Has SAP Labs, with promise to share secret arts of enterprise AI, really seen the future?

⇨ SAP’s AI center in France showcases AI applications and educates partners and customers.

⇨ The center helps address AI adoption fears and supports practical, scalable solutions.

⇨ SAP emphasizes AI's role in transforming businesses, with a focus on cloud integration.

When SAP Labs unveiled its first ever AI customer experience center in the lush and picturesque Provence region of southern France in April, it did so with minimal fuss. Or that’s how it seemed at first. The real show was to happen over the following two days when a large number of SAP partners were expected to descend on the town. They were the real targets – the companies that are expected to gain most from the AI center, and to translate SAP’s AI strategy to customers.

The SAP Labs France AI experience center is located in a modern, sustainable building (everyone drives an electric car to work as part of the firm’s “Plan Vert”, or “green plan”). Pablo Picasso used to live up the hill in Mougins, by the way.

He died there too, although before doing so, Picasso apparently once said, “Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.” It’s a fitting quote that could be applied to SAP Labs’s approach to its new AI venture. It wants to be disruptive but only with a small “d”.

“Why are you relevant in ten years from now?” said Martin Wezowski, SAP’s chief futurist. Yes, you heard that right. Not many enterprise IT vendors employ a futurist. At first, you wonder what the hell is going on but then you start to realize the plan. Wezowski is no mug, but a bright thinker on how technology and humans are (and should be) intertwined and why SAP customers need to start thinking differently, especially when it comes to the cloud and AI. 

This apparently has nothing to do with dangling carrots for on-prem customers, who may still be weighing-up the pros and cons of migrating to the cloud and SAP’s S/4HANA. More, this has everything to do with breaking down barriers, overcoming customer fears and giving partners and SAP a vehicle to conjure ideas for AI-enabled applications. And here there is certainly a sense that SAP is sending its customers a message – no cloud, no AI. No AI, no future.

“Last year, customers were nervous,” said Dan Barton, partner and co-founder of SAP partner, Bluestonex. Another partner, Filip Decostere from delaware added that “we still have a lot of customers on the old platform,” and there is “uncertainty” when it comes to moving towards the cloud.

Decostere went on to say that many Delaware customers saw SAP’s embedding of generative AI and its cloud-based S/4HANA as just rewards for years of SAP loyalty. However, he added that there is a long way to go before both Delaware and its clients can reap the benefits. It’s not so much about education and collaboration – two of the intended functions of the AI center. It’s more about time. This has been an ongoing challenge for SAP, giving customers time to unpick and deal with years of customizations.

SAP’s head of business artificial intelligence for EMEA, Jesper Schleimann, said as much, acknowledging that many SAP customers are facing challenges. But the caveat, as he sees it, is that modern SAP applications, on the cloud, with embedded AI, are like a light at the end of the transformation tunnel.

“To some extent, there’s good reasons for that, right?” said Schleimann, referring to the slow uptake of cloud and S/4HANA. “But it’s not a linear path, because you need to do the right preparation in order to get to what we would call a clean core.

“We’ve known this for some time, right? And we are aware that this is where customers want to go – a clean core in the cloud because it’s more agile.”

Vive la differentiation

This takes us back to the SAP vision with AI. Schleimann said that “AI can’t be just about productivity,” adding that speed (processes) and quality (business insights) were key factors driving AI into organizations. Certainly, boardrooms are increasingly recognizing the potential value of AI, but organizations are likely to not have the necessary advanced technological skillsets which are key to having an AI roadmap.

Schleimann recognized this need to confront challenges around skills and prioritization. He said that GenAI, in particular, has to have context, as well as being trustworthy and transparent. “We need to ground it in reality,” said Schleimann. “And it needs to be embedded to enable scale.”

This is the pitch to partners and customers. Essentially SAP can enable not just an increased understanding and confidence around AI, but also offer vision and differentiation. This is why the AI customer experience center really exists: to share what SAP has learned so far; to work together to realize a new AIdriven future (think ecosystem vibe) and also to sell products.

Now we are back to the future and Wezowski’s suggestion that customers have to use GenAI “not to predict but to speculate,” adding that any companies that are resistant to change will “fade away.” It appears to be Wezowski’s role to help partners and customers understand this, to overcome any reticence to change and fear of the future. So, the AI experience center is as much about removing any preconceived ideas about SAP’s portfolio and AI, as it is giving customers and partners an opportunity to try before they buy. It’s also about recognizing the integral role of partners in the whole process. SAP needs the partners to be on board and customers to recognize the value they can – and should – bring to the SAP relationship.

“Augmenting people and business networks through autonomy is expensive but necessary,” said Wezowski. “If you do it on your own without any partners, you might be thinking you are doing it very efficiently – but it also might be a direction that is not beneficial for this world, or yourself.”

Any visitors to the AI center will be able, to some extent, to test that theory. So much of this is about autonomy – AI does that – but customers will have to work that out for themselves. Undoubtedly there will be areas where customers will see opportunities to improve their self-sufficiency, but they will have to weigh-up the short and longer term benefits and risks of doing so.

That said, the center is worth a visit, to get a real sense of what SAP is doing here – visitors will have the opportunity to dive into several applications of AI in areas such as art, cybersecurity, responsible AI, or energy transition. Guests will also be able to experience SAP’s new AI assistant Joule, a seemingly smart tool promising “proactive and contextualized insights from across SAP’s portfolio and third-party sources,” according to the company.

For Barton at Bluestonex it is all about customer education and to “calm customers down” from the hype of AI. He believes the AI center can help play a “reality check” role here, showing customers a way forward that is not too scary.

“SAP is good at showing people the vision, the art of the possible. But we work on that more human side and bring it back down to a maybe more scalable, adoptable level,” said Barton. “We try and understand the customer’s constraints and the budget and tailor whatever we’re trying to deliver to that. I think that’s important because if customers jump in too soon, they could potentially not adopt it because it might be a bit of a car crash.”

Barton’s advice is to start small. Maybe the AI center can help with that, as well as come up with new use cases and ideas for new apps. All in all, there’s something to be said for having a physical place to go to, to actually immerse in what is and isn’t possible with enterprise AI. SAP should be applauded for that – but it remains to be seen how this will pan out. That’s the problem with the future; in some ways it’s already here, but also frustratingly, never really arrives.