1970s
Herzig says SAP's founders were still working at IBM in the 1970s when they went customer to customer.
“actually in the 70s, when the founders of SAP worked still at IBM, what did they do? They went to each customer, right?”
Topic
SAP
59 facts from 12 episodes, in date order. These are what speakers said on the shows, each linked to the moment it was said. They aren't independently verified.
1970s
Herzig says the SAP founders repeatedly implemented a finance system for individual customers, which led them to the idea of standard software.
“And they implemented the finance system again and again and again and again.”
1970s
Herzig says the notion of standard enterprise software was born from SAP founders' realisation that re-implementing finance per customer does not scale.
“And this was the idea where standard, the the notion of a standard software was born, essentially right.”
1972
SAP was founded in 1972.
“I mean, something has always prevailed over the years, because even when SAP was founded, right in 1972, right, long time ago.”
1990s
Satya Nadella says he worked on Microsoft's database products with SAP in the 1990s, and that SQL Server together with SAP R/3 was successful for both companies.
“I worked on our database products, uh, in the nineties, uh, you know, with SAP. In fact, the combination of, uh, SQL Server and R three were successful on both sides.”
2010s
Belden says that ten years ago, choosing an ERP system effectively meant choosing between SAP and Oracle.
“Ten years ago, if you said you got to pick an ERP system, you would have said, well, okay, it's got to be SAP, or it's gonna be Oracle.”
2012
Alex Zhu, a UI designer at SAP, was appointed an in-house futurist focused on the future of education before founding the company that became Musical.ly.
“he's just been appointed as an in-house futurist at SAP, focused specifically on the future of education.”
2019
Klein says that when he became co-CEO of SAP in 2019 he concluded the company had to double down on its cloud transformation.
“in 2019, when I became the co-C E O of the company, that we have to double down on our cloud transformation, absolutely.”
2023
SAP held internal AI Days in 2023, with sessions across its global units to teach employees about large language models.
“in 2023, we had what we called AI days, which we delivered a bunch of sessions across different global units”
2023
Walter Sun joined SAP from Microsoft to build generative AI for its customers and products.
“I joined SAP a couple years ago and have been working on building out generative AI for our customers and our products.”
2024
SAP shipped a feature with its SuccessFactors team that uses large language models to generate job descriptions from short natural-language prompts.
“job description creation with a feature we shipped over a year ago, where you use large language models and you just use natural language.”
2025
SAP's Business Technology Platform makes more than thirty large language models available to developers.
“we actually make more than thirty different large language models available.”
2025
SAP loaded its help and consulting documents into a retrieval augmented generation system so consultants can ask questions in natural language.
“we effectively uploaded with retrieval augmented generation our help documents, our consulting docs.”
2025
SAP's annual Sapphire conference was scheduled for May 19 to 21 in the week after the recording.
“we're having our annual conference, Sapphire Conference, May nineteenth to twenty first next week.”
2025
Walter Sun says SAP is not building its own large language model and instead builds on existing ones.
“we're not building our own LLM because that area has been well researched and well developed.”
2025
SAP is building a tabular foundation model for business data and predictions to complement large language models.
“we're actually building a tabular foundation model to complement the large language model.”
2025
SAP's tabular model uses the same transformer technology as large language models but is trained for business data and predictions.
“Using the same transformer based technologies that are used by LLMs for this tabular model, and this model is focused on business data and predictions.”
2025
Walter Sun says SAP can find industry-wide patterns, such as the Black Friday to Christmas retail surge, from anonymized data of customers who opt in.
“it's the retail business in North America. And so if every company is opting in and we've anonymized the data”
2026
Herzig says everybody at SAP now uses agentic coding.
“We are in the meantime all in on AI, right? Uh, so I mean, everybody in the company is using agentic coding, right?”
2026
Herzig says SAP Concur now has live travel booking agents and expense agents.
“with Concur, for example, right, where now our travel booking agents or expense agents are are alive.”
2026
Herzig says most SAP software is licensed per seat, with exceptions such as Concur and Fieldglass.
“for the most part, SAP software is seat based, licensed, uh, uh, uh, today, with a few exceptions, like a Concur or a Field Glass, for example”
2026
Herzig says SAP's current AI pricing is a hybrid of consumption-based charges and an element of per-seat licensing.
“it's consumptive, but it still has a certain element of seats in there”
2026
Herzig says enterprise customers still demand cost predictability, which is why SAP keeps a hybrid pricing model.
“Knowing that they demand still a lot of predictability in the enterprise space in order to cost control.”
2026
Tim Crawford says business processes span systems such as ServiceNow, Salesforce and SAP, each with its own governance layers that must be reconciled for agents.
“we might have some data in ServiceNow, we might have some data in Salesforce, we might have some data in SAP, and so each of those systems have their own governance layers.”
Undated
Nadella cited the partnerships of Intel with Windows and SAP with SQL Server as examples of successful Microsoft collaborations.
“Intel and Windows came together and and that was successful, S A P and SQL Server, so it came together and it was successful.”
Undated
Nicolai Tangen says the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund owns just under 3% of SAP, worth about $9 billion.
“we own just under 3% of the company, $9 billion, equivalent to 100 billion Norwegian kroner, or 20,000 kroner per Norwegian.”
Undated
Christian Klein says about 80% of the world's business-to-business transactions touch an SAP system.
“80% of the world's, you know, B two B transactions, one and touching an S A P system.”
Undated
Klein says 95% of the world's largest companies use at least one SAP system.
“Actually, and 95%, uh, use one or the other S A P system, many of them finance, supply chain, obviously”
Undated
Klein says 80% of SAP's customers are mid-market companies.
“but we are also having actually 80% of our customers are mid-market customers.”
Undated
Klein says mid-market customers that follow SAP's standard templates can go live in three to four weeks.
“when you actually adhere to our template, our best practices, you can also have go live in three to four weeks, absolutely possible.”
Undated
Klein says SAP serves twenty-five industries with a common horizontal layer and deeper vertical applications in many of them.
“I mean, actually, we won twenty five industries and the horizontal layer is actually oftentimes really S A P.”
Undated
Klein says SAP runs customer businesses in more than 140 countries and commits to following local laws, including sovereign cloud requirements.
“for us, I mean, running businesses in almost over 140 countries, I mean, that is our commitment to our clients”
Undated
Klein says SAP delivers new cloud releases every quarter, or yearly if the customer prefers.
“we deliver, you know, new releases in the cloud, you know, every quarter, or if the customer wants, every year.”
Undated
Klein says SAP has about 50,000 developers.
“we are have 50,000 developers, they're coding great stuff every day, a lot of A I use cases, a really good stuff.”
Undated
Klein says SAP researchers expect quantum computing to be mature enough for SAP products in three to four years, with logistics optimization as a leading use case.
“when I'm talking to our researchers, they actually would say now in three to four years, I mean, the the the technology should be that mature”
Undated
Klein says SAP has already shipped its first agentic AI use case, in services.
“Actually, the the first one we already shipped. Yeah, that is about, you know, the services and the services agents we have”
Undated
Klein says SAP promises customers that end users working with its AI assistant can raise productivity by up to 30%.
“every end user who is working with our A I, so our digital assistant tool with the embedded A I use cases, yeah, we can actually drive productivity up to by 30%.”
Undated
Klein says SAP is building sovereign clouds in Germany and, in France, a venture called Blue with Capgemini and Microsoft.
“we have, uh, De Lucy in Germany, we have in in France, we have together with Cap Gemini and Microsoft, we have Blue.”
Undated
Klein says SAP had to double its European legal department in the last two years because of regulatory complexity.
“we here in Europe, in the last two years, we had to double the size, you know, of our of our legal department.”
Undated
Klein estimates SAP's European legal team for commercial contracts and compliance checks at around 150 people.
“Here in in Europe, uh, I have to check, but it's probably around, you know, 150 people.”
Undated
Nicolai Tangen says only about three of the world's top fifty tech companies are European, with SAP the largest.
“I think the number is what three out of the top fifty in the world? And you're the number one.”
Undated
Klein says SAP was founded by five people who were doing the same task repeatedly in their jobs and left to start the company, despite being turned down by many banks.
“there was actually, you know, five people who did a job, and they found, hey, I'm doing the same task all over again.”
Undated
Klein says Bill McDermott asked him to become SAP's Chief Operating Officer, a role in which four predecessors had failed.
“Bill McDermott asked me to become the Chief Operating Officer. And because, uh, four C E O's before all failed.”
Undated
Klein says he was 38 when he became SAP's CEO and asked leaders such as Satya Nadella for advice early on.
“I was thirty eight when I became the C E O. I mean, oftentimes, I at the where we especially at the beginning, I asked them for advice.”
Undated
Daugherty says companies not on SAP's S/4 generation of software cannot access SAP's AI features.
“If you're not on SAP's S4, for example, their new, uh, generation of SAP, you don't get access to their AI.”
Undated
Snowflake is deepening its partnership with SAP, including bidirectional data sharing and joint work on analytics, AI and agents.
“So with folks like SAP, we are actually thinking much harder about what is that one plus one equals three with SAP.”
Undated
Herzig says AI is changing enterprise software on three levels: the user interface, business processes and the data layer.
“And then it's happening on three levels. It happens, of course, on the UI side, right?”
Undated
Herzig says an enterprise assistant must tailor travel policy answers to employee master data such as country, so a US employee and a German employee get different answers.
“of course, for a travel policy, for example, of course, you expect a very different answer that me as a German employee, right, would would get.”
Undated
Herzig says MCP servers work easily for ten APIs, but with hundreds of APIs the model's context overflows, and SAP has far more.
“for ten API is not an issue, hundred, you get already, uh, context, blowed and all these these challenges”
Undated
Herzig calls context that lives in people's heads or chat channels rather than in business systems tribal knowledge.
“I always call this the tribal knowledge, the stuff that is not in the system, stored somewhere, that just lives in people's heads.”
Undated
Herzig says SAP now calls the recording of decision traces from agents and users agent mining, where it formerly used the term process mining.
“In the past, we called this process mining, now we call it agent mining.”
Undated
Herzig says a pharmaceutical customer operating in 90 countries would need 180 separately trained models to predict payment delays and non-payment.
“They are running in 90 countries around the world, and they need these two models. So you end up with 180 models.”
Undated
Herzig says SAP's RPT-1 stands for relational pretrained transformer and is a transformer-based model for structured table data.
“we call this RPT1, so rapid ones and for relational pre trained transformers.”
Undated
Herzig describes the SAP knowledge graph as the link between natural language questions and structured data in SAP systems.
“the SAP knowledge graph that we've built, which is kind of the glue between natural language and the structured data in the system.”
Undated
Herzig says improving a customer's demand forecast accuracy by three or four points can be worth millions of dollars.
“if you can improve the accuracy of the demand forecast by three, four, right, that is huge for them, right? This is this is multi million value”
Undated
Herzig says SAP's quantum computing research will be hardware agnostic, much as SAP software has always run on different kinds of computers.
“we will be very hardware agnostic in that sense, right? Uh, like, like, SAP always, always ran on different computers”
Undated
Belden says SAP and Oracle own the context of ERP systems today, which he thinks gives them an advantage over Anthropic, OpenAI and AWS.
“big providers like SAP and Oracle, they own the context today for the ERP system, right?”
Undated
Baldwin says IBM sees 20 to 40 percent productivity gains in large platform implementations such as SAP and Oracle.
“we're getting productivity gains of twenty, thirty, 40% in those types of, uh, programs and and projects.”
Undated
Alex Lieberman says replacing a system like Salesforce or SAP wrongly could cost hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, which is why he does not see them as at risk.
“where if a company gets it wrong, ripping them out, you're talking about potentially hundreds of millions or billions of dollars.”
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