Stefan Steinle leads SAP’s Customer Support & Cloud Lifecycle Management organization, guiding customers through individual digital transformations with end-to-end lifecycle management and support with cloud transition. His organization is responsible for ensuring a seamless customer support experience across all SAP applications, safeguarding customers’ mission-critical processes throughout their journeys. With over 7,000 experts worldwide, the team collaborates closely with engineering units to enhance development and quality.
Since joining SAP in 2000, Steinle has held various key leadership roles, including COO & Head of Strategy for SAP Product Engineering, Head of SAP Globalization Services, and COO of Global Business Operations. He also served as Chief of Staff and Head of Operations for former executive board member Gerhard Oswald.
In conversation with ASUG Executive Exchange, Steinle reflected on the evolution of SAP’s customer support strategy and the galvanizing role of generative AI.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
How have you seen strategic priorities evolve at SAP around delivering an excellent customer support experience? What is the role of AI here, especially generative AI?
AI allows us to shift from reactive issue resolution to proactive, intelligent engagement. The mainstreaming of AI has accelerated this evolution. For example, SAP’s Built-In Support platform integrates AI to offer contextual assistance directly within applications, providing immediate help without disrupting the user’s workflow.
Among the countless improvements generative AI can bring to customer experiences, support interactions are especially enhanced by the optimization of repetitive tasks, the quality of issue resolutions, and the seamless escalation of complex issues to experts. Generative AI also helps capture contexts and semantic nuances from the customer’s request, helping us deliver precise responses.
According to analysts, companies actively making use of AI in support functions achieve up to not only 30% faster resolution times but also significantly improved customer satisfaction scores. SAP infuses AI at every stage of the support journey to deliver exceptional experiences.
What are your priorities for 2025, and what is SAP’s long-term strategy for enhancing the customer experience across its support functions?
With the mainstreaming of AI, the ante is up for all companies in 2025, and SAP is no exception. Our top priorities for this year include scaling innovation and ensuring that customer support adapts to changing customer needs:
- Enhancing the integration of AI to further improve the customer experience. For example, simplifying how to access support by automatically suggesting the appropriate priority and the most efficient channel—with the use of AI.
- Addressing more complex questions using AI agents and incorporating a broader context of information.
- Enhancing AI-driven automation to increase efficiency while delivering personalized solutions that can include operations and application lifecycle data—for example—in SAP Cloud ALM.
- Taking advantage of insights from tools like SAP for Me, which provides customers with a central hub for tracking their support cases, reviewing system health, and accessing tailored recommendations.
- Avoiding issues even before they happen with preventative and proactive support.
- Fostering seamless integration among tools like SAP Cloud ALM, SAP Signavio, SAP Enable Now, SAP LeanIX, and the WalkMe portfolio to optimize project execution and operational processes. By combining these technologies, we ensure that customers can unlock the full value of their SAP investments, and that these tools become an integrated toolchain for business transformation.
All of this directly applies to our support functions as well. In our long-term strategy, tapping the full potential of preventative support is definitely right at the top when it comes to enhancing customer experience and support efficiency. Agentic and collaborative AI has opened the door for AI systems to operate autonomously and provide assistance with minimal human intervention. Collaborative AI would augment human decision-making in a partnership between humans and AI.
How is the customer support organization leveraging AI and automation to handle repetitive queries, scale support, and continue to foster innovation within the team? Are the customers noticing? Can you share metrics year over year?
AI and automation are at the core of SAP’s support transformation. Take the examples of:
- Intelligent routing: AI-driven systems classify support tickets instantly, enabling quicker routing and resolution.
- AI-infused knowledge management: Tools like search and intelligent recommenders provide solutions based on historical data and help in shortening resolution times for common queries.
- Proactive system checks: These checks help us deliver business continuity by preventing service disruptions and degradations.
Customers are definitely noticing the difference. SAP’s AI support scenarios are called up more than 1 million times by our customers on an average day. More than 35,000 end users use our AI capabilities per month.
It is interesting to note that customers would notice AI-based support improvements only indirectly: for example, with higher levels of system availability or fewer issues being reported. Becoming more invisible to our customers is a good thing—when it comes to customer support.
As enterprise applications across the full spectrum of operations (CRM, SCM, general ERP, etc.) become more sophisticated, what shifts have you seen in clients’ expectations for leveraging the full potential of their SAP investments?
Customers expect SAP solutions to deliver strategic value, not just operational efficiency. This includes real-time insights, intelligent automation, and support for complex business scenarios.
For example, our customers can make use of SAP Signavio for process optimization, ensuring that their ERP solutions align with their business goals. The integration of SAP LeanIX into SAP environments further supports IT landscape transparency, helping clients drive innovation confidently. Together with SAP Cloud ALM, we provide an integrated toolchain for business transformation.
Customers increasingly expect proactive guidance and intelligent support to navigate their transformation journey with ease. Beyond traditional issue resolution, they seek expert-driven insights, AI-integrated recommendations, and best practices to optimize their SAP investments.
To meet these expectations, SAP continues to invest in AI-driven tools, built-in diagnostics, and predictive support capabilities that not only resolve issues but also prevent them in the first place. By embedding guidance directly into workflows and providing real-time recommendations, SAP empowers businesses to maximize efficiency, reduce complexity, and accelerate their path to innovation.
As customers move their SAP instances to the cloud, what are the most significant challenges SAP faces when transitioning customers to the cloud? How are these issues being addressed?
The top challenges are:
- Customers often face challenges when managing large-scale transformations. SAP provides proven tools and methodologies to simplify and accelerate these processes while ensuring business continuity. At the same time, we work closely with our ecosystem of partners and experts to deliver tailored guidance and best practices, helping customers navigate their transformation journey with confidence.
- Change management: Many customers require significant enablement support. SAP offers tailored cloud readiness programs and learning and enablement platforms such as SAP Enable Now or WalkMe solutions—to help customers upskill their teams.
- Business continuity: SAP Cloud ALM ensures real-time visibility into project progress and operational aspects—allowing customers to address potential issues proactively.
- According to industry studies, cloud transitions without proper planning see failure rates as high as 60%. SAP mitigates these risks with structured methodologies and expert-led guidance, helping customers achieve seamless cloud adoption.
What can SAP customers expect from the customer support organization as they transition to the cloud in 2025?
This year, SAP Customer Support continues to focus on proactive and agile support tailored to a cloud-first landscape.
Customers can expect:
- Personalized AI-driven interactions, with SAP’s Built-In Support platform offering real-time, context-specific help directly within cloud applications.
- Transparent project tracking, powered by tools like SAP Cloud ALM, enabling customers to monitor progress and mitigate risks.
- Innovation-focused collaboration, with the customer support team working closely with product development to ensure customers achieve their strategic goals.
Companies with a proactive support strategy report higher customer satisfaction rates. SAP’s road map for 2025 is aligned with this strategy to ensure that we remain a trusted partner throughout every stage of the cloud journey.
AI and large language models have revolutionized the way we deliver customer support by helping us provide faster resolutions and predictive insights. We should, however, keep in mind that, while technology enhances our ability to deliver, it’s our people who make the difference.