SAP’s CX Keynote Puts B2B Selling in Focus

Customer-facing AI is only as reliable as the business information behind it. That was SAP’s message to marketing, commerce, sales, and service teams at its Customer Experience keynote at SAP Connect, where the company focused on the path from first customer contact to closed order and delivery.

SAP opened the session, “Running Autonomous CX”, with findings from its own survey of customers, CX practitioners, and CX decision-makers. Almost all CX leaders said their organizations are prepared for AI agents in the customer journey. But only 3% reported true end-to-end connection across their systems.

Most of what SAP announced next was aimed at that gap. SAP made Commerce Cloud ERP edition generally available, extended several tools to B2B selling, and introduced new assistants for quoting and sales compensation.

Why SAP Ties CX to the Rest of the Business

An AI agent that sees only CRM data is “practically a guess,” said Balaji Balasubramanian, president and chief product officer for SAP Customer Experience. Without a company’s orders, inventory, subscriptions, and financials, he said, the business cannot follow through on what the AI proposes. SAP’s Autonomous CX approach, which he first outlined at SAP Sapphire earlier this year, starts from that wider context and builds assistants and agents that work across marketing, commerce, sales, and service.

Jessica Keehn, chief marketing officer for SAP Customer Experience, put the problem in everyday terms. Customers want AI to help them compare price and value, find accurate information, and resolve problems, she said. An agent cannot promise availability without current inventory, or fix a service issue without access to orders, shipping, and billing.

SAP also invited an outside voice. Tom Goodwin, an AI and digital transformation commentator, cautioned the audience against rushing. Many companies are moving superficially under pressure to be seen doing something with AI, he said, and adding chatbots to systems that don’t work together only adds to technical debt. In his view, transformation depends on the depth of integration more than the sophistication of the technology.

What SAP Announced

Commerce Cloud ERP edition is now generally available, Balasubramanian announced. It is designed for midsize and growing companies that run on public cloud ERP and sell to other businesses. It comes as an integrated suite with order management and customer identity and consent capabilities built in.

Several existing tools now extend to B2B. SAP Engagement Cloud, launched earlier this year for consumer marketing, now supports account-based marketing and passes leads to SAP Sales Cloud. SAP’s Order Management service also now supports B2B, and Balasubramanian positioned it for large enterprises that run several order systems and want to avoid a costly consolidation project.

SAP also introduced two assistants for sales teams. The Quoting Assistant turns a customer request into a quote using a company’s configuration and pricing rules and live ERP prices, and the Incentive Compensation Assistant explains commission calculations to sellers in plain language. New marketing agents can turn a single prompt into a campaign draft or a complete marketing program. SAP did not share availability dates for the new assistants and agents during the session.

SAP’s demo showed its assistants and agents handling one wholesale sale for a fictional athletic brand. A campaign became a quote, the quote became an order, and agents proposed a fix when a shipment problem came up. People reviewed and approved the agents’ work along the way.

Ericsson’s Approach to Quoting

Ericsson, which sells telecom equipment and services to mobile operators, was the featured customer. Aaron Thomas, global product owner for commerce at Ericsson, said customers valued the company’s technology but told it Ericsson was not always the easiest to do business with. Complex quotes could take days or even weeks, and with operations in more than 175 countries, teams quoted in different ways.

Ericsson chose quoting as its starting point because the step touched the most people in the most markets, said Mark Niemiec, chief revenue officer for SAP Customer Experience. The company standardized its commerce, pricing, quoting, ordering, and fulfillment processes on SAP, then built an agent that drafts quotes from that data. Sales reps send a request by email, and the agent returns a draft for review, flagging uncertain product matches and price changes that need approval.

Thomas also described a less expected choice. Ericsson uses a commerce storefront internally, so sales teams can build quotes from multi-year contracts much as a buyer fills a cart.

His advice centered on business value and the people doing the work. “We’re not building AI just to build AI,” Thomas said. Each idea needs a business case that can scale across accounts, he said, and teams should listen to the salespeople who handle quotes every day, because adoption follows when they see a real benefit.

Ericsson said it is still early in the work. It plans to test SAP’s Order Management as an early adopter and connect its quoting agent to other parts of the order process.

What This Means for SAPinsiders

• Choose one customer process that slows deals. Ericsson began with quoting, the step its customers had flagged as hard to deal with. A focused first project gives teams a clear test of where AI helps.
• Check what your customer-facing tools can see. List the pricing, inventory, order, and contract information sales and service teams need but cannot reach today. Teams gain a clear view of where AI agents would be working from incomplete information.
• Plan for adoption from the start. Involve the people who will use the tools and set measurable goals before rollout. Teams gain tools that people use in their daily work.