SAP Hopes AI Can Help Buff Up Cloud Revenue

Enterprise application software firm SAP is hoping artificial intelligence (AI) demand fuels its cloud revenues.

To that end, the company has created the new role of chief AI officer to oversee AI implementation throughout its services suite, Bloomberg News noted Thursday (March 7) in an interview with that executive, Philipp Herzig .

“An important part of our strategy is the goal to be really, really fast,” Herzig said.

The report said that although SAP was a latecomer in migrating clients to the cloud, it has begun seeing strong growth there and wants to use AI to speed that transition for clients.

Herzig told Bloomberg that more than 24,000 SAP customers have adopted its AI solutions, with fewer than 1% of these being clients still using on-premise systems. He added that it’s easier to develop “out-of-the-box” AI services for cloud users requiring little or no retraining.

The Bloomberg News report noted that this approach has irked some SAP on-premise customers.

“Of course when it comes to AI and how these models are trained, these are things that have to take place in the cloud,” said Jens Hungershausen, chairman of DSAG, an interest group representing more than 3,800 SAP customers in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. “But the results of these models can also, in our view, be used by on-premise systems.”

According to the report, rather than developing large language models (LLMs), part of SAP’s approach involves working with big cloud providers such as Google and Amazon and backing AI startups like Anthropic.

“We selected those last year because they really had interesting technologies for the various parts of the AI architecture that we would need,” Herzig said. “Sometimes people see them only in terms of the large language model itself, but there’s so much more behind it.”

SAP in January announced it was restructuring to incorporate more AI into its operations, a move that it said would impact 8,000 employees who will either be retrained or leave the company under a voluntary leave program.

Elsewhere on the AI front, PYMNTS on Thursday examined how the technology was helping close the gulf between available data and actionable insights in an interview with Pecan CEO and Co-founder Zohar Bronfman .

“Large language models in general are extremely good at interacting with humans, gathering data, and making knowledge and data accessible,” said Brofman, who spoke with PYMNTS during a conversation for the series the “AI Effect.”

“They are the best technology humanity has ever made that helps make knowledge accessible,” he added.