What is SAP NOW AI all about? What’ s the purpose of the event? Ultimately, what we want to do first and foremost is get our customers exposed to other customers to learn and understand how you can actually deliver business value from the solutions that we provide. There’ s a lot of questions around AI, SAP’ s AI strategy, but also how we as an organisation should think about AI. How can it not only drive productivity, but also impact the balance sheet and the P & L? We want to show and demonstrate our latest innovations, whether it’ s nextgen Ariba, new AI agents or how apps, data and AI should come together as a flywheel to deliver maximum value to our customers. It’ s about education, networking and sharing best practices.

Stephan de Barse, President, Global Business Suite SAP

What were your key takeaways from the London event? What stands out to me is that companies truly understand that the value is not necessarily just in the app layer. It’ s about how you access the data, combine the data with other data sources and then make sure there is an AI layer on top. That should not be a disconnected layer somewhere; it has to be embedded back in the core application to drive value and adoption. Companies are also realising that it’ s not just about the technology, but how we move to industry best practices and thinking about user adoption. We had a lot of discussions around our tool chain with Signavio, LeanIX and WalkMe, and that is resonating. Finally, a lot of the innovation we’ re introducing is not just on a PowerPoint slide. We have some early adopting customers saying,“ this is real, let’ s go and make it happen.” That is inspiring a lot of other customers as well.

How important is it for companies to have clear use cases in mind before implementing AI? Having that in mind is extremely important. Ultimately, with any software implementation, it’ s about the business problem you’ re trying to solve.

72 December 2025