JanGilg_SAP 0:02 Wonderful welcome. 0:03 Today, we're excited to be catching up with Young Gilg of SAP at our SAP Insider 2025 event here in Las Vegas. 0:10 Welcome to SAP Insider 2025 Yan, and congratulations on your new appointment as Chief Revenue Officer for the Americas, as well as head of the business suite and a member of the extended board. 0:23 You might have the longest business card in the Business Today. 0:27 Welcome. 0:28 Thanks so much, Jamie. 0:29 Thanks for the welcome. 0:31 It's it's exciting to be here. 0:32 And yes, indeed, it's quite a mouthful, but I have to say I'm, I'm really excited about this step. 0:38 And as you know, I have been leading the cloud ERP product and development organization before for the last six years and bringing this knowledge now and this background into the new role as being responsible for the region. 0:53 I think that's it's a it's a good step and I'm really looking forward to working here with our customers in the Americas. 1:00 Well, that's a great segue for my first question. 1:03 I want to dive into Jan. 1:05 You've got an amazing background in really product leadership and you're really bringing that now to the customer intimate kind of experience focused on those core America's customers. 1:16 How are they going to benefit from all of the knowledge that you bring to the table in your discussions around the product, the evolution and what that customer experience needs to be? 1:26 Yeah, I think what what we have observed in the last couple of years going all the way back to 2015 when we launched As for Hannah for the first time, it was a lot of technical discussion to begin with, right. 1:38 And customers were wondering, OK, how can I modernise technically as soon as possible. 1:45 And that that discussion has changed over the years. 1:47 And you know, there have been a lot of events out there, changes in the global business environment from from COVID to the war on the Ukraine and so on that really force customers to rethink that. 2:01 And I have realised that many customers now when they talk to us, they are looking for ways how they can really transform themselves and how software can actually help them to do that. 2:12 And we all know and ERP modernisation is a big, big project. 2:17 And the question is of course, how can I take advantage now if I anyway have to do this project purely from for technology reasons, how can I help really the business to capture the the outcomes that they need to be successful today, but also then tomorrow. 2:33 And I believe that is what I can bring to the table to really help, first of all, build the bridge back to the value proposition of our products to connect also frankly our North America and Latin America customers into the wider SAP organization. 2:49 Because I would consider myself being quite a global leader, I would say with a very good network also inside of SAP and really help them to understand the value of our solutions, especially now that we are pushing so much around business data cloud, business AI and what the impact is. 3:06 And I think we are are all figuring this out together at the moment. 3:10 And that's why it is so important to stay closely connected to the product organization and understand what's coming there and how does that fit from a customer perspective then in the into the individual project timelines that they all have. 3:24 And I think that is where I can help build a lot of bridges actually. 3:28 Well, it's wonderful you say that. 3:29 And you know, I think one of the things that here in the Americas we've seen with our members is a very strong leaning in on customer experience and understanding SAP is a real partner as they go to market. 3:43 But one of the things that I think has been still an opportunity for SAP has been really to connect the Americas members with that sort of core central product leadership that emerges out of out of Waldorf and really that you bring to the table. 3:59 So hearing that voice is a great one I think for our members because it's something they really need. 4:04 They're faced with. 4:05 Is it BTP, is it BDC, is it Business Suite, is it Business AII? 4:10 Thought it was S for HANA. 4:12 And how do I take that and then integrate them into a coherent architecture? 4:17 And that's where I really think they're going to look to you for leadership. 4:22 I thought that is a transformation for us as a company, right at SAP and we love our product names and then we love to change them. 4:29 But at the end of today, if you, if you think about it, once you arrive in, in the cloud, the actual product itself doesn't matter so much anymore, right? 4:39 It's really about the outcome that customers are looking for. 4:43 And at the end it's a cloud service, their customers subscribed to a cloud service that should deliver an outcome to them. 4:50 The way we assemble that cloud service or how we bring it together in the background is pretty much up to as us as an, as a, as the software provider, right. 4:58 And that is exactly where we what we are working on from a, from a product perspective to make this very, very seamlessly. 5:04 So that at the end of the day, if I'm an end user and I run a procure to pay process, I don't need to know whether this piece is now in Aruba and the other one is in As for Hana. 5:17 And then there might be a third step that's happening in in field class. 5:21 And if you think about, you know, everything that's happening now around a Gentek AI anyway, that will blur more and more, right? 5:29 Because those agents, they will just use whatever service they need to get the job done. 5:34 And, and that is exactly the big, big transformation that's happening for us at SAP, but also then for our customers. 5:41 So I really hope we can bring them also more simplicity in that regard to our customers to understand that better and, and figure out how that can then what that actually means for them. 5:52 One of the things that you you touched on, you're a great segue in this regard is that there's a lot of buzz in the market about agentic AI and the really the evolution of independent agents. 6:04 There's SAP bringing new agents to market all the time. 6:08 But one of the things that are members are seeing is now the end to end connectedness and how do you connect and operate the agents that they work in synchronous together. 6:18 How are you guys thinking about bridging that integration and operation challenge that it that comes with new actors in in the mix? 6:27 Yeah, I, I personally believe that is a huge differentiation for us at SAP because our underlying cloud services or products in a traditional sense, they cover a very wide range of business processes and they are semantically connected, right. 6:44 So if you and we've frankly put a lot of work into that in the last couple of years driven by a lot of customer feedback that we have received, right, because customers told us all your, your products there so disconnected and you know, Conquer doesn't really talk to us for and so on. 6:58 So we have worked on that. 6:59 And now when you have a cost centre and, and As for Hannah, Conquer does understand what that cost centre is and, and what the semantic is behind that. 7:08 And that is then also the foundation of course, for an agent to be able to, you know, book a trip in Conquer, but also then trigger a financial posting in S4 seamlessly without the need of any human interaction. 7:22 And I believe that is the differentiation because if you look into some of the best of breed competitors that we have, they all have agents themselves, of course, but it's also only within their narrow domain in which they operate. 7:34 And then if you think end to end processes, which is how our customers operate, it will be very difficult to make those different agents communicate with each other, which is what you get from SAP out-of-the-box, so to speak, when you run our business. 7:49 We that's at least our vision. 7:52 Well, one of the things that we were very excited about today was the announcement of Jewel for developers. 7:58 We had heard Christian talk about that at Sapphire that it was coming and it's wonderful to see the evolution of it. 8:05 How do you see 22 questions here? 8:07 How do you see the evolution of Jewel and really helping the development community, all of our members that have focused on it, but you also really foreshadowed in the conversation that Jewel takes on a role of being truly the UI, the user experience, what it tell us a little bit about the evolution of Jewel, how we're going to be able to use it and where you see it going. 8:28 Yeah, Jewel is really a big deal for us. 8:31 You you said it and you know, I've been in the in the product organization now for years and UX has always been a big, big discussion as as you know, right. 8:41 And we had for years the discussion, when are all those Subgui screens going to go away and will be replaced with fury. 8:48 And then we always said probably never because there's so many, especially in our core ERP solution, some of them are only used, you know, for administrative purposes and so on. 8:58 So we really have to also drive that significant investment, you know, based on usage. 9:04 Yeah, what, what, where do we see the most usage of, of certain transactions and, and processes? 9:10 Jewel really in my mind can help us to leapfrog a lot of that because especially for the casual user this will be then the front end that helps them to answer the questions that they have. 9:23 And if you think about what do you want from an ERP system as a casual user, you have a questions regarding your business, right? 9:29 And often those are analytical questions and then the system can provide you the answer. 9:35 And frankly here you also see how with As for HANA Cloud, the fact that we don't need to move data anywhere to run operational reporting, that will help us here as well because the the answer can be immediate and and real time back to the end user. 9:50 So Jewel will play a big, big role here when it comes to modernizing our user experience and also the way customers and end users are using our system. 9:59 I personally believe it will also help us to broaden the population that is actually using SAP software because often it was considered rather an expert tool. 10:08 And then I'd rather pull the data out and bring it into kind of an, an AI tool, analytics tool, you know, and, and make that available for the end user. 10:18 That's not going to be necessary anymore if with with Jewel. 10:22 And the last aspect I want to mention is Jewel as an orchestrator then also of those AI agents and we talked about earlier, because also we will have domain specific AI agents, one for procurement, one for finance or maybe even for treasury specifically order to cash and then for supply chain. 10:40 So some somebody needs to orchestrate them to solve a business problem and that's going to be Jewel again. 10:46 So Jewel also becomes the orchestrator of our future AI agents. 10:51 So as you think about that, one of the holy grails that's been out there all along has been this whole concept of process orchestration, process automation, process intelligence. 11:01 And how do you enable that? 11:02 And then how do you link that into industry specific solutions and create and address the nuances that are in unique industries today. 11:11 You talked about the ability to actually bridge that and create that capability for unique industry specific solutions. 11:18 Talk a little bit about that if you can. 11:20 Yeah. 11:20 So first of all, it's, it's always funny, a lot of those topics they are on for quite some years and and I remember, you know, from composition environment and ESOA and all the things that we did years ago. 11:32 But sometimes it's also a timing question. 11:34 It was just not ready yet. 11:36 The technology wasn't really there. 11:38 It wasn't, you know, the cloud wasn't as pervasive as it is today. 11:42 And now I think it is. 11:44 So many of those concepts will work much, much better today. 11:48 And specifically when it comes to industry I, I feel we do have still a very powerful industry portfolio. 11:54 We do have best practice processes that are industry specific that we have learned and developed from working with our customers across the globe across 25 industries. 12:05 And we will bring that to bear. 12:06 And also those industry solutions will of course expose their data then into the business data cloud and we will be then able to also build new capabilities on top and what's important. 12:18 And that goes maybe back also to Jewel for developers. 12:20 We do encourage our customers to build extensions that they feel are differentiating for them on the business technology platform leveraging something like Jewel for developers to make it easy into build and and often those are industry specific extensions that are maybe too small for us to build a standard product around it. 12:41 So that's where we provide AP is then into the standard solutions and then our customers can build that leveraging Jewels for developers on the business technology platform and integrate it back then seamlessly into into the SAP world. 12:55 And all of this will then be of course part of the scope, so to speak of their SAPS data, if you will. 13:03 So I'd love to take a moment and and introduce you more formally to our member community. 13:10 I know they'd like to know the person that you are. 13:14 It's always important for who's going to be their key partner to understand them. 13:18 And one of the things you talked about in your keynote today really resonated with me. 13:23 It was almost like I was watching the old movie of planes, trains and automobiles and, and how do we get here? 13:29 And you had a personal experience coming from Germany to the US that actually spoke to really not understanding the customer and at the same time decreased productivity even with increased technology spend. 13:43 Talk a little bit about that, because I think that's a story everybody can relate to. 13:47 Yeah, I, I, I think it's that that was about me travelling from our German headquarters to the US. 13:54 And you know, if you think about customer experience for a business trip, I mean, you want to spend as little time as possible in the airport and you feel like, you know, in the year 2025, there's so much data available. 14:07 You have probably put in your, you know, address data, passport data in an online tool somewhere with an airline or multiple airlines. 14:15 It's, it's all there. 14:17 And then, you know, I went through an experience where online checking doesn't work, you know, you have to put in the data again, just like you would take your first flight there and then even in the airport itself. 14:30 And I think that's interesting things like broken elevators, broken coffee machines, broken walkways, which we all experience all the time. 14:38 The question is how is it possible that this stuff happens in a, in a time where pretty much every equipment, every asset has sensor data, has sensors and they this data somewhere. 14:48 And my analogy there was the companies collect this data, but they don't do anything with it because they don't know how. 14:55 And if we would actually leverage this data and then, then we could create a much easier or much better experience in order to stay ahead of the curve and, and fix those things much earlier, like an, like an escalator or walkway. 15:10 And that also shows then, and I, I think that's an important point, those operational efficiency topics, those are not just back office processes. 15:19 I mean, often it, it sounds like, yeah, you know what you do there in ERP and predictive maintenance. 15:24 And that's, that's all nice. 15:25 But it's all back office stuff. 15:27 Yeah, who, who, who cares really about it. 15:29 But at the end, it reflects directly to the customer experience. 15:32 And I, I think that is how we need to tell the, the story and connect the dots. 15:37 And at the end, nowadays it's all about data to understand the semantics of data along the entire journey, so to speak, and applications talking to each other, because in my mind, that's exactly what didn't happen in my trip. 15:50 Each of those groups I interacted with, of course, they use software right from the passport control to the, to the check in, you know, to, to probably people in, in the back who, who run asset management or maintenance for, for the, for the various equipments there in the airport. 16:09 But they don't talk to each other. 16:10 And I think that's the point which we are now in an, in an, in a position technologically that this is all possible. 16:18 And I think that's the big difference from maybe 5 or 10 years ago when we talked about similar things. 16:24 It's interesting because data has been the story for the better part of our lives and we're aging ourselves here. 16:30 And yet with business data cloud and some of the integration capabilities that, that exist in both the solutions themselves and in BTP itself and how you bring that together for the first time, I started to hear a story where I felt like data can actually be the driver. 16:47 And you said something, you said ERP data is the most important data. 16:51 Talk a little bit about that because what does that really be the glue that binds it all together? 16:56 I, I think the, the critical thing about ERP data or operational data in general and even with expanded to the entire business suite, it really captures how business is done globally and, and across the world across any industry because that is what comes out of business processes, how company, how, how companies run their operations, right. 17:18 So that data on the other hand, is very structured because you, you know exactly there are semantics there. 17:24 There's purchase orders, there's sales orders, there's delivery orders, there's all kinds of documents that are interconnected and there is a semantic model on top of it. 17:35 And, and that actually makes that very deterministic, right? 17:39 So you, there is no Gray zone. 17:41 And if you think about AI, one of the biggest challenges of course, is how do I avoid hallucination, right? 17:49 But if you operate on such a semantic model that is curated by SAP, there is no hallucination. 17:55 And that's what our, our knowledge graph does, which, which is underneath all of that, that when we talk about our agentic framework and so on. 18:04 So therefore, it is super, super valuable data. 18:08 And now the kicker in my mind is really, and that's why the cloud is so important in this. 18:13 It is accessible now across our customer base. 18:17 Before it was just individual customers. 18:19 And then when we started enabling our ERP solution, for instance, to be more intelligent and we we talked about that in 2015 already and we put a lot of machine learning into it and so on. 18:29 But the customers couldn't really capture the value because the data set was just too small and it was only based on their own company operation. 18:36 Nowadays, we can actually in the cloud and we have more than 30,000 customers that have given us consensus to use their data in an anonymized way. 18:45 If we bring that together, think about how much knowledge we can derive from that, how businesses run across the globe. 18:51 And that is very, very unique because there's no competitor who can, who can replicate that because of the vast install base that we have that run on our business suite solutions. 19:02 And that is why I believe operational data is really the most valuable data in the world. 19:07 And by the way, now with BDC and the partnership with Data Bricks, we are also bringing this together with the unstructured data world. 19:14 And that is very, very powerful and also shows maybe a little bit of a shift in our industry, the openness to other companies that might even be considered a competitor, frankly. 19:25 But that's the norm in the software industries nowaday and in the cloud, which is why I believe customers will really benefit from that and that we are almost like forced to work with all kinds of companies to make it work and fit for our customers. 19:39 And so that's why I can only repeat that I encourage everybody to look into how can their path into the cloud look like, because there's so much benefits of the on that in that operating model. 19:51 So in closing, that's a great finishing point there. 19:55 You know, as everything today is AI and you hear it everywhere. 20:00 But in truth, when we look at our SAP Insider member research, there's almost 50% of our community that is not yet moved to Esquahana and and you talked about the importance of. 20:13 Eswahana Public Cloud Edition and how the public cloud is really providing the solution for people to get there fast and take advantage of all of the things we've just been talking about. 20:25 Talk a little bit about you, where you see the public cloud playing and what advice you can give to our members who have yet to make that journey because they've got till 2027 to get there. 20:35 And so how should they get started now? 20:38 So I think first of all, of course we, we are making all of our innovation available in the in the cloud under, under rise and that's either public or private cloud for the core. 20:49 The public cloud in general has in my mind huge advantages because the SAS model is very prescriptive, yes, almost forced to adopt to standard processes. 21:01 And I know many customers that are using this as an enforcing mechanism to say, hey, I do need to transform my business processes. 21:08 I do need the business to also accept that they need to run a little bit differently. 21:13 And maybe especially the non differentiating processes, they are commodity. 21:18 And why do we need to do it differently? 21:20 And it's easier to go in then and say, hey, by the way, this is the software and this is how it works in the software. 21:26 And you don't have a possibility to change that like you used to have in the past. 21:31 And so therefore the SAS model is, is very, very superior in my mind. 21:35 Plus for us as well, we of course then have 100% control on how the customer is using the solution. 21:42 So when it comes to integrating then As for public cloud, for instance, into all of the line of business solutions, we can do that much, much more seamlessly for our customers. 21:51 And we have them always on the latest release, which means our customers then are able to consume the innovation. 21:58 And for us, we can then also make sure that it works seamlessly together in the private clouds in S4, specifically when they choose private cloud in the core. 22:08 Of course it is. 22:08 It is possible to a certain extent and that's why we are hammering so much on the whole clean core story business also here business process standardisation and so on, because we need customers to be on the latest release so that they are in the position to consume than the innovation that hopefully helps them drive business outcome. 22:27 And if it doesn't, then you need to come back to us and tell us. 22:29 And then we need to also alter our road map accordingly. 22:32 And, you know, we live off of customer feedback, but the assumption is that with every release that we're shipping, there is innovation that helps companies run better. 22:40 And therefore, I want them to consume it. 22:43 Very good. 22:43 Well, it's been an absolute pleasure having you here at SAP Insider 2025. 22:49 Your voice has made a huge difference. 22:51 I'll leave the final point with you. 22:53 Anything that you want to share that we haven't talked about that our members would really value? 22:58 And otherwise, Jan, it's an absolute delight to have you here now. 23:02 Thanks so much, Jamie And I, I have to say, I really enjoyed being here. 23:05 It's amazing to see how this community has, has grown and I believe really the the biggest and and most important community for us at SAPI. 23:15 Think at the end of the day, this is, this is a partnership where we are all sitting in the same boat. 23:21 And I, I hope that our customers see also the change that is happening inside of SAP. 23:27 We are listening and we are trying to address the the burning topics also around commercials and make it easier to do business with us and get less complex with the pricing and the contracting and that that all plays a role as well. 23:42 And the second thing is really turning more to become a product LED company, meaning talking about the value, helping customers build a business case, also help customers to streamline their implementation. 23:55 Yeah. 23:55 So that is a topic we haven't really talked a lot about and maybe something for the next podcast how we can also then have a take a bigger stake actually in making sure implementation happens along clean core principles and so on, holding our SIA partner community accountable there and really making sure that it doesn't happen what happened in the past that customers carry over all the legacy from the past and then they are again stuck on where they are. 24:25 And therefore, I think it is important that we really work closely together. 24:28 And I can, I promise you, you'll always have open doors here with me. 24:32 And I'm always happy to hear the customer feedback and we'll make sure that it also makes it weighed and to the respective respective places inside of SAP. 24:42 But thank you very much for for having me, Jamie. 24:44 Absolutely. 24:45 It's been an absolute pleasure. 24:46 And I think we'll take you up on that offer maybe once 1/4 of bringing you on to the podcast and keeping the conversation moving forward. 24:54 There's a number of topics I know our members would love to hear. 24:57 Yes, absolutely. 24:58 Thank you. 24:58 Thank you so much. 25:01 Thank you.