearing from customers on the show floor?
Hi, Nicky. Yeah, a lot of buzz and excitement out here on the show floor, and we're getting a lot of questions around SAP Engagement Cloud and the fact that it's been announced as part of the Customer Experience Suite. What people would like to know is, how does it help customers unify the experience, and how does it differ from previous versions?
Great question. Balaji, are you happy to take that one?
Of course. The journey of the customer from how they are made aware of the products and offerings to pre-purchase, post-purchase experience is just much more complex than it ever used to be. Our SAP Engagement Cloud offering actually unifies all of them so that you can orchestrate very personalized and tailored to in the moment, in the context of what the customer would want, and do that in a seamless, harmonized way, leveraging enterprise-wide data. We think of customer experience and the engagement as an enterprise port. It's not something very specific to a sales team or a marketing team that unifies all of them. SAP Business Data Cloud allows us to bring it all together in a harmonized manner.
Every single touchpoint of every single customer in their journey, in the moment, is how we want to engage with them, and SAP Engagement Cloud allows us to do it. Now, looking beyond the customer experience, we also want SAP Engagement Cloud to be the one that allows organizations to connect with their employees, to connect with their suppliers, to connect with their business partners. A single, seamless SAP Engagement Cloud built on top of SAP Business Data Cloud allows the full enterprise-wide communication, not just with customers, but much more than.
Final question for you both. For organizations just beginning their journey with SAP Customer Experience and data innovations, what advice would each of you offer? Balaji, we'll start with you.
No, it's a fantastic question. I think the key part of it is data that fuels it. The context to Prakash's point, he said it very well, which is AI can be so much more powerful when it understands the context in the moment when you need it, and data fuels it. My recommendation would be to take a lot of attention and care to unify your data, bring it together, harmonize it. I would say it's an enterprise-wide capability. Front office, back office, bring it all together. That drives best-in-class customer experience, and that's where I would start.
I'm sure it's so key, isn't it?
Absolutely, and so well put. If I can take a different angle to this, it's about the personas in your organization. The tools that different people in your organization need to achieve these outcomes are different. Data scientists require different tools. Data analysts require different tools. Line of business consumers require different tools. It's really important to purpose-build those tools to serve the right kind of person. This is where the tooling in SAP Business Data Cloud is covering all the different personas, both the enablers and the consumers in your enterprise.
Absolutely. So well put. I could talk to you for hours, but thank you very much for calling in. It's been an absolute joy. Thank you for joining us here.
Absolutely.
Thank you so much.
Appreciate it.
Optimizing customer experience is critical to your business success, but what about your own workforce? For years, SAP Success Connect has been the venue for business leaders to explore the power of SAP SuccessFactors and the latest HR solutions from SAP. Of course, the world of human capital management is something that our very own Babatunde Ojo knows a little something about, isn't that right?
Absolutely, Nicky. Very, very proud to be part of the Solution Value Advisory team for SAP SuccessFactors, and I'd like to give a little shout-out to all of my adoption-minded colleagues.
I think you're going to be very excited for our next interview. Joining us now to talk about how SAP SuccessFactors is preparing workforces for what's next is Lara Albert, Chief Marketing Officer for SAP SuccessFactors. Lara, thank you so much for joining us today.
Thanks so much for having me. It's great to see you both.
A lot of exciting announcements, Lara, including some new AI advancements in SAP SuccessFactors.
Yeah, really excited to talk about this. I'd like to hear from you what these new advancements mean for our HR leaders and our customers.
Happy to share. So much going on on the agentic AI front. We've got a number of SAP Joule AI assistants across SAP SuccessFactors that we're introducing, four agents to be specific, which is part of our plan to deliver 12 agents over the next 12 months. First of all, showcasing our Performance and Goals agent. This will be generally available next month, so we're excited about that. Imagine an agent really helping a manager to essentially gather all kinds of performance feedback and insights to make it easier for a manager to then have meaningful performance conversations. We've got the HR Service Delivery agent. You can imagine there an agent helping employees to resolve issues, get the answers to questions, also to help caseworkers to resolve issues much, much faster. We've also got our Payroll agent.
This is all about helping employees better understand their pay, especially when there's anomalies, things like unexpected leave or things of that nature. Again, reducing the time that it takes for an employee to really understand their pay statement and also helping payroll administrators by essentially increasing accuracy. Identifying issues pre-payroll processing and then serving up to administrators ways to resolve them. Super excited about that. Career and Talent Development, another agent that we are introducing, is all about helping managers, prompting them to develop succession plans, making sure that they have recommended successors right at their fingertips, and also recommending development paths for employees that maybe need to accelerate readiness for a particular role.
That is fantastic, but I understand there's some other exciting news on the SAP Joule front. Could you elaborate on that for us, please?
Yes, some very exciting news. We are announcing a Workforce Knowledge Network, which is all about opening SAP Joule up to third-party expert human capital management content and content partners. This is super exciting. You can imagine if you're an HR leader or practitioner or even employer manager and you have a certain question and you want to ask SAP Joule, for example, how should our organization go about adopting a more formal performance management model or a less formal performance management model? All of a sudden you can ask SAP Joule, and SAP Joule will then tap third-party content from the likes of GP, Globalization Partners through their agent GIA, or The Josh Bersin Company through the agent Galileo. You can imagine the richness in the answers that now SAP Joule will be able to provide by opening up to these third-party content providers.
Huge value add for HR practitioners, managers, and employees alike.
That's great. I mean, like you said, there's a lot going on there. I just wanted to touch on the people intelligence side of things now being generally available within SAP Business Data Cloud. Again, can you tell the audience a bit more about what this is going to mean for not only HR leaders, but also general business leaders across our organizations?
For years, HR leaders have told us that people analytics solutions have fallen short. They're more toolkits versus turnkey solutions. With people intelligence, we are providing HR teams themselves, without the need for data scientists or integration partners, to really access insights and to access AI-guided recommendations. Initially, when we announced in May the people intelligence solution, we talked about a couple of key insights around skills, workforce composition, as well as compensation. We're excited to release additional insight capabilities around things like recruiting, learning, and performance management, things of that nature. When you think about HR leaders saying it's very difficult to answer key questions because data is in many different places, it's not harmonized, this solution now addresses that. All of a sudden, you can imagine HR leaders being able to easily answer questions like, how many employees do I have in which location?
Do succession plans exist for all of the key roles? What are high performers? Are they being paid equitably? These are questions that HR leaders need to be able to answer on any given day, and now there's a solution to allow them to do that.
You've been incredibly busy, Lara, so that's amazing.
Absolutely. Of course, one of the other big announcements was SAP's acquisition of SmartRecruiters, a leading talent acquisition solution, which is absolutely incredible.
It really is. I had a great opportunity to chat with Dan Beck and Rebecca Carr earlier, and this is what they had to say. Dan, Rebecca, thank you for joining me.
Thanks for having us.
Thank you.
Now, I know you're incredibly busy, but this was a really, really exciting announcement for all of our recruiting customers. What I would like to ask is, how are we going to be helping customers to really move them across on the journey in terms of their recruiting outcomes and the things they're trying to drive? You know, tell us a bit more about what they should expect.
You know, the reality is that many customers are very motivated to have their journey go to SmartRecruiters. Our plan is to work with them for their path to success, path to SmartRecruiters on their timeline as they see fit. We're obviously going to support them in that endeavor, but it's really an opportunity.
That's great. Thanks, Dan. Rebecca, obviously exciting times to be part of the SAP family. How are you feeling? What would you like to tell our customers as well?
It's been a whirlwind. I like to tell people I don't think I've slept or eaten in three or four months. You guys keep us on our toes, but we're very excited. I think as a standalone best-of-breed recruiting vendor, one of the things we lack is visibility in the front end and the back end of a process. When you think about something like AI, which feeds on data and information, being able to connect that feedback loop to a platform like SAP SuccessFactors is just going to bring so much power, so much insight to the recruiting journey.
That's great. I'm going to stay with you for now, Rebecca, as well. In terms of driving innovation and moving forward, in terms of product timelines, is there anything else that you think would be useful to let our viewers and customers know in terms of where we are today, but also where we're going to be going?
Sure. I mean, SmartRecruiters is very customer-centric in the way that we work. We have a lot of design partner programs that we work with alongside so many global organizations. They lean into that process. Dan, as I understand it, has started some of those programs with some of the SAP SuccessFactors customers too.
As somebody who, you know, spends day in, day out working on the recruiting side of the business, I'm very excited as well. I really, really appreciate your time. Dan, Rebecca, thank you very much.
Thanks very much.
Wow, that really is exciting stuff.
It is. Actually, you know, coming back to you, Lara, one of the things that everyone would really like to hear about is how this acquisition is actually going to help our customers to attract and retain top talent.
We are so excited about this. The whole entire team is just incredibly optimistic about what this means for our business and, more importantly, what it means for customers. When you look at SmartRecruiters, you have got a best-of-breed talent acquisition solution with key capabilities that are going to complement our SuccessFactors HCM suite. When you think about things like high-volume recruiting capabilities, automation capabilities, also AI-enabled candidate sourcing, candidate experience, candidate engagement, and a really great UI, in addition, seamless workflows, this is a solution that customers love. We couldn't be more excited about bringing SmartRecruiters into the SAP family and really having the talent acquisition capabilities complement our HCM suite. Ultimately, we're talking about being able to not only help organizations attract the best talent no matter where it exists, but then nurture that talent across the entire employee lifecycle.
When you think about some of the benefits of just the pure integration between SmartRecruiters and SuccessFactors, you can imagine things like the Talent Intelligence Hub, the Common Skills Framework, being able to then drive skills-based hiring, also SAP Business AI and some of the robust capabilities there. We're super excited about what this means for our customers. It's been a busy couple of months, as you've said, but so much innovation, and we're just thrilled about it.
I mean, I'm genuinely excited as well. The fact that this is going to keep SAP SuccessFactors at the forefront of the human capital management space is just great news.
Absolutely. Thank you so much for having been with us today. It's been great to have you with us. Thank you very much, Lara.
Thank you.
The complete SAP Success Connect keynote is available in the SAP Connect on-demand catalog, along with breakout sessions, so you can dig even deeper into the full functionality of human capital management solutions from SAP. Of course, here at SAP Connect, attendees can explore how SAP is transforming every line of business for the next era of enterprise at the SAP Experience Centre. For you, our virtual audience, Babatunde has an exclusive behind-the-scenes tour. That's coming right up. First, we have a brand new SAP Connect experience to introduce. SAP Supply Chain Connect is making its debut this year, offering SAP customers an incredible opportunity to explore solutions capable of transforming their businesses into efficient, intelligent logistics operations. Joining us now to talk about SAP Supply Chain Management is Dominik Metzger, President and Chief Product Officer for SAP Supply Chain Management.
Dominik, thank you so much for joining us here in the studio.
Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure.
Excellent stuff. Big news for SAP customers here at SAP Connect. Before we have a chat, let's give our virtual audience a quick peek at the keynote before we dive in.
We are launching a brand new product named SAP Supply Chain Orchestration. It is really an ability to orchestrate multiple actors that are necessary to resolve a disruption in order to become more resilient. What SAP Supply Chain Orchestration brings to you is a number of things. We are building out a network, multi-tier knowledge graph. The first thing you need to do in order to be more resilient, you need to understand risks and disruptions as early as you possibly can. The best way to do that is by looking into the tiers, into the depth of your suppliers.
Great stuff. Dominik, let's chat. The theme of SAP Connect is, of course, connect everything, achieve anything. What are the latest announcements to connect supply chains and help customers achieve business goals efficiently? Talk us through that.
Thank you, Nicky, for the question. I mean, look, it was a true pleasure to present in Las Vegas because really we had a firework of announcements that we made to our customers. I'm going to pick my favorite three, right? First, we launched a brand new blockbuster product by the name of SAP Supply Chain Orchestration. That is really something that we believe will change how supply chain leaders run their business. It is a way to manage severe disruptions and all of these uncertainties that many supply chain leaders are faced with. Number one, we also launched another brand new product by the name of Logistics Management. It really helps companies to conquer what we consider the final edge of logistics, which is simple, small warehouse and transportation operations.
Last, we launched IBP Reimagined, which is the way of rethinking how supply chain planning will work in the years to come.
It's been a very busy time for you, as you can see. Lots that you've been working on behind the scenes. Thank you for breaking that down for us. Let's move on. Can you explain the concepts of supply chain orchestration generally? Of course, we've got things like tariffs, trade uncertainty, inflation, just to name a few shocks to supply chains these days. How do SAP solutions help supply chain managers overcome disruptions like this?
Yeah, no, great point. I mean, look, the amount of disruptions we are seeing at the moment are unprecedented. In fact, there are some economists that put some mathematics behind it, and we call it the Trade Policy Uncertainty Index. If you look at that amount or that spike in uncertainty right now, it is something we have never seen in the industries before. The way how we want to respond is really giving our customers the ability to significantly improve their time to response. Meaning, I need to know about risks, about disruptions earlier than without intelligence, right? I want to tap into the depth of my supply chain. I want to know what is risk not only to my suppliers, but my suppliers' suppliers, which ultimately affects me.
I want to be able to model scenarios, come up with intelligent actions, and then really orchestrate my response to that.
AI is front and center, of course, here at SAP Connect. How will AI change the game for supply chain customers?
Yeah, I mean, we are truly here in a transformation of an entire industry, ours included, software. The way how we look at it is we want to help customers first to build trust in AI. The best way to do that is by pairing any persona in a supply chain function, a demand planner, a service dispatcher, a technician with an AI assistant, which will then really help to mitigate or to support day-to-day operations and will make these assistants more and more smart. Those will have agentic features to then truly automate and run towards our vision of autonomous supply chains.
Excellent. Thank you very much. We've covered off a lot there. We could talk for a lot longer. I really appreciate your time. Thank you for coming in to tell us about all the exciting advancements here.
Thank you for having me, Nicky.
You'll find the complete Supply Chain Connect keynote in the SAP Connect on-demand catalog, along with demos and breakout sessions offering deep dives into all the latest innovations for supply chain resiliency from SAP. Whatever your line of business, there's truly something for everyone here at SAP Connect. That's what makes the SAP Business Suite such a comprehensive end-to-end business solution. Powerful individual applications that together help SAP drive the next era of enterprise. To see these solutions in action, let's send you over to the center of the show floor, where Babatunde has the inside look at the SAP Experience Center. Babatunde.
Thank you very much, Nicky. I am here at the heart of SAP Connect on the show floor, which is the Experience Center, and I am delighted to be joined by Andreas Wendel .
Thanks for having me.
Here in the Experience Centers, we make innovation tangible. We showcase how SAP Business Suite unites data, AI, and applications to power the next generation of enterprise applications. We do that across lines of business and across industries.
How many industries are actually represented here?
From chemicals to utilities, professional services, retail, healthcare, high tech, and industrial manufacturing, we cover really a lot of industries here in the Experience Center.
My first question is then, how does human capital management factor into this new era?
Oh, that's a good question. I mean, in the end, people are at the heart of every transformation. Here in the Experience Center, we show how companies can build their future-ready workforce. We are doing that by showing how SAP enables them to grow employees, to also enable sustainable and confident leadership, and also how to optimize talent acquisition, all with AI and data intelligence.
We have to think about our finance leaders as well, and they're trying to manage cost control with transformation.
For our CFOs, for everyone working in the finance area, we deliver new SAP Joule AI assistants that will help them to take resilient and supportive decisions, at the same time remaining to stay compliant. With the time and the efficiency gain they have, they can really focus on strategic growth. Here in the Experience Center, we talk about real-time forecasting and sustainable finance by combining financial data with sustainability data.
My mind then moves towards supply chain, right? Supply chain is always part of, you know, board conversations on a regular basis. How are we going to help our customers in regards to managing their supply chain?
Here in the Experience Center, we show how our business customers can orchestrate their supply chain end to end. With that, they can sense and navigate critical events whenever they occur, and they can also see what disruptions mean for the entire network.
Thinking about our customers, how are we going to deliver the best customer experience?
It's all about delivering intelligent and connected experiences in order to build sustainable growth and loyalty. With our SAP Business Suite, we connect data, AI, and applications in a continuous loop, connect everything to achieve anything.
This wonderful machine behind you, what does it do?
That's a real machine where we work together with our partners like Schneider as an example. Our customers and visitors here on site can get a small SmartTag, and with that SmartTag, they also get a very personalized journey on what they have discovered here.
Connect everything, achieve anything. Great way to leave this. Andris, thank you so much for taking us on this wonderful tour of the Experience Center here at SAP Connect.
Thank you. It was a pleasure.
Now, for everybody who visits the Experience Center here at SAP Connect, they get the opportunity to walk away with a personalized SmartTag, which will guide them through their own personalized experience, as well as having all of the demo content loaded. For you, our virtual audience, you get the opportunity to experience this wonderful Experience Center by scanning the QR code on the screen now. You can also explore different industries, different types of executive roles, and really, really experience the power of SAP. Now, back to you, Nicky.
Thanks, Babatunde. Now, SAP Business Suite stole the spotlight here at SAP Connect with the central keynote speech showcasing how companies can turn bold ideas into tangible results before competitors even see you coming. Here are some of the highlights.
We have the entire power of the SAP Business Suite in one room. That's the spirit of SAP Connect. Let's kick it off with a quick recap of the highlights. With autonomous financial calls, we are introducing the controlling assistant that leverages the workforce of SAP Joule AI assistants to eliminate manual tasks. The need for ease, agility, and insight has never been greater. It's why I am so very pleased to highlight the announcement of next-gen SAP Ariba, SAP Supply Chain Orchestration. It was always a big goal for us of having full transparency across the entire value chain and realizing the risks and mitigations across the entire problems that we're facing.
We announced four new agents in SAP SuccessFactors, which will support new role-based AI assistants in SAP Joule for really everyday HR tasks. Our revenue intelligence application built on SAP Business Data Cloud brings all of your sales data together in one place.
Let me quickly show you how SAP runs SAP with the power of AI, data, and apps. Starting with AI, across all areas of SAP, we already track several hundred million in AI-powered productivity gains, and we are just getting started. Next up, data. Earlier this year, we became customer zero of SAP Business Data Cloud. Finally, the app layer. The SAP Business Suite is where data is being created and where AI delivers impact. Business transformation management helps us drive our transformation forward. Along this journey, we use the Business Technology Platform to keep a clean core and drive innovation.
First, embedded AI brings intelligence to every SAP business process. Second, SAP Joule turns that into natural, intuitive interaction and conversation. SAP Joule makes your business data and the entire SAP Business Suite immediately accessible. Third, AI assistants in SAP Joule help evolve from having helpers to being your personal AI teammates. They know your role better than the organization because they are role and context aware. Because we know that each one of your businesses is different and pre-built agents are just not enough, that's why I'm excited to announce that Agent Builder is generally available this December.
Now, in the Data Foundation, of course, we launched our product called SAP Business Data Cloud. We've been working on building a very substantial number of these high-fidelity data products. Those data products now are spanning the breadth of our business suite. Of course, we want to ferment that data into consumable packages. This is exactly now where we started introducing these intelligent applications. All of these intelligent applications are taking full advantage now of this broad spectrum of these high-fidelity data products. This gives us a very substantial level of value and also gives you the benefit now where you can take full SAP data, high-value, semantically rich data, and allow that very contextual value to be achieved as well.
When we combine the power of business transformation management and the Business Technology Platform, you can connect all your systems, gain full visibility into your business, and understand how to bring out your best, and use those insights to innovate and build your own custom solutions. SAP Signavio lets you dive deep and understand every detail of this process. It can also suggest you concrete actions to take. We simply use those insights to improve the process in SAP Build by automating processes, building your own agents, as Brenda just has shown in the AI part, and building an app. Lastly, we can help people adopt these solutions with SAP WalkMe.
We help you to truly use all of our innovations to fully realize the value of your investments. We are with you every step, a little bit like a personal trainer. A great place to start is with the fitness gear or the integrated toolchain. Sebastian and Michael showed SAP LeanIX, SAP Signavio, and SAP WalkMe. On top, we add Cloud ALM, that is Application Lifecycle Management. We have now launched the model company for SAP Business Suite. It is a ready-to-run industry process designed for where your industries are going, not only today, but also tomorrow.
We need to continue to adhere to our mission, which is to deploy safe, reliable, affordable power. We can't do that with just doing things the way that we've always done it. We have a series of deployments that are scheduled over the next couple of years. We're heavily dependent on AI. We will be integrating SAP Joule and other AI solutions into that because to do things the way we've always done it and expect a different outcome is what the definition of insanity is.
First of all, we have made great progress across all lines of business to deliver a unique experience for all of you, with AI becoming your personal assistant, powered by data that defies boundaries and applications that take insight into action. The cross-capabilities you just saw now make the flywheel spin. To wrap it up, I hope you leave Las Vegas with many fresh ideas how to embed AI into your everyday work. Because for the very first time, what happens in Las Vegas doesn't need to stay in Las Vegas.
You can watch the SAP Connect Central keynote in its entirety in the on-demand session catalog. Please stay with us for just a moment longer because we saved the best for last. Joining us for a double feature finale to talk about how SAP solutions for spend and finance are helping organizations connect dots across their enterprises are Baber Farooq, Senior Vice President, Product Marketing for SAP Ariba and SAP Fieldglass. We also have David Imberts, Head of Finance, Product Marketing at SAP. Great to have you both with us. Can't wait to chat to you.
Thank you. Thank you for having us.
It's great to have you here. Before we chat, of course, let's take a look now at some of the big announcements that we're going to be discussing in some of the keynote highlights.
Even the best orchestra cannot stay in harmony without reading from the same sheet music. That's where SAP's end-to-end applications and data come into play. With the breadth of our coverage, you get collective insights across your business, facilitated shared understanding, and enabling informed action on a vast scale.
SAP Ariba's source-to-pay products have been reimagined and redeveloped as next-gen SAP Ariba to automate the power of procurement in a world in which procurement fulfills its elevated role to support profit, stabilize supply, and ensure resilience.
Several exciting announcements there in the finance and spend sessions. I wonder if you could talk to me specifically about the latest AI innovations in these areas and how they'll help practitioners in both. Baber, let's start with you.
Yes, so I mean, we're infusing AI capabilities throughout the entire suite of source-to-pay in procurement. We've announced something about our next-generation experiences that are entirely built with the idea of having a platform that enables AI capabilities as a walk-up experience. They're built-in and native with AI capabilities by default. Across, whether it's sourcing, category management, buying, invoicing, contracting, we have assistants that are created for all of these business processes. Underneath these assistants, we have specific agents that align for a specific sub-process. For example, you have a sourcing assistant, but underneath the sourcing assistant, you also have someone that does your bid analysis. You have something that does an assistant that does the creation of the RFP.
You'll have an assistant that eventually hands it off to the contracting process where the contracting assistants can go ahead and execute the contract and provide you all the insights that are available for there as well. Across the entire source-to-pay suite, we're enabling agentic and AI technologies to make sure that people can be more productive in the work that they're doing.
Excellent. Thank you for breaking it down. David, over to you then. What can you add?
Yeah, so same on the finance side. It's really about the people who are going to use the AI, and for each person, we're going to give them an assistant. We announced three things. There was one assistant targeted at the trade manager. In today's economy, trade policies and tariffs are changing every day. We have an agent that will actually help those managers save time and assess the correct trade treatment for different products they have. That was the first one. We had a cash management agent targeted at cash managers, helping them reconcile bank statements, unlock unused cash in the business, or identify cash shortages in the business. Thirdly, we presented more for the accounting persona, an autonomous close where the process will be driven by AI assistants working behind the scenes.
The accountant will really become more of an orchestrator of that process rather than really spending their time in the nitty-gritty work of the period-end close process.
Excellent stuff. Lots of exciting announcements. Thank you again for explaining that for us. Sticking with the news, I understand there's also been another significant announcement with the next generation of SAP Ariba. Baber, tell us more about this.
Yeah, you know, thanks for the question. I referred to it earlier in my answer, but effectively, the idea is that when we look at the pace at which artificial intelligence is moving, we have to change, right? Our customers have to change, business processes have to change, and technology has to change as well. We have to think about things, doing things in a new way. From our perspective, you can layer AI on top of the existing capabilities as they are, and that's helpful. It would be really powerful and transformative if we can just reimagine the experience entirely for procurement built in an AI world or for an AI world. How would you do procurement today if we are redesigning it with all the tools and capabilities we have for artificial intelligence? When we talk about next-gen SAP Ariba, that's what the experience is that we're expecting.
That, you know, as David was saying, the procurement manager or the sourcing manager or the category manager is an orchestrator for what needs to end up happening. The system is giving you a place to start with all the information pre-filled. Of course, you can still modify it if you need to. Rather than sort of entering into execution and then invoking AI, AI is automatically executing for you, and you're just making sure that it's on the right track, right? That's the philosophical difference in approach when we talk about next-gen SAP Ariba. It's the first sort of platform that's been built sort of AI-native and AI-first in the procurement space. We're very proud of this achievement.
It is hugely exciting. Thank you again for explaining that for us. David, now in your Finance Keynote, let me get this right because you used a fantastic analogy, beautifully put, that the future of finance technology should function like an orchestra with harmonious collaboration rather than disjointed soloists working independently. Can you explain to us a little bit more about how the SAP Business Suite enables companies to operate in a more coordinated and integrated manner, similar to the orchestra that you so beautifully referenced?
Yeah, sure. Because of the challenges businesses are facing and the increasing rate of change everyone has to deal with, it no longer is adequate to just optimize your own area of a business. You have to look at enterprise-wide. Finance is in the privileged position, but also responsibility to be the nerve center of the organization. The analogy I used was you have to get the company reading off the same sheet music. In a company, their music, the musical notes, are the business processes and then the data that that business process is generating. Only once you have that coordinated, conducted, can AI come in and achieve its potential.
We like to think of ourselves as we're going to let the customers run the show, and we'll be that orchestra behind the scenes, making sure that the music plays correctly based on a solid set of processes at SAP applications, based on the data that's coming off, and then allowing AI to actually execute decisions into that environment and continuously improve.
I love that. It's such a great reference that makes it so tangible for people as well. Thank you for that. Now, you both mentioned in your thoughts The Economist research. Can you speak to us a little bit more about the research and findings and how they're influencing the work that you and your teams are doing? Baber, we'll come back to you first.
Yeah, I mean, we've had a partnership with The Economist in doing a survey of the C-suite and procurement priorities for, I think, four years now. It's really interesting to see how it's changed and evolved this year with obviously AI strategy and having a digital strategy becoming an extremely important priority for the C-suite across the board, right? We also notice some other things, right? Which is that cost savings are important for procurement, and they're not going away, right? Especially in the environment that we're living in today, with all the uncertainty that's present, it's becoming an, you know, it's always been there, never goes away, but it's becoming increasingly relevant again because people want to be able to hedge their, you know, their bets and make sure with uncertainty around monetary policy and inflation that they have that extra cushion when available.
Because of the geopolitical uncertainty, the other priority that's coming front and center from across the C-suite for procurement is reorganizing supply chains and having an option available in case they can't find items from their original supplier, be able to source it from someone else, but source it quickly, right? Almost a multi-source or a dual-source strategy is becoming increasingly important just because of the environment that we're living in today.
Absolutely invaluable. David, what about you?
Yeah, so we surveyed 480 CFOs from all around the world, from all industries, from all geographies, from all company sizes. I'll just give a few highlights, but I encourage people to go and read the full report on sap.com. One thing that we see is the role of the CFO is clearly expanding in IT strategy, in risk and compliance, and actually in sustainability. Those were the three biggest areas where CFOs said their mandate has grown compared to three years ago. When we asked, what are the areas that you're going to invest in versus where, if you had to make cost savings, would you make cost savings? The area that was most protected from cost savings or most prioritized for investment was IT and investing in technology.
We saw on the cost-saving side actually geographic expansion because I think the macroeconomic environment has caused a lot of companies to pause and really double think about where they want to put their next factory or open their next market because it's not sure if the business cases will be the same today as tomorrow with all the changes that are happening.
Thank you so much. I know you're very busy here, but thank you for coming and sharing those insights and breaking it down so beautifully. Great to talk to you.
Thank you. Thank you so much.
Babatunde, you returned. How are you?
I'm all right. How are you doing?
Very good, thank you.
I brought you a little gift.
Oh, thank you.
I got you this.
What is that?
This is a personalized SmartTag from our wonderful Experience Center. Basically, what you can do is pick a role and then you get a personalized experience just for you. I was thinking long and hard about what role would be best suited for you.
Really kind.
I decided that you would be a great CFO. You have a personalized CFO Nikki experience right here.
I agree. That is absolutely lovely. Thank you so much.
My pleasure.
I'm very honored. I'm very powerful now. Thank you so much, Babatunde. It's been an absolute blast hosting the first-ever SAP Connect Welcome Show with you.
I mean, I've had so much fun, Nicky. It's been great having all five lines of business together at one event, and it's been really impactful. For our virtual audience, there's so much more still to discover.
Absolutely. The on-demand catalog has been filling up with keynotes from every line of business and over 40 breakout sessions.
These are breaking down the impact for SAP customers in terms of learning and maximizing value from our solutions.
On behalf of our entire crew here in Las Vegas, don't bet on red or black.
Go all in on SAP.
Absolutely. Thank you so much for joining us for SAP Connect Continues.
This force, when unlocked, allows you to build connections with customers that are not just a point in time, but they're truly a long-lasting relationship. These are things that move from building relationships that are just quick wins or campaigns into something that's so much greater. That is why we're here today to reimagine customer experience design. We're looking to help focus on not what it is here today, but really how you build a customer experience design that's focused on the end in mind, starting with the intention of building loyalty. With that, in my role, I wake up every day thinking about how do I positively impact the customer experience for our customers and allow them to do the same for theirs. You've heard of product-led growth. You've heard of sales-led growth. Today, we're going to talk about loyalty-led growth.
This is really focused on ensuring that our customers can start by enabling their audience to engage with them in more deep, more long-term ways than ever before possible. It creates advocacy. It creates growth. It does that in a way that lasts. This year, SAP set out to better understand why customers stay loyal in both B2B and B2C. We surveyed over 13,000 customers. These are both customers that are decision makers and SAP customers today to understand what it is that drives loyalty. Long-term loyalty we identified is actually under pressure. For B2C customers, we noted that there's a 5% drop in what is considered true loyalty. These are customers that articulate that they love the brand, that they have a deep, passionate connection to this brand.
This is important because that's very different than customers who engage with a brand because they have similar values or because they're incentivized to stay loyal. These are the customers that have a deep, intimate connection with your brand and care about it. These are the folks that drive referrals. They engage with you on an ongoing basis, and they have a lifelong intention of being your customer. On the B2B side, we identified that 35% of customers reach what we call strategic loyalty. Strategic loyalty comes when you have a customer that's willing to give you feedback, engage in dialogue, the way that we are here at this event. Importantly, strategic loyalty customers become advocates for your brand.
That's important for your business because when you engage with these folks, they become the advocates for your brand that reduce your cost of customer acquisition, increase profitability, and ultimately drive profitable growth. Not only is achieving true loyalty and strategic loyalty important for your business because it's fulfilling.
These are the customers that actually propel your business to the next level. With that, I'd like to welcome Chief Revenue Officer for APAC, EMEA, and MEE, Manos Raptopoulos, and a part of the extended SAP board, to the stage.
Good morning, Vegas. First time in Vegas, and it's never too late, as you can see.
It's your first time?
I'm coming back, I tell you.
Wow. OK. We'll make sure that this is just the beginning of a good time, then. All right. Tell us, Manos, what is the difference between customers who have great customer experience delivery for their audience and those that are performing well in delivering customer experiences?
Yeah, you could phrase the question from good to great or from great to excellent. Let me use a personal example. I think it would resonate with most of you in the audience. I live in Europe. I live in Italy, in Milan. You have this experience of those powerful luxury brands, right? This is what I usually take as an example of a great customer experience. You just walk into the store, and they seem to know you. They seem to understand what you need. They make you feel unique. Of course, all those brands, regardless if we zoom out a bit, if you're in a B2B space or if you're in a B2C space, all those brands have an intrinsic quality in whatever they offer. At the end of the day, they understand much better their customers' needs, and they take you at a very unique place.
As we talk about customer experience, think about everybody of us, right? What defines a good experience from a not-so-good experience? It's basically expectation, understanding who is the customer on the other side, and making sure that you meet or beat that expectation every time. That takes effort, and it's never easy. It's easier said than done. Somehow, these are the elements that, in my opinion, make a great customer experience.
You're right. It's not easy. What is it that you find customers struggling with most?
Yeah, I would say that there are two elements, in my humble opinion. Firstly, it's about the data. We talk a lot about that. We talk a lot about how we turn data into insights, but it's never obvious. It always takes some level of technology in order to integrate the data, especially when we talk about customer experience. Your data does not always reside in a transactional system like SAP. You need to tap into other data sources. You need to be able to harmonize the semantic layer so that the data starts picking between each other and be able to draw insights out of those. The data part is a very important one and not easy to get it right. I would say that there is another part when we talk about customer experience.
No matter if you are selling a service or you're selling a product, there needs to be a connection with, if it's a product, with a supply chain. You need to be able to convert those signals that you get into the supply chain to something actionable for your customer. That is super important in terms of customer experience. Why? Because you can turn a potentially bad experience into an OK or a good experience because you have been able to anticipate the disruption, be able to communicate to your customer, and give them what they actually need, which is a better service or a better product in their expectation. That's a little bit the challenges, the way that at least we see it.
Your job, of course, as Chief Revenue Officer, is to help customers in that journey with SAP. Tell me, how does SAP actually help our customers do that?
Firstly, I have to say that we have some great customers. You already spoke about Migros, Boeing that are going to be joining us on stage shortly. I have some examples from the other side of the Atlantic. I will start with the first one. It's a company called Lemvig-Müller, very difficult company to pronounce. They are based in Denmark, and they are a B2B steel specialized manufacturer. They implemented SAP Commerce Cloud, and already, they have 60% of their orders digitalized in an SAP system. As such, they can personalize and customize the orders to the needs of their customers. The steel manufacturing business is a highly personalized business. It's a B2B steel, but personalized to the needs of the industry that is using the steel. That's one example. There is another example of a company that has actually implemented the full suite of our CX portfolio, almost.
They're called Horman. They're one of the oldest and biggest manufacturers of specialized doors for industrial use or home use in Europe. They've manufactured and shipped more than 20 million doors since they started operating. They started by replacing their SAP sales with SAP Sales Cloud, their bespoke system that they had. Very importantly, they focused on the service side of the equation, making sure that they capture the signals from their customers. They have managed to accelerate by 40% the average time to resolve a ticket. Already now, 50% of their service tickets are in an SAP system. They went further. They implemented also SAP Marketing Cloud, and in that way, they can read better and understand in the business-to-business environment the needs of their end customer. Also, they've built an application which allows them to record the visits that their reps are doing.
It's an AI-powered application powered from our technology, BTP, which has brought down 80% of the time that a sales rep is recording the data out of a customer visit. Imagine all those visits are quite detailed because we are talking about an industrialized product. We know very well that salespeople do not like to use systems, right? It's one of them here. It's important that this is getting automated. Maybe last but not least, this actually came in this morning, and I wouldn't like to miss the opportunity to mention it. I'm not sure if you know about a company called New Look. It's in the fashion, let's call it industry, high-street fashion industry in the U.K. They've replaced, it's a competitive replacement, and they implemented Commerce Cloud. They went live a few weeks ago, a few months ago.
They are using SAP Commerce in order exactly to personalize and try to anticipate the needs of this market, which is ever-changing. They try to capture the trends, make sure that they have the right product in the right store so that their customers can consume. They are already reporting GBP 4 million, about $6 million of benefits already after a few weeks of implementation. We always talk about outcomes. That's why I bring those three examples. It's about personalization, understanding the end customer. At the end of the day, how do you bring to your business a tangible business benefit? That's what CX is all about.
Fantastic. I love to hear the examples from the customers. I can't wait to hear from customers themselves in a little bit. Thank you for sharing the insights. Thank you for sharing with us what you're hearing across the globe. I appreciate your time.
Thank you very much. Thank you.
Thank you, Manos. You've heard the research and the insights from Manos. Now, I want to talk about the key question we all have in mind. How can my organization start down the path of loyalty-led growth? There are four key building blocks to loyalty-led growth: understanding, connection, relationships, and value. Loyalty starts, as Manos mentioned, with a deep understanding of our customers. This is an understanding of their buying behaviors, their past purchase history, the activities that engage with them, the things that they engage with in terms of outreach and marketing, the campaigns that they engage with, truly understanding what it is that they are interested in, combined with your operational data so that you understand how to best serve them.
How can you connect all of those pieces of data together in order to deliver the right message to them, in order to honor the relationship with them, in order to engage with them in a way that matters? That all leads to building connections. Connections come when, across every single channel, you're able to engage with them in a way that matters, again, delivering the right message, delivering the right offers, delivering the right engagement mechanism so that they are understood and personalized in a way that matters to them and where they are in their journey with you. Last is relationships. Relationships are different than connection in that relationships are a two-way conversation. This is when you show empathy. You demonstrate humanity in the way that you engage with your customers. You speak to them as the customer wants to be spoken with. You listen.
You incorporate their feedback. You engage in a deep and meaningful way. Last is value. Value is when your customer feels rewarded for the commitment that they've made to you. Loyalty is not a one-way street. Value is truly when you demonstrate to them the reciprocal relationship that you have, whether that's through upgrades or waived fees, comp passes, or prioritizing their issues. You show them the value every single time. This is what leads to loyalty, those four building blocks where you understand the customer, you connect with them, you build relationships, and then ultimately, you deliver meaningful value that ensures that they feel understood and engaged with you every single time. To share how these building blocks are coming to life, I'm excited to introduce to you our President and Chief Product Officer, Balaji Balasubramanian.
Thank you, Jessica and Manos. You know, when I think of immersive and memorable customer experience, music comes to mind. Great songs hook you. They create an emotion. They create an unforgettable memory that makes you come back to those songs over and over again, sometimes even after many, many years, still sparking the same emotion. These songs actually blend lyrics, voices, and instruments in a perfect manner. I'm not sure how many of you have seen this movie, Whiplash. It's one of my favorite movies, actually. It actually brings together the pursuit of perfection beautifully because the harmony in these songs is not an accident. It's because of the precision, careful orchestration, and countless hours of practice that leads to it. We think at SAP, we think of customer experience in the same way.
When customer-facing teams work in harmony with the back office operational teams and processes and tools, then we create memorable experiences for customers as well. The idea behind this is they don't just operate as teams, but they have a deep understanding of customers. They leverage enterprise-wide data. They let AI actually act on top of it to create the magic that is needed effectively. That's how we create memorable experience. Just like in music, when one musician or one instrument is off tune, the experience is not that great. The business is no different. When one team doesn't work well or when they are not in sync and the tools are not aligned or the context is off, the timing is off, then the experience is not as rich, and loyalty fades fast. That is how SAP is approaching customer experience all out.
The power of AI is very, very critical here. If you think of the music analogy again, musicians rely on a conductor to be able to keep everything in sync and everything in harmony. In this modern day and age, AI is that conductor, increasingly so. It can actually connect systems, people, data to bridge that gap and create those magical experiences that we all love to understand and use. Now, businesses around the world are investing super heavily in AI. Billions and billions of dollars are being spent across the board. There are also recent reports that actually suggest that many of these businesses are not getting the results that they are expecting. Over 95% in one of the reports actually say that they're not getting the results that they are expecting. The question is why? It's not the power of the tool.
It's not the AI itself, but how it is built, how it is deployed in the context of that customer drives those outcomes effectively. This is where I think it's very important how we think at SAP, the context of how we can bring that together. Customer experience is an integral part of SAP Business Suite, obviously leveraging SAP Business Technology Platform, SAP Business Data Cloud, in order to make this all come together and to have an AI layer on top to actually automate, reason, and act in a way that is meaningful for this magic to happen. Those AI capabilities are already happening right now here. For example, a code creation agent automates the ability to create codes effectively and effortlessly, a case classification agent or a Q&A agent, for example, elevates the customer service experience.
A shopping agent, a catalog optimization agent, enables shoppers to actually discover products better, personalize their experiences better, and drive conversion. In order for all of this to work, the important thing here is context. AI needs context. The broader the context, the deeper the value of what AI can provide. That doesn't happen with a single application in a single domain. This happens through an entire set of connected processes that cuts across multiple applications, bringing data from multiple domains in order to provide that context. When that context is provided, the optimal reasoning can happen and actions that can be taken in order to meet the organizational objectives. In the world of customer experience, that really means AI can do predictive insights, can actually orchestrate recommendations, take actions, and more importantly, drive personalized experiences for customers.
That means every single customer touchpoint can become faster, smarter, and more relevant. That's the world that SAP believes in. That's what we are building here. These agents that I was telling you about, they can be very domain-centric. They can be singleton that can work in a given setting for a given persona. Increasingly, the world that we see is also very multi-agentic, if you will. For example, a marketing agent can kick off a campaign, can coordinate with a pricing agent or a commerce agent in order to drive the relevant offers and personalization, which can then connect to an order management agent, for example, in order to check your inventory, connect with a supply chain agent in order to replenish the right amount of inventory in the right locations.
When this happens across multiple domains, both in terms of autonomous execution, reasoning capabilities, and the power of human and AI working in conjunction, we can create magical experiences for customers. Those experiences, when done properly, will allow customers to build trust with the brand. That trust, over a period of time, when done repeatedly, consistently, and in the moment when customers expect, will convert those customers not just as buyers, but more importantly, into brand ambassadors and advocates and loyal fans for life. That's what we call customer-led, loyalty-led growth that we believe in here at SAP Customer Experience. We are not building all of this by ourselves. We partner with a lot of prominent customers around the world. We build it with them. One of the best brands in the world is Boeing. Let's take a look. What a wonderful customer.
Please join me in welcoming Raman Venket, Director of Digital Strategy and Experience at Boeing, so we can have a conversation. Thank you, Raman. Thank you for being here. I appreciate the partnership over the last several years. Maybe for the benefit of the audience, you can speak a little bit about your role and what you do at Boeing.
Yeah, first, thank you for having me. Really delighted to be here. I'm Raman Venkat. I lead the Digital Strategy and Global Experience for Boeing Global Services. As part of that, it's basically the aftermarket of once an aircraft enters into service. There's a 30-year life cycle of that to manage, maintain, run the fleet of aircraft. That's where Boeing Global Services and the experience that is required to manage that comes in. That's where my role is.
That's wonderful. You know, a lot of folks in the audience obviously know Boeing, great brand. I don't know if people understand the complexity and the scale of your business and the type of customers you serve. Maybe that might help the audience.
Absolutely. Most of you would be aware that we build airplanes. We also design, build, and maintain defense-critical systems for the U.S. government and government entities across the globe. We also have a large aftermarket presence. We are the largest aerospace distributor in the world, and we supply parts, services, and solutions across a breadth of aerospace industry as well as aerospace needs. If you really look at the customer segments that we serve, you obviously have the largest commercial airlines that operate all the international plus domestic routes. We also have regional carriers, leasing companies, business aviation, and general aviation enthusiasts who fly or are trying to learn to fly.
We have OEMs, and along with that, we have several thousand partners who help build us this large supplier network to service and operate the worldwide fleet safely and securely. It is a pretty broad spectrum of customer segments, very different if you look at commercial airlines all the way to a student hobby pilot that's trying to learn. We do serve them across that full breadth of customer segments. One thing I do want to note is behind all these customers and segments, there is a human that interacts with us or maybe a human-like AI agent in the future. There is always somebody who has a very specific need and who has a very specific expectation from Boeing. Our goal as part of the aftermarket is to serve them, serve them exactly to what personalized needs they have.
It is quite a challenge, and it is quite complicated, especially if you consider the highly regulated industry that we serve in.
Yeah, I know it's quite a complex mix between the type of customers, commercial all the way to individuals. I also know that you have millions of products in your catalog as well. That also adds to the complexity, especially because of the nature of your business. You touched upon the type of customers and the differences. Maybe you can spend a minute explaining how you think about serving the best possible customer experience. What does it really mean for you? How are you applying AI in your organization?
Let me actually key off the point that you just made. We have probably one of the largest product catalogs out there anywhere, close to 20 million offerings that we can serve to the customer. The complexity of that is not all 20 million will ever be in stock. These are for our Boeing 757 or a 747 that's out of service, but we still maintain and manage the entirety of the long tail of the life cycle, and it still is in the catalog. The same thing as new aircraft come into service, we put those parts in the catalog. If you look at that, what a customer expects from us and how we kind of meet that is dependability and trust. How do we enable that responsiveness to the customer when they need a part?
When you hear that dreaded announcement while you're waiting at the gate at the airport, your flight will be delayed by an hour. Behind the scenes, the airline is probably going to incur upwards of $100,000 an hour for a delayed flight. That's an aircraft on ground situation, which if planned better, if planned in advance, that's what we're doing day in and day out to avoid such surprises. Dependability and trust is kind of the critical piece to enable. The other piece is global presence. We want to be where the customer is, where they need us. If you need parts in a remote place, we want to make sure that we are logistically ready to do that. The third thing we look at is customer value.
If you can look at customer value as how do we ensure that as a customer, you're flying your fleet safely, efficiently, and sustainably. That's what we want to enable day in and day out. We are looking at AI as a way to drive a lot of these means to an end rather than itself being the solution and being a layer on top of all the things that we do. That takes out some of what we call a swivel seat work involved, like you take from one system, put it into another system, and try to match the two and say, OK, this is my activity, and I've got all the information, and it's complete. That swivel seat activity is what we're trying to eliminate.
I think getting into the workflow of the customer more and more is what we hope to achieve with the unleashing of AI opportunities.
Wonderful. It's great to hear. I think trust is the foundation, as we all know. Very quickly, Raman, how's your engagement with SAP over the years? Maybe share a little bit of thought in terms of how it has worked out and what do you look for in the future?
Yeah, with SAP, our partnership goes back a couple of decades, if not more, right? We've been in the e-commerce space for well over almost three decades now. SAP has, you know, back in the hybrid stage, that's when we started. We built our first website on that or migrated into a big full-scale website, which is billions of dollars of revenue that it trunks. The additional piece is, of late, we just migrated into the Commerce Cloud instance, which has probably been one of the most successful implementations that we ever had. Flawless, absolutely flawless. We hope that the same kind of innovation and the same kind of co-creation that we can do over the years is maintained with SAP. We do that in a way that unlocks some of the challenges that we have in this vertical.
Raman, we look forward to it. We really look forward to working with you, partnering, doing the co-innovation, especially in the AI arena and how to make this all work. Thank you so much for your partnership.
Thank you.
Appreciate it.
Thank you.
You know, the word trust and what Raman talked about, that drives almost all the engagements. Plus, what Manos talked about, many, many different customers, including New Look and others, this drives our innovation at SAP, which leads me to the next segment, which is an exciting segment of product innovation and announcements that we are making here at SAP Connect. First and foremost, we build a lot of products. We build a lot of innovation, and we want to make sure that we are making this available to all of you in an easy-to-consume manner. Commercially, how do we package? How do we make this available? It's all done on an ongoing basis. There's a bunch of goodness that we have done. If you're not familiar with what these mean, please talk to your account executive and get to know this.
This is designed for all of you to take advantage of innovations in a much more comprehensive manner. Talking about product innovation and especially trust and trust-based customer-led loyalty, one of our biggest announcements here at SAP Connect is the fact that we are launching a brand new customer loyalty management application that allows organizations globally to run customer loyalty programs across brands, across business units, and across both first-party, third-party channels, including partners and affiliates. That is comprehensively designed to integrate with not only ERP, but with the rest of the CX suite as well. We're extremely happy and proud of this, and it's coming to you in about a month. It's generally going to be available in November of 2025. Now, talking about loyalty and engagement, we're also making this available for you here at SAP Connect.
If you use your events app, please open that up, tap, and you can actually earn points for attending sessions, attending demos, and even right now, for those of you who might have the app available, use this, and you can earn this. You can actually redeem this for some good, memorable prizes at the CX Showcase booth here on the show floor, effectively. Talking about engagement, the next big product announcement for us, as those of you who might have attended the keynote yesterday, Mohamed talked about this, is SAP Engagement Cloud. This is a brand new way of how we serve our customers so that they can engage with customers at every single moment, at every single touchpoint in a way that orchestrates their customer journey.
Even beyond for SAP Business Suite, SAP Engagement Cloud will actually allow you to not only engage with customers, but employees, suppliers, business partners, distributors, and a whole host of other players as well. SAP Engagement Cloud will become available for beta next month, and it is scheduled for release in the early part of 2026. In this world, obviously, we talk about intelligence and how intelligent orchestration is critical. We are making SAP WalkMe for all of our customer experience applications so that users can understand, can adopt, and can use the applications in a much more meaningful manner. More content, more journeys will be added. This is already available for CX applications right now. The next important thing is about talking about intelligence and how intelligence comes to life.
Yesterday in the keynote, Muhammad Alam talked a little bit about different classes of this intelligence, and one of which is deep research capabilities in SAP Joule. We are leveraging that in SAP Customer Experience to build account planning capabilities that allow sales personas to better understand their customers, create a better account plan sales play so that they can drive better engagement and convert and drive revenue. This account planning powered by deep research capabilities of SAP Joule, as well as we are also bringing together a digital service agent that allows elevation of customer experience where customers can get the best answers that they need, fast, reliable, anytime on any device. That's also becoming available as we know it right now. There are different classes of applications. An AI-native application is fundamentally key. We are announcing two new applications here. Number one is SAP CX Revenue Intelligence.
This AI-native application leverages the context, enterprise-wide context of SAP Business Data Cloud, data from Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Commerce, Marketing, all the way through to ERP. It is designed for selling personas, Chief Revenue Officers, so that they can forecast revenue predictably. They can identify risks and opportunities in their pipeline and take actions in order to generate growth. The second application that we are also bringing as an AI-native application is for industry-specific. This is for consumer products companies. We call it Consumer Products Intelligence. This allows key account managers to collaborate to create trade spend to meet their financial goals. It integrates with supply chain planning capabilities, as well as ERP for financial settlement and claims management end-to-end. Both of these applications will become available in the first half of 2026.
Having said all this, I'd love for all of you to actually take a look at these products in action. For that, I'd love to welcome Ria Chakravarti and Sangchar to the stage.
Thank you, Balaji. Today, we're going to tell you all a story about Best Run Fashion. Best Run is a global fashion brand that sells both directly through their own e-commerce website as well as through retail partners all over the world. In this demo, my fantastic partner, Sung, and I are going to show you how Best Run uses our CX solutions to strengthen their relationships with retail partners. They do this by creating personalized, engaging experiences that ultimately drive profitable growth. Let's first take a look at how Best Run scales its retail partnerships in the B2B side of the business. Sung, let's start by looking at this from the perspective of Best Run's CRO, Sarah. Sarah leverages the revenue intelligence application to help her better understand her business.
With data harmonized across the entire business ecosystem and with the help of AI to surface the most critical insights, Sarah is able to identify opportunities that matter the most. She starts off by looking at this dashboard where she can see multiple different insights, including pipeline opportunities, the state of conversion rates, and regional performance. One insight stands out in particular. Regional retailers are bringing in an increase in sales. This shows a huge opportunity for growth. If we dig into this a little bit further, we can see that Cbond Department Store, a regional U.S. retailer, has had a 47% spike in Best Run Fashion sales despite only hosting two in-market events. Now, imagine if just two events have created such a large increase in sales. What would happen if Best Run spent both more time and budget with Cbond?
Sarah decides to take action and clicks into the insight where she can see more details about the opportunity with recommended actions just ready for her to assign. In order for her to take advantage of this opportunity, Sarah knows that she needs to engage both the sales and the marketing teams. She does just that. She assigns the task directly to the account manager and the marketing team in just one click, automatically setting an entire workflow in motion. Now, it's time to get the sales teams to start acting on these insights. Terry here is on the Best Run Fashion sales team and has been assigned as the account manager for Cbond. He receives the assigned task notification and drills into the account. This new opportunity looks promising. He enhances the strategic account plan. The plan already has a lot of different critical data populated inside it.
Terry can use the capabilities of deep research in SAP Joule to automatically help enrich this account plan. This isn't just another agent. It's a smart guide that reveals hidden insights and surfaces opportunities in plain sight. It rapidly analyzes the Cbond account to help build a comprehensive partnership strategy. The plan now has relationship mapping, competitive analysis, revenue projections, and partnership recommendations within minutes. The deep research agent in SAP Joule has done all the heavy lifting. Terry can now focus on what humans do best: building relationships. Now, let's shift this demo to the B2C side of the business and take a look at it from the perspective of Richard, the Marketing Manager. Here, we can follow Richard as he sets up one of these co-marketing events.
For this event, Best Run's loyalty club members are invited to exclusively preview the Best Run fall collection only in Cbond stores. Looking at the offer analytics, Richard notices that he can provide even more exciting opportunities for members. The data tells him that members are most likely to redeem their points for discounts and complimentary products. In addition to the event invitation, he also provides members with the opportunity to redeem their points for a 20% discount and a complimentary engraved bracelet. Before we go ahead and activate all of this, I want to show you all the loyalty wallets of Best Run's most loyal customers. Here, we can see Jane's loyalty wallet. We can see all the different ways in which she has interacted with Best Run in the past.
We can see the promotions she's redeemed, the promotions she's currently eligible for, as well as her communication and privacy preferences. This powerful set of information allows Richard to use data for personalization and segmentation. Let's go ahead and activate all of this and get Jane invited to this special event. Richard sets up the automation program to invite Best Run's loyalty members to 75 of his local Cbond stores. From there, he's able to access local data by selecting the U.S. West region as well as the content to get himself started on all this. In order to accelerate speed to market, Richard uses SAP Joule to create a brand new customer segment. The agent handles all the manual work, applying the filters and drafting the segment using just his natural language prompts. Once he's reviewed all of this, he then drops the segment into the automation program.
Next, he clicks into the email channel node to start building out the event invitation. Using the AI product finder, he can then add personalized highlights connected to the event, such as all the different products that are in stock across all the different stores. He can also then either spotlight items that he wants to move faster, or he can spotlight some of the out-of-stock favorites to capture demand signals. To complete the campaign, he then sets up in-app messaging to ensure that customers receive a consistent experience across channels. With automation orchestrating every step, Richard is able to turn data and insights into action, turning his promotion into a connected omnichannel experience that scales. Now, let's finally take a look at this entire experience from the perspective of Jane, one of Best Run's Gold Tier loyalty members.
As soon as she receives the invitation, she clicks into the link and is taken directly into her account profile in the Best Run app. Her profile has been updated automatically to reflect all of her current offers. This showcases the importance of connected data between the engagement, loyalty, and commerce platforms. Jane sees the initial offer we set up with the 20% discount and the complimentary engraved bracelet. She also sees some more exciting experiential offerings like 500 points to bring a friend and 750 points for an exclusive meet and greet with the designer. Jane is excited. This event would be so much more fun with her best friend coming along with her. With just a few clicks, she's able to use her points to sign her friend up. Jane notices that she's actually just a few points shy of this meet and greet with the designer.
She looks into how she can earn enough points to redeem the experience that she wants. She then recalls that she recently placed a dress on her wish list that would be perfect for an event like this. With just a few taps, she completes the purchase that is backed by configurable, flexible payments so she can buy the dress on her own terms. Her potential points then appear, but she notices that she won't actually receive these points until the dress has been delivered. With the event approaching so soon, Jane grows worried. She decides to connect with an agent. Using SAP's digital service agent, she receives an instant answer based on company policies, confirming what she just heard. Not quite getting the answer she was hoping for, she then asks if an exception can be made so she can take advantage of this exciting offer.
This is when a human service agent steps in. Because loyalty management and Service Cloud are integrated, the agent can see that Jane is a loyalty member and has been for many, many years. The agent then overrides company policy and grants this as a one-time exception specifically for this event. This is a great example of keeping humans in the loop. The customer service representative teaches the digital service agent to respond similarly in case other loyalty members have similar questions. Jane's points reflect instantly, unlocking access to an elevated customer experience. In just a few clicks, Jane has created an unforgettable memory with her best friend, attending an exclusive fashion event, meeting the designer, and shopping for a beautifully designed fall collection. Where does our journey end today? It ends back with our Chief Revenue Officer, Sarah, who's responsible for profitable growth.
In the revenue intelligence application, Sarah can see the impact of her team's efforts. Net new revenue is up. Even better, she's just received a smart recommendation to build out a similar journey for another region. In other words, success doesn't stop here. It's setting her up to scale and to repeat. Now, let's recap all of what you just saw today. You saw how SAP's CX solutions have provided a seamless working experience for Best Run's teams and an engaging customer experience for their most loyal customers. The revenue intelligence application identified the opportunity. Account planning powered by deep research in SAP Joule enabled rapid partnership planning. Loyalty management helped design the cross-brand value proposition. SAP Engagement Cloud delivered precision targeting and omnichannel engagement. Last, Jane was able to get all the help she needed with the digital service agent.
This is how loyal customers are created, using intelligent data to create meaningful connections that build partnerships, delight customers, and drive sustainable growth. Now, I would like to welcome Geert Leeman, Chief Revenue Officer for SAP CX, to the stage to talk about how some of our incredible customers are doing just this.
Wow, wow, wow, wow. What an incredible demo. I'm really blown away. Wow. It's bringing the future back here on stage today in Las Vegas. Thank you to Balaji. Thank you to Jessica. Thank you to Ria and Sung for this fantastic thought leadership and a lot of the insights we are learning here in the session today. For me, thank you also for everybody here. You're already hanging in 50 minutes. We always keep the best for last at SAP. Don't worry. It's coming up. We all know what they say. What happens in Las Vegas stays in Las Vegas. Of course, the exception to the rule is everything you learn here in this session, more than happy to carry it out. We heard already a lot of customer examples from Manos. We also heard the Boeing story. This session is really about the voice of the customer.
Every generation, every decade has faced adversity. Through this change, we've seen really drastic upheavals. A lot of these iconic brands you see here have operated in the business for more than 100 years. They stayed relevant, always focusing on the customer first. With that, I really wanted to showcase two additional customers: Migros, which is really a global grocery retailer out of Switzerland that is disrupting the market, the grocery retail market, and Wella, which is really a global beauty retailer. I'm super happy to announce Bianca Bolouri , Global Vice President of E-commerce from Wella Group, as well as Daniel Gahlinger, Chief Digital Officer from Migros. Let's give them a warm applause. We really tried to work very hard to fit the outfits. The memo didn't really.
I'm the Black one.
We ultimately ended up with one of us in black. Joking aside, I think CX is such an area that is in the move the last couple of years. There's so much currently happening, what is out there. I just wanted to get maybe a first thought, what is happening in your industry at this point in time when we look at customer experience. Bianca, you want to give us a first impression?
I think one thing that's really interesting about the Wella organization is that we cater to so many different cohorts of customers. We have our consumers who buy from either their stylists or within stores, and we also have our stylists who are buying from us, but also buying from us from an omnichannel perspective. I think we used to probably approach experience based on what the field was doing live with the salons. Now we're trying to tailor it to make sure that the actual experience is omnichannel. When you think about putting yourselves in the mind of your consumer is where we started. The experience no longer is a static one. We've tried to anticipate the changes in behavior and be there across the journey. It's really building the connection and the convenience.
We're trying to find a way to have the experience come to life for pros when they're digesting inspiration on social, listening to education, also shopping in store. You have to imagine these are independent business owners, and they may be going to pick up three tubes of color for that one day from wherever is most convenient. What we don't want to lose is the connection and that experience. We're working much stronger as an organization now to make sure that every touchpoint from education to social to in-store to e-com and to our field walking through the door or a telesales call are all bridged together to make that experience memorable.
Super. Daniel, anything on your side?
Yeah, from my point of view, customer experience anticipates all facets of customer expectation, emotional impressions. It's very important for us as a retailer, and also all the functionality of prediction of customer behavior, convenience, at least in the stores, or frictionless is very important, but also the customer prevention and all the different things. You asked me about trends. It's also very interesting for us. We see as a retailer more and more hyper-personalization. A retailer needs to know the customer. It sounds very easy, but it's quite hard, at least in the stores. Online, it's easier. Not easy, but easier. In the shops, it's not so easy because if you go in the shop, then it's not quite clear who it is. It's very important to know who is the customer, what is the expectation. This is the base for all of that.
We see that across all the different channels, hyper-personalization, and also for individual combination of all the different channels, online and offline. That's the key, at least for our business in the retailer sector.
You spoke a lot around every channel, every connection. Bianca, a little bit coming back to also what you were outlining on the omnichannel experience, trying to find and be consistent across all of the channels. How big is technology playing a role for you in your day-to-day jobs as the Vice President of running an E-commerce business at Wella?
Yeah, I mean, it's getting very important. I think the company, Wella, is investing so heavily behind that experience and understands that technology is going to be the enabler to get there, similar to AI. The way we approach it is really trying to think about, I mean, our company's been around for 140 years, which is awesome. Legacy is amazing, but it's not about preserving the legacy. It's about adapting. The way we see technology is we want to start with what made our company who it is today, which is really about artistry. It's about trust, and it's about education. We want technology to enable those things. We partner with SAP, but also other technology that enables us to be able to either anticipate our customer needs faster, to design better.
For example, when we think about our professional market and our field sales organization, we're trying to leverage technology to make sure that education is more accessible faster and more seamlessly. We also want them to be able to go into their field, into their salon doors with a lot more information, which is empowered via technology. That's how we start. We start with essentially the end idea in mind and then build and partner with the technology to enable us to get there better, faster, stronger.
Super. We speak about all of the pieces in an organization that need to come together to drive customer experience. It's never the job of one team, one organization. Experience is basically the last connection that many of the customers have. I was just trying to understand a little bit from both of you how you drive that organizational change. How is that change management to not only have one department owning it, but a whole company owning, from finance to supply chain, this customer-first mindset in an organization? Any experience from both of you you can share with the audience?
Yeah, at least for us, collaboration is very, very key for us. We promote and support cross-functional collaboration. That begins from IT, of course, but all colleagues from marketing, business, and also colleagues from the shows itself. It's not a collaboration in our legal entity. We work also together with other legal entities in our group. For example, we work together very tight with a bank, and we work together with our financial colleagues. In the context of credit card, credit card format is an integrated part of our loyalty program. It's very important to get a common understanding. The common understanding is also based on a common collaboration on the same technology baseline. We work on a common data lake. We have cloud platforms. This is also the key for a common understanding for a 360-degree of our customer view. We call them internally digital customer twin.
Yeah, similar. I mean, I think if I had to drill it down, it's probably access and visibility, transparency to data. Coming from a beauty organization, again, that's more salon-first. A lot of the anecdotes and the strategies that we were building for this omnichannel collaboration was really based on what the field was telling us. What we've done now with the structure we have in the U.S. and global is to actually amplify the hard facts of the data, which we leverage through our CDP, Emarsys, et cetera. We're kind of marrying the anecdotes that come from the field with hard data. I think the collaboration comes when you have something that's non-negotiable and you can't refute it. I hate to say that the basics of structure and rituals get you there. You need the right structure and the teams that have the same measurements and KPIs.
You have the habits, the rituals of talking about it versus it being something that, like, oh, yeah, the technology team is doing that. The digital team is doing it. It's like, no, no, no, we're all doing it together. We're going to keep talking about it ritualistically so that it becomes a part of everyone's vocabulary.
That's a very personalized approach at Wella. To take that and bring it back to Migros a little bit, there's a lot about convenience in grocery. It historically has always been location, location, location. Convenience has been the main factor in grocery retail. How do you or how do you see Migros playing to build that emotional connection between on one side the brand and then on the other side the consumer?
Yeah, that's a very good question. We try to anticipate all these aspects, as you mentioned, in our loyalty program called Cumulus. Cumulus is very well known in Switzerland and 20 years old. It's also very interesting to know. Yeah, we have a good situation, a very well-established loyalty program. 50% - 60% of Swiss citizens are a member in our loyalty program. After 20 years, we have to go further. We have to go in the direction of more digitalization, hyper-personalization. It needs more. It needs all aspects for our customer, beginning of the customer journey. It could be online. It could be offline in the stores until the checkout process. It must be seamless. It must be easy. It must be also emotional because sometimes in Switzerland, we say it is just boring to buy some goods. It must be touchable.
We try to anticipate all these facets in our loyalty program. Technology helps.
To build on that technology a little bit and to get out of the boring, I mean, there's no session, of course, where we cannot talk about AI and data. It's at the center of every board's discussion. Where can we leverage it? How can we leverage? Where to start? Where not to start? What are the challenges in that area? It would be great to share maybe with the audience a little bit your insights, but also maybe a little bit your challenges, what you're seeing in the organization by adopting.
Yeah, I think what's great is that everyone, at least within the Wella organization, is super excited about it. I think we all share a common feeling, which is like, where do we start? How do we do it? You come out of this environment of everyone being like, I want to do it. No one really knows where to start to a certain extent. I think for us, what we're trying to do is build use cases and have an idea of what AI can enable. I think the challenge of just hoping that it does everything is not going to be helpful. Really trying to, from a department perspective, we have specific use cases that we're piloting that then we can scale. For me and the organization, we really see it as not automation, but more of an insights tool.
Really practically, if you imagine you're a sales field representative who has to go into a salon, you may have to acquire a salon to change their hair color to Wella. AI is an amazing tool where you can input your zip code, what we have to offer, the salons in the area. You can walk into that salon a lot more informed. The insight mechanism is something that we're really leaning into versus just seeing it as an automation tool. I think we're seeing it as something very exciting. We're trying to go as fast as we can, but making sure that everything we do is scalable and not just like a one-off experience and seeing it as insight, not automation.
Yeah, for us, this AI key is an enabler. It's a booster. It helps. It supports, it accelerates all the different functionality as perhaps product documentation for our customer, prediction of our customer behavior. It helps also for all activity in marketing, in logistics. It gives us better data quality. On the other hand, we must be aware. We work on customer data, and this is our goal, our data goal. We are very aware because we are handling with trust, with the customer trust. It is very dangerous to make something wrong. We have, based on that, a clear understanding internally of data ethics, privacy, and also what we could do and what we could share. That is very important.
You started to give already a couple of advices, data protection, making sure that the basic fundamentals are in place. I think it would also be super nice to share a little bit with the audience any practices, any advice, where to start, how to transform that customer engagement. I mean, maybe also sometimes the things that did not work so far, that at least to get some additional input from both of you.
I think my advice on all of the things, whether it's technology, AI, engagement, customer experience, it's so fundamental. It's the thing that we forget about the most, which is making sure you can answer the question, who is this in service for and in service of what? Keeping essentially the consumer, the customer, the professional in our instance at the center of what you're doing is, again, coming back to the AI thing. You may be like, we need to activate AI, but you don't know. You're not thinking about in service of who and in service of what. By doing that, I think you can get to a much faster outcome from an engagement perspective, technology, all of it.
Connected to your last question about AI, for us as a retailer, it's very important to have a clear strategy. AI today brings us a new dimension. Today, we have humans in the stores, in our digital channels. In the next few years, perhaps months, there will be bots. Bots are not loyal. They look just for best price, best availability of the goods. If we want to continue to have humans as customers in our shops and our channels, it needs a very clear customer experience strategy. It needs emotional. It must be attractive to go into shops and to get information about goods, about prices. Some aspects also are gamification. It must be interesting for our customer. Otherwise, you will lose. You'll have just a logistic and an API, but not a clear customer interface. That is my preference.
Super. I mean, first of all, I really wanted to thank both of you to actually be here today and to share a lot of that insight. Thank you, Bianca. Thank you, Dani, as well. Thank you to everybody here in the audience for listening in here at the CX keynote. I mean, really, at SAP, it's all about putting the customer first in every interaction that we do and ultimately driving that customer lifetime value. I really would hope that you join some of the other sessions that are actually planned the rest of the afternoon. There are really great customer stories that are out there. I would say have a fantastic rest of the day. Thank you so much.