SAP NOW AI Tour: Andrew Smith on AI Use Cases

With constantly emerging innovations, more practical applications of business AI in finance and spend management are being put into place. 

The SAP NOW AI Tour explored these applications, using the London leg of the tour to provide attendees with solution demonstrations and expert presentations.

At the London event, Supply Chain Digital spoke to Andrew Smith, SAP and Digital Procurement Director at KPMG UK, who spoke about how clients are showing more interest in implementing AI into their operations.

Tell us about your role at KPMG

I lead our SAP spend management, which incorporates Ariba as well as SAP sustainability service lines. One of the most important things I look at is relationships, but for relationships to be relevant, you've got to be doing things and innovating with SAP and the ecosystem.

We're very much about not standing still. It's about people on the S4 journey and what they can do before or during the journey to realise business value.

To what extent is AI featuring in your conversations with clients

The topic of AI comes up many times. A lot of it is agentic AI, but there's also a lot of value with Gen AI, LLM and machine learning that companies can realise.

We’re working on use cases we've developed around spend management. It's all about the decisions SAP have made around their architecture, which makes it more open but gives greater control for customers. Control and governance is key, but also greater flexibility on the flip side. We're helping customers utilise a more open landscape with the ecosystem.

There's a lot of customers with SAP and other platforms using them as data sources, but they're not doing that much with it. They're looking at dashboards, but it's flat. We ask, what are you doing with those insights? How are you solving business challenges? We’re using the capabilities in SAP platforms and the data in the ecosystem to make a difference – so we can go back to sourcing managers and say, for example, ‘without critical supply you’re going to let customers down, so who are your alternative suppliers?’ Clients want agentic AI, but there’s more than just the agentic part. 

How important is readiness when it comes to AI implementation?

There are a few prerequisites. Data and the categorisation of data is key, and obviously there's external data sources that interact with SAP. You can't just dive in and get the benefits. If you don’t have a certain data set, it won't enable you to take action. We've got a maturity assessment that we've developed across different spend areas.

The value of AI is that you're pulling information from one part of the Ariba solution, using external data sources and coming out with a result impacting another part of the source-to-pay procurement process. We help clients not just with the implementation of the technology, but with the readiness from a business perspective.

What have you made of the SAP NOW AI London event?

I think it's great that SAP accepts it's not all about the SAP solution; it's about partners and how they work and interact. I've been working with SAP for 30 years and they've acknowledged that.

I've heard from customers not just about AI in the future, but what it can bring now. I think we're only just at the start of what's possible.