What does your role at SAP entail? I look after the go-to-market, the narrative and the messaging that we put into the market, and that means being much closer to procuretech. That’ s the best part of the job for me – really being connected to the market, helping to understand where it’ s going, where our customers need us and then ensuring that aligns with the SAP strategy.

What’ s the purpose of the SAP NOW AI tour? Technology has moved so quickly and SAP is at the forefront of that. With all the announcements that we’ ve given over the last 18 months, it’ s about trying to bring that to our customers. We were at another show recently and everything was about AI, but this is SAP alongside our partners really showcasing what AI means in terms of our platform, how that can help further our customers’ journey and get more connected. It’ s turning a lot of talk into action.

What challenges are customers looking to overcome by harnessing AI in procurement? We had a panel discussion on this and the reason I wanted that panel is because everybody’ s having a different

Mo Ahmad, Head of Procurement and Ecosystem GTM & Strategy EMEA SAP

journey and there’ s different levels of maturity and different levels of interest – there’ s excitement and there’ s fear. Everybody’ s got to look at it really strategically and look at what’ s best for their business because AI has so much opportunity to help procurement. There are some real scaremongers who are saying procurement’ s completely going to go away and I’ m not a believer in that. But what opportunity does that actually bring us? It’ s really around efficiency, intelligence and cost reduction – doing more with the same. Procurement technology is going to help enable a lot of this, but it’ s got to be done in the right way and in the right places. Depending on who you are as a business, the size of your business, the size of your teams, you’ ve got to have the right strategy to do that.

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