The future of SAP innovation recently came into focus at ASUG Tech Connect, the North American stop on the SAP TechEd tour.
Held Nov. 12-14 in West Palm Beach, Florida, this second edition of ASUG’s destination event for the SAP practitioner community, which debuted last year in New Orleans, drew more than 1,200 SAP professionals from over 31 countries for three days of hands-on access to the latest and greatest from SAP and its partner community.
Participating in deep dives, innovation spotlights, hands-on labs, expert 1:1 appointments, and other session formats designed to help them bring out the best in their businesses, attendees dove deep into integration, data and analytics, application development and automation, system modernization and artificial intelligence, architecting business transformation, system operation and administration, and SAP technology fundamentals.
Emceed by Kelly Dowling, Head of Content Strategy at ASUG, all three days of ASUG Tech Connect featured morning keynote sessions designed to capture common themes present in the hundreds of sessions available to attendees, featuring insights and announcements from industry professionals and prominent SAP leaders.
Unlocking the Future of SAP Innovation
Providing in-person interactions and hands-on learning to a degree unprecedented for the North American SAP community, ASUG Tech Connect embodied ASUG’s long-standing commitment to help its members learn, connect, and grow in recognition of “the collective passion and commitment we all share globally,” said ASUG CEO & Chief Community Champion Geoff Scott during his opening keynote address.
Reflecting on challenges faced by today’s SAP practitioners—from talent and skills shortages to supply chain disruption, economic uncertainty, political turmoil, and geopolitical instability—Scott emphasized that the signature strength of a unified SAP community is its ability to help its members overcome such obstacles.
“ASUG is your community of fellow SAP professionals who are looking to connect, learn, and grow,” he told attendees. “This—today, and these next three days, and this year—is exactly where you belong. Having a sense of community and belonging is more important than ever. It is your calm in the middle of the storm.”
Scott was joined on stage by Patrick Dineen, Senior Vice President, Finance Systems Transformation at NBCUniversal (NBCU), whose experience overseeing transformation projects at multinational firms across leadership positions on both business and IT sides of the business has given him a unique vantage point from which to identify key principles for driving business value.
“It starts with purpose,” Dineen said. While ensuring systems worked efficiently and were producing data people could trust was a critical part of his work as a technology leader, instilling purpose across an organization turned out to be equally important in ensuring business stakeholders actually utilized those systems.
One of Dineen’s guiding influences in overseeing change management is the late American author William Bridges, who wrote about “four Ps” of managing change:
- Purpose: “Why you're doing it. Purpose cannot be clean core. Purpose cannot be that you’re trying to get past an issue with software maintenance. Those are not motivating purposes. Purposes are about making you feel like a winner.”
- Picture: “What does it look like?’ What does a great day at work look like after S/4 has been implemented?”
- Plan: “What is the day-in, day-out transition?”
- Part: “Each one of your constituents, your business colleagues that are going to use these new systems that you’re going to put in place, they need to know exactly what their part in all of this is: shutting down the old, starting up the new, and then making the transition from one to the other.”
Leading SAP S/4HANA transformation at NBCUniversal, Dineen headed an internal campaign to impart the message that “this is what winners do,” explaining that “everyone wants to win, and winning is worth the sacrifice of a difficult transformation,” such as a digital transformation. “Winning is an important way of framing what SAP S/4HANA and digital transformation deliver,” Dineen said.
Citing SAP research, he added that “companies that show a higher level of digital maturity, that have taken the step to be digitally transformed, outperform their peers… by seven to eight percent when it comes to the return on their cash investments. That’s incredible. That’s the story.”
Even so, Dineen added: “It’s not about the technology. It’s about change management, and making the shift from technology leader to finance leader gave me an opportunity to really see that in clear relief. The first thing I had to learn is you have to trust that your technology teams are going to do the right thing, and it's going to make the software work. What you really have to work on is hearts and minds.”
To that end, Dineen encouraged attendees to attend hands-on learning labs and as many product demos as possible while at ASUG Tech Connect.
“What this group really can’t underestimate is the power of great demonstration,” he said. “Your business colleagues can’t see what you can see. You have a unique opportunity here, over the next couple of days, to bring the tech exchange back to your colleagues: ‘Why are you going through this transformation? Why are you going through this pain?’ ‘Because this software rocks, and here’s what it can do for you.’”
Inside SAP’s ‘Suite-First’ Mentality with SAP BTP; Plus SAP TechEd Announcements
Scott was next joined on stage by SAP’s Michael Ameling, Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer, SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP), who detailed the solution’s role in maximizing operational efficiency and fostering data-driven decision-making while recapping recent announcements made at virtual SAP TechEd in October.
Among the top takeaways:
- SAP Build is SAP’s central suite of tools for extension development, with SAP Build Extensibility Wizard (allowing customers to create on-stack and side-by-side extensions in SAP S/4HANA in an embedded experience) and the addition of ABAP environments to the SAP Build suite both powering full-stack application development and furthering SAP’s declared intention to democratize access to developer capabilities.
- With its announcement of a new embedded data lake for SAP Datasphere, available by year’s end, SAP is expanding its previously available data lake service (via SAP HANA Cloud, data lake), enabling enterprises to store large amounts of data while retaining valuable business context.
- In introducing collaborative multi-agent systems to Joule, SAP aims to enhance the solution and expand its capabilities to support 80% of SAP’s most-used business tasks by year’s end. These specialized AI agents will tackle specific tasks and communicate with one another on complex workflows, working both autonomously and collaboratively to break silos across organizations.
- A knowledge graph engine for SAP HANA Cloud allows users uncover complex and meaningful relationships between data points that would not be otherwise discoverable with traditional data modeling tools.
- Joule will be available to all customers on SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition, by year’s end; the digital copilot will also be available in SAP HANA Cloud, SAP LeanIX, SAP Sales Cloud, and SAP Signavio, with availability in SAP Concur and SAP Service Cloud planned for early 2025.
- SAP Analytics Cloud compass allows non-technical users to model complex risk scenarios, while a Watchlist functionality allows them to benefit from personalized KPIs.
- New integration adapters let SAP users optimize custom scripts with AI-generated recommendations.
For more insights into SAP TechEd announcements, read ASUG’s full coverage here, as well as our interviews with Dr. Alexander Rother, Head of ABAP Product Management at SAP, and Dr. Walter Sun, Global Head of AI at SAP.
Ameling also provided an overview of SAP BTP for application development, automation, integration, data and analytics, and Business AI, citing more than 2,800 partners and 27,000 global live customers running SAP BTP (including more than 7,000 in the Americas) as evidence of the platform’s centrality to SAP innovation.
Orla Cullen, Solution Manager for Planning and Analytics at SAP, took the stage to demonstrate how a user would complete a task in SAP. In her scenario, which involved coordinating a project by assembling a global team then bringing them together in person, Cullen gained visibility of the project in SAP Start, identified correct employees to assign in SAP SuccessFactors, assessed budget and expenses related to their travel and lodging in SAP Analytics Cloud, asked Joule to anticipate pending expenses and to determine there was sufficient budget remaining to cover the travel costs, then proceeded to SAP Concur, where Joule had already supplied relevant context from those previous tasks to suggest the best flight options.
“Applying a suite-first perspective means that it’s even more important to deliver a great user experience,” Ameling said. “We want the end-users of our products to navigate seamlessly through their workday and be more productive.”
Unlocking the Future: How Generative AI is Transforming Industries
To assess the transformative potential of generative AI across industries, ASUG Director of Research Marissa Gilbert convened a day-two keynote panel of industry leaders, including Jared Coyle, Chief AI Officer at SAP North America; Soulat Khan, Worldwide Technical Alliance Lead for SAP at AWS; and Geoff Scott, ASUG CEO & Chief Community Champion.
The discussion, recorded live as a forthcoming special episode of the ASUG Talks podcast, allowed Gilbert to shed new light on AI trends in the ASUG community by sharing exclusive research—the first of its kind—that illuminated how AI is shaping the SAP ecosystem and reflected organizational readiness to embrace this emerging field.
Evaluating the views of ASUG members on benefits of enterprise AI through ASUG research, Gilbert revealed that 87% of those surveyed had stated that AI benefits will revolutionize industries, with 48% recognizing that there will be benefits.
Stating that, in his view, “it’s impossible to be a contrarian” in the face of such widespread support for AI, Scott noted that “preparing our datasets to be AI-enabled” is an urgent opportunity across the SAP ecosystem. “The challenge that I see with AI is, I think it will deliver amazing results, but it necessitates that we have data available to drive those results.” he said.
“To the extent that we have old data sitting in our SAP landscapes, we haven't necessarily kept up with archiving, [and] we haven’t really thought about the complexities of master data management, we might be setting ourselves up for a dataset that isn’t quite ready for prime time,” Scott added. “Now, maybe AI will be able to engineer around that, but I think there is a huge opportunity for all of us to think about the promise of SAP as the official source of truth inside an organization.”
Coyle noted that, in digitizing business process data by entering it into SAP and non-SAP systems across the past few decades, professionals in all industries have already been “establishing that structured data that can provide the context for your business and provide value,” thus preparing their companies for AI to leverage that data and drive business value.
Khan added that the way customers see the value of AI is fast-evolving as well. During the pandemic, “Moderna needed a way to quickly scale clinical trials and development of vaccines, and they were able to do that with a highly scalable and secure service, with Amazon Web Services, and develop a vaccine within 100 days,” he explained. Doing so with AWS as its cloud services provider involved leveraging on-demand computer power and machine learning to accelerate discovery and development, as well as building flexible capacity and real-time analytics into Moderna’s cloud-native manufacturing facility.
As AI sweeps the SAP landscape, ASUG research found that seven percent of members report using AI in many areas, while 25% are using AI in some areas and 25% are doing pilot projects; 20% are considering a pilot AI project, while 10% are not involved in anything related to AI.
Coyle noted these results reflect the lingering question of “how organizations can deploy AI both effectively and meaningfully,” asking attendees to consider practical applications to drive bottom-line improvements, from reducing user time in systems with in-system copilots like Joule to improving efficiency or target inventory levels with AI algorithmic capabilities.
Khan encouraged members exploring AI to “geek out and try it out,” to determine how they can activate services and explore reference architecture within their enterprises—as well as those AWS has published with SAP, available via SAP Discovery Center.
“When you’re building out these services and these experiments, security is job zero,” he added. “If you find something really unique that’s working for your organization, you’ve got to work in the context of your security team. You’ve got to help them understand what it means for your interaction with your data; they’ve got to learn as well how you’re interacting with those models and what that looks like in production.”
For more insights from this keynote panel on AI in the enterprise, keep an eye out for next week’s ASUG First Five newsletter for early access to the full ASUG Talks live taping of this insightful dialogue.
Connecting the Ecosystem: Uniting Customers, Partners, and SAP through AI and Strategic Collaboration
The value of a customer-centric SAP ecosystem powered by dynamic partnerships took center stage on ASUG Tech Connect’s third and final day, as leaders from SAP, Kyndryl, and Microsoft reflected on the vital roles of SAP customers and partners in driving innovation.
“Customer feedback is a true north star for us at SAP,” said Walter Sun, Global Head of AI at SAP, in conversation with emcee Kelly Dowling, ASUG’s Director of Content Strategy. “It guides us to ensure that our solutions are not only innovative but also valuable to our customers. With a fast-moving AI environment, it’s important to understand where our customers are in their journey.”
While ASUG is a valued partner to SAP year-round in providing direct, unfiltered feedback from its members to inform SAP product strategy and roadmap, Sun noted that peer-learning and knowledge-sharing spaces such as ASUG Tech Connect are “the best way to learn” what’s on the mind of SAP customers, encouraging all attendees to take every future opportunity to attend similar in-person events.
Sun recommended that SAP users take a “crawl, walk, run” approach to implementing generative AI solutions, determining which business processes can be automated most effectively and focusing on high-priority areas of their businesses.
Read our recent interview with Walter Sun.
Experimenting with enterprise chat functionality and seeing what types of responses large language models (LLMS) generate via SAP AI Core and the company’s Generative AI hub are relatively easy ways to initiate AI implementation at work. Identifying scenarios with high human interactivity that could benefit from generative AI can then give employees more confidence in understanding how the technology works while automating more repetitive tasks, he said.
Sun spoke of his excitement for collaborative AI agents, as well as the AI Foundation on SAP BTP, where SAP is building out its orchestration layer in generative AI to simplify the work of developers building AI applications.
At SAP Sapphire, it was announced that Joule will be integrated with Microsoft Copilot to create a unified work experience for business users. SAP’s partnership with Microsoft, is about “combining our business and technical expertise,” said Sun, who previously held leadership positions at Microsoft.
“SAP brings deep business insights, and Microsoft’s cloud and AI capabilities allow us to create powerful tools for our customers,” he said. “For example, both BTP and RISE with SAP are powered by Microsoft datacenters around the world using Azure. With respect to AI as well, we have a very deep partnership.”
Nathan Weaver, Senior Director of SAP Business Unit at Microsoft, detailed this 30-year partnership further, alongside Robert Hernandez, Principal PM Manager at Microsoft, who joined Weaver on stage to discuss AI-driven technologies that can benefit SAP customers.
Read a recent guest perspective authored by Nathan Weaver on harnessing the power of AI with SAP and Microsoft.
“Every day, over 200,000 Microsoft employees touch an SAP system,” said Hernandez. “I believe the statistic is over 5 billion transactions take place every year on SAP for our internal systems at Microsoft. SAP is at the core of every business process that Microsoft runs.”
Complementing this, utilizing Microsoft Azure's cloud infrastructure to host the SAP business suite offered through its RISE program (commonly referred to as RISE on Azure) is one of the most common ways SAP customers provision the necessary virtual machines to configure a RISE environment. “We have the most VMs, in the most places, to fulfill your needs for running your SAP RISE systems on Azure,” Hernandez said.
Elsewhere, Microsoft’s security assets extend to SAP solutions, and the company has worked diligently to integrate its flagship solutions with SAP; Microsoft is next “almost doubling” its SAP BTP footprint to ensure that SAP BTP services are available in more public Microsoft Azure regions, “to make sure that you have all the service capabilities you need in the locations that you need to be able to run your BTP services on Azure,” Hernandez said.
Weaver detailed Microsoft Copilot as “our digital assistant across the entire Microsoft stack,” as well as one of the company’s biggest growth stories across the past years. Connecting Joule and Microsoft Copilot together, he went on to explain, is an ongoing process with major implications for data gathering and searchability:
“This is not something that just magically happens. Microsoft isn’t actually opening up a lot of the API calls here. This is an engineering-level conversation that's happening to hook these things together. This is not just passing inference. This is actually very tight. Why do we do this? The reason that we're doing this is because we don't want single connections that have to be maintained."
Kyndryl provides “mission-critical” services to some of the world’s most complex businesses, from all five of the top automotive businesses to five of the 10 largest airlines. Chuck Kichler, VP, Distinguished Engineer at Kyndryl, which is both an SAP partner and customer, took the stage to reflect on Kyndryl’s transformation journey with SAP and Microsoft, which came after Kyndryl was spun out from IBM.
“During that period, we had to spin out all of our business systems, all of them, separating from IBM and becoming a new company, and we had to do that while running your companies’ businesses,” Kichler said. “It was not a small task.”
Kyndryl is currently running SAP S/4HANA on Azure, with plans to move to RISE next year; to get to this point, automation was essential, Kichler added. 1,800 systems were driven down to 360, and Kyndryl continues to reduce, combine, and migrate to more efficient systems as it prepares for its RISE journey.
Kyndryl recently shared its transformation journey with ASUG in an exclusive case study; read more here.
Executive Leaders Reflect on Collaboration to Foster Innovation in SAP Community
As Sun, Weaver, Hernandez, and Kichler reconvened on stage for a discussion, it soon became clear that none of the four could be described simply as partners, solution providers, or customers. Instead, these leaders power the SAP community forward from the unique perspective of working together in multiple capacities.
SAP utilizes Microsoft 365 applications internally; SAP relies on Kyndryl’s modernization services while counting the managed services provider as a major customer. Kyndryl leverages Microsoft’s AI-powered analytics to enhance its Kyndryl Bridge open integration platform; that standard environment runs on Azure. Weaver describes Microsoft’s strong relationships with Kyndryl and SAP as “symbiotic relationships that ebb and flow through the years,” enhancing customer satisfaction as they strengthen.
Reflecting on the rise of AI, Weaver noted that Moore’s Law—named after Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel—observes that the number of transistors on a computer chip doubles every two years, whereas a more recently observed “scaling law” observes that computing power, particularly for training LLMs, is doubling every six months.
How can ASUG members position themselves best to take advantage of the explosion? Kichler advised organizations to host “hackathons” and engage employees’ creativity and imagination. At Kyndryl, 40 teams came up with ideas, with nine co-winners including holistic advisory journeys, intelligent migration assistants, and deal insights. “A hackathon is a great way to throw open the doors, shed some light, and get amazing people to think about what they maybe didn’t think about before,” he said.
Hernandez suggested that those wanting to get started with AI solutions install pre-packaged, pre-built solutions directly on their systems. “Start deploying today, so that you can learn its benefits, then utilize those learnings and benefits” to guide your roadmap, he said.
In closing, each panelist shared what they’re most excited about in terms of generative AI.
- Sun predicted “2025 will be the year of enterprise implementation,” with users past the stage of grasping LLMs conceptually and asking questions focused on security, compliance, and privacy.
- Kichler shared his excitement for looking across massive datasets with AI to help clients run their systems more effectively.
- Hernandez predicted excitement for agentic AI will surpass the hype for digital assistants, with a high-level orchestration layer driving interaction between various specialized AI agents and bringing their functions together for aggregated best solutions.
- Weaver reflected that the next generation, growing up around generative AI, will learn how to harness these innovations intuitively and drive “what’s next” beyond anyone’s ability to predict.
For more coverage of ASUG Tech Connect, subscribe to ASUG First Five newsletter and stay tuned for more customer stories, expert interviews, guest perspectives, and session recaps in the weeks ahead.