SAP NOW AI Tour: Stephan de Barse on Effective AI Usage

The SAP NOW AI Tour demonstrated how AI is helping supply chain and procurement professionals transform their businesses with the unlocking of value and cost savings.

As AI becomes more integrated throughout global supply chains, increasing efficiency and driving innovation across the organisation, speakers at the UK and Ireland stop at Excel London explored how businesses can undergo operational transformation through AI. 

At the event, Supply Chain Digital caught up with Stephan de Barse, President, Global Business Suite at SAP, to discuss how AI can be implemented across the supply chain and what the SAP NOW AI Tour was hoping to achieve.

What is SAP NOW AI all about? What's the purpose of the event?

Ultimately, what we want to do first and foremost is get our customers exposed to other customers to learn and understand how you can actually deliver business value from the solutions that we provide. There's a lot of questions around AI, SAP's AI strategy, but also how we as an organisation should think about AI. How can it not only drive productivity, but also impact the balance sheet and the P&L?

We want to show and demonstrate our latest innovations, whether it's next-gen Ariba, new AI agents or how apps, data and AI should come together as a flywheel to deliver maximum value to our customers. It's about education, networking and sharing best practices.

What were your key takeaways from the London event?

What stands out to me is that companies truly understand that the value is not necessarily just in the app layer. It's about how you access the data, combine the data with other data sources and then make sure there is an AI layer on top. That should not be a disconnected layer somewhere; it has to be embedded back in the core application to drive value and adoption.

Companies are also realising that it's not just about the technology, but how we move to industry best practices and thinking about user adoption. We had a lot of discussions around our tool chain with Signavio, LeanIX and WalkMe, and that is resonating.

Finally, a lot of the innovation we’re introducing is not just on a PowerPoint slide. We have some early adopting customers saying, "this is real, let's go and make it happen." That is inspiring a lot of other customers as well.

How important is it for companies to have clear use cases in mind before implementing AI?

Having that in mind is extremely important. Ultimately, with any software implementation, it's about the business problem you're trying to solve. When you solve that business problem, how much value should that deliver to the business? I should see it in my P&L – either costs down, revenue up or working capital.

What customers are realising is that core applications need to be in the cloud and need to be natively integrated. Then they start thinking about how they can connect different data sources and start building intelligent applications on top.

In procurement – whether it’s contract intelligence, AI for negotiations, third-party risk factors, autonomous buying, issuing an RFP – what we’re seeing is a change from a procure-to-pay process that has 15 steps to a complete rethink of how the procurement process is executed with AI. We’re not there yet, but a lot of our customers are on their journey. In the past, SAP was a vendor of technology; now, we’re a business partner and we are on this journey together.

How much do you enjoy seeing SAP and its partners and customers coming together in one place?

This is what's all about. The insights you get from face-to-face conversations and coffee chats are super important. What's the challenge you faced? How did you solve this data problem? How do you think about driving user adoption? We are doubling down on this and we will be back next year.