Tell us about your role at SAP and how it’ s evolved I’ ve been with SAP around 10 years, always in the procurement space looking after our applications like Ariba and Fieldglass. Now, I head up our newly-formed Finance and Spend Management business. That includes all those procurement applications, but also now our Office of the CFO and finance applications that integrate into procurement and also into S / 4HANA, either public or private. I head up probably one of the biggest business units we have now within SAP UK, covering all of those different solutions. I’ ve got a big sales team looking after new business and then also work a lot with our customer success management team that looks after existing customers.

What’ s the purpose of the SAP NOW AI Tour? AI is everywhere and you’ re seeing all vendors and all companies talk about it. Admittedly, some of these smaller, niche companies can bring things to market a bit quicker than we can. The reason is that we have so many customers and manage so many different applications, so we want to make sure when we come to market with AI that we’ ve done all the certifications, all the security checks and bring something that customers can be confident in that protects their data. This event shows our customers,‘ we are here, we are selling and we have AI available in all those different solutions across the business suite’.

What challenges are clients looking to overcome when it comes to AI in procurement and finance? AI is great – it’ s the future, it’ s revolutionising and it’ s going to continue to be present. The challenges lots of organisations have is: what’ s real? What can we do now versus the future roadmap and future innovation? The reality is, if you have bad data, having AI trying to pull information from that data is not going to produce realistic, accurate, sensible results. If you use ChatGPT and it’ s getting the data from the wrong sources, it’ s not delivering what you want. Our big proposition is being able to have lots of different application layers across different business processes across a business suite, and being able to extract and hold onto that data in a single layer that’ s organised, structured and accurate. Then we have AI on top of that single layer of data that produces accurate insights into all those different applications and processes.

76 December 2025