Davos 2024: AI has gone from hype to execution, says SAP’s Thomas Saueressig

SAP was an early-mover as far as AI is concerned, and all its employees are needed to pass AI learnings in the company

Artificial intelligence (AI) has gone from hype to execution that will lead to higher spending in tech going ahead, said Thomas Saueressig, member-executive board at German software company SAP.

“I also see a lot of excitement and positivity, especially with regards to artificial intelligence, which further will increase the tech spending,” Saueressig said while speaking to Moneycontrol at the World Economic Forum in Davos on January 18.

Saueressig said SAP already has 130 AI cases productive for its customers. “We also delivered more than 16 generative AI cases, available for our customers for productive use since end of last year,” Saueressig said.

He further said that SAP was an early-mover as far as AI is concerned, and all employees are needed to pass AI learnings in the company. “It's definitely a massive spending on AI, because we see the opportunity to rethink how people work and rethink how businesses are run,” Saueressig said.

On India and Bengaluru, he said the market is an extremely strategic one for the company. SAP's second campus in Bengaluru will house 15,000 employees, similar to its first campus in the city.

“We do that because of the talent, skills, and the innovative spirit of Bangalore,” Saueressig said.

Development and product management of all SAP products are done in Bengaluru, he said. The garden city is also the company’s go-to destination when it comes to distributing AI services across the company’s portfolio.

On growth, Saueressig said India is the fastest-growing market in APJ (Asia Pacific and Japan) in the last 12 quarters. He said SAP wants to bring its products and solutions to the private and government sectors in activities such as digital public infrastructure, Open Network for Digital Commerce, and the Unified Payments Interface.

“We want to bring that to India to help disperse or grow this ambition… which the state has so we are excited to be part of it,” Saueressig said.

The also sees a total acceleration of SAP’s cloud services and said the company is adopting innovation and it will be one of the key topics, going forward. “Cloud is a huge opportunity for us to really deliver these innovations more quickly,” he said.