From Vision to Value: Advancing AI across the world’s most complex enterprises

Julia Nimchinski:

We want to welcome Mark Niemek, CRO of SAP, and he’s going to be joined by Seth Bars, Chief Strategy Officer at Sandler. So fantastic to have you back, how are you doing?

Mark Niemiec:

Excellent, great to be here. Thanks so much for your invitation.

Julia Nimchinski:

Our pleasure. Seth, take it away.

Seth Marrs:

Awesome. Hey, Mark, looking forward to this discussion. So, just kind of to kick us off, like, one thing, obviously, if you’re in this, AI is everywhere, people are talking about it in a lot of different places.

The one place that it’s probably least prevalent is in enterprise organizations, especially B2B enterprise organizations, because working in that type of environment is just different. Like, true large enterprises are just different in what they… what they’re dealing with. They have challenges, opportunities that are just unique.

Their scale is significant. The security requirements are different, how you deploy globally is different, so it’s… really is just a different game that makes the easy deployment of AI, even if the technology’s super valuable, slow down. You have to do it in a very… in a super specific way, and be able to handle all of those different things.

So, like, one company that is well aware of this is SAP. you guys, Mark, handle the biggest technical challenges at the largest companies, so it’s so great to be able to talk to you about this, and kind of bring a pragmatic approach around what this looks like at scale.

Can you talk a little bit around, kind of, just, like, an overview of SAP, and then how you’re helping organizations really bring this to life when they’re working in this gigantic, kind of difficult, complex organizational structure?

Mark Niemiec:

Yeah, for sure. And, you know, look, like you said, SAP has a deep and rich history of working with the world’s most, you know, complex, large, large organizations around the world, from, you know, companies to governments to, you know, other large organizations that have really, really stringent requirements in terms of.

you know, regulation and geographical boundaries and data residency and all that kind of stuff. And so, we have to be really deliberate with our customers, and, you know, it’s oftentimes so much less about the technology and so much more about the business processes that our customers employ to run their businesses.

You know, one of the things that SAP is known for, and we are a horizontal business operating system. we run the processes, the, you know, end-to-end processes inside of our customers, on our platforms.

And so much of that those processes are responsible for, you know, hire to retire, you know, lead to cash, so many of these processes that are deeply, you know, entrenched inside of our customers’ environments.

And so, making changes is really something that needs, you know, deep deliberation and alignment and understanding of, you know, regulatory compliance requirements that They can’t be taken lightly.

And so, so much of what we do over the past 6 decades has been helping our customers innovate, moving through all of the different market transitions that have happened since, you know, mainframe, client-server, you know, application suites, in-memory computing, next-gen ERP, and now, you know, AI-native business processes.

We’ve been through all these changes with our customers over the past, you know, 50-plus years.

And while there’s a ton that’s changing, the change process is something that SAP is very familiar with, and so much of it is about understanding the process, understanding the requirements, and then building a change program that’s going to help customers actually adopt those capabilities and changes.

There’s almost half a billion people a month that use SAP, and we’re not talking about casual users, we’re talking about, you know, these are business users that are running you know, almost 90% of the world’s transactions, when you think about the global economy.

It’s a really deeply entrenched company inside of our customers’ environments, and these chains need to be considered really, really thoughtfully, and most often are about process and people, and certainly that sits on top of the technology capabilities, but it’s really about process and people.

Seth Marrs:

Gotcha. So if you… and I think people may be looking at this saying, I don’t work in a company like that, but I guarantee you every single person on this call is trying to sell into a company like that. Can you talk through just kind of an example of how? Like, how do you… how do you solve those?

I mean, you talked about the process and change management, but when you’re trying to break into a customer, or you’re talking about this in different ways, like, what’s an example of how you talk about AI differently. Yeah.

Mark Niemiec:

we…

Seth Marrs:

in the.

Mark Niemiec:

We often don’t talk about the tech… we don’t lead with the technology. We certainly talk about it, but we lead with the business processes. There’s really 7 business processes that SAP runs, and that customers who are fits for us will have deep focus on those processes.

And we are the, you know, the creators in many cases, or the partners of our customer… with our customers in many cases. of those processes. And so, oftentimes, it’s a discussion about how that process works. It’s not a discussion about features or capabilities or technology, necessarily. It’s about how do we make your business run better?

And we’ve got, you know, dozens of examples. I’m just, you know, 6 months into my journey here, but some great, amazing examples of companies that are massive companies, the brands we know and think of all the time, where, you know, we think about… take Coca-Cola as an example.

We do a ton of work for them, and in the U.S, it’s one market, it’s one currency, it’s very different roles for each person in the company that, you know, the guy that delivers… is your salesperson is different than your delivery person, is different than the person that comes out and may fix the devices or refrigerators in your environment.

But in other countries, in other continents, in Africa, as an example, it’s the same guy. You’ve got dozens of currencies, dozens of languages, and you’ve got one guy Who is your, is your salesperson, is delivering your inventory, is fixing your refrigeration system, and is responsible for forecasting the business.

And so, to be able to address customers in a market like the U.S, but also those same companies that have to operate in those environments where you have so much diversity of process and human capital and capability, it ends up being a really, really deep discussion about how do we optimize process to ensure that our customers are able to meet their brand promises, right?

You know exactly what to expect from Coca-Cola every time, and we’ve got to make sure that we build the systems and processes and capabilities to support them in this diverse environment of their business.

And so it’s much more about that process, it’s much more about how do we help them optimize those processes, and then it gets into a discussion around what are the technical capabilities that we can bring to bear.

And obviously, AI is a huge topic for everybody, but our discussion is much more focused on how do we embed that AI into your business process. And so that’s a little bit of the difference in the discussion that we have here versus maybe some of the smaller companies that are more focused on individual point products or capabilities.

Seth Marrs:

Yeah, so, I mean, it honestly, it just sounds a lot more pragmatic. Like, in these companies, they’re just trying to get stuff done. Like, if I… you help me do my job better, I’m interested in buying it. If you use AI to do it, and you use AI to make it… differentiated so you can do it better than your competitors, I’m in.

If you can do it a different way, and it’s still better, and just… I’m in, I just… I need you to solve my problem. So it’s almost like an amplification of problem solving, rather than, here, let me sell you AI so you can… you can say that you have this to your board.

Mark Niemiec:

For sure. You know, it is very, very much about pragmatism. You know, I’ve spoken over the years, and you know, one of the things I love to say is, you know, sales isn’t a job, it’s the measurement of a job, and the job is problem solving, and so I think you nailed it.

So much of what we do is we figure out how do we help our customers solve their most important problems.

And if we solve them in the right way, and we are able to prove that, and we work through all the requirements that would go into regulatory or compliance-related decisions that have to get made around the things that we’re involved in, certainly we have an opportunity to service our customers more broadly.

But it is so much about problem solving, and that is the thing that we focus on. How do we make those key processes that run those businesses more effective, faster, more reliable.

How do we bring human capital up to let them do the most valuable work that they can do, and move those rote tasks to things like AI, things like other types of automation that have been around for many, many years. But that is very much how we think about helping our customers.

Seth Marrs:

Gotcha, gotcha. Let’s talk a little bit about, like, so, headless, like, headless systems.

So, Salesforce has been in the news a lot for what they’re calling the headless 360, Where they’ve kind of decoupled the backend solution from the user interface, so it allows people to have users and agents use this the way that… these systems the way that they want to use them, that’s optimal for each. Different type of user.

We talked a few weeks back, and you mentioned that SAP’s been doing this for a while. Can you talk through your position on this?

Mark Niemiec:

Yeah, so I think that the headless story is a great one, you know, and I think a lot of our customers have been accessing our systems through, through the APIs and through those direct connections for years. That’s mainly how customers interact with our capabilities.

And so, you know, we said this, or announced this at Sapphire last year, that the age of logging into interfaces and applications is definitely coming to an end. That was something that was part of our SAFIRE conference in 2025.

And certainly, we’re seeing other companies, you know, kind of come to that realization that the interconnection of these systems and access to data and native connections to data is so important to getting a fulsome picture of our customers’ business, or helping them get a fulsome picture of their business.

You know, we think of ourselves as that business operating system, so it’s less about logging into individual systems and much more about how those systems work together to make sure that we can drive those processes. In many cases, they run on SAP systems.

In some cases, they don’t, but it’s oftentimes about how do we make sure that we orchestrate and harmonize all those systems to be able to make sure that our customers can get those key business processes, you know, completed.

You know, we do, we have gone to the customers, and you see those, you know, 10, 20, you know, tabs of human swivel chair kind of going on, and you see how challenging that is for users. And we’ve been, you know, stitching together those data systems and applications for many, many years.

Oftentimes, you know, those capabilities are built right into our platform. So we’ve been doing this for a long time, and we think it’s definitely It’s great to see other folks kind of get to that realization.

Seth Marrs:

Yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, when you talk about these systems, isn’t it just putting the right interface for the right use case? So, if I’m talking to an agent, I need to be able to work it, but it’s not that… I think sometimes people perceive this as everything goes to a text prompt, and that’s just how I work forever.

And I don’t work any other way. what you’re talking about is, right, I’m just connecting to the interface you need as X user, and I make it work.

Mark Niemiec:

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, oftentimes when you think about these big shifts and changes that happen, yes, there’s a lot that changes, but there’s also a lot that stays the same, and this business of creating the right experience for users based on accessing the right applications and the right data in a way that helps them get their jobs done, that’s something SAP’s been doing for, you know, 50-plus years.

And that is really how we think about, you know, how do you bring the right information to the right to the right folks at the right time. And agents, we deeply believe in.

We think there’s so much opportunity to help our, you know, help our users move up the value chain and be able to see from the bridge the entire business process that they need to be involved in, but they don’t need to do all the work anymore.

We now have systems and agents that do a lot of those rote tasks that users, candidly, had to do previously, and now we don’t.

We think of it as embedding those capabilities into our systems that allow us to move that human capital up the value chain, and help folks do more valuable work, and help companies, you know, solve more complex problems for their customers.

So, we see this as a really natural extension of the work we’ve been doing for a long, long time, and helping folks be more efficient, and that’s how the business started. It was helping businesses become more efficient, and this is just an amplification Of the mission we’ve been on for the past, six decades.

Seth Marrs:

Yeah, another tool in the tool belt, a very good tool, use it where it makes sense, make the business better, keep going, keep improving.

Mark Niemiec:

For sure.

Seth Marrs:

Okay, so… a lot of… people talk about the front end, I mean, the agent wars, and people talking about how many… I have more agents than you do, and I created 15 agents today, and all of that stuff is happening.

The biggest value is really in the back-end ability to create unique, valuable data and be able to turn that into context that can be uniquely valuable for your customers. SAP manages, I think you mentioned earlier, you’re handling 90% of transactions that are happening in the world.

you have a treasure trove, both for your customers and then structurally across your business.

Like, how are you supporting those customers to be able to connect all this information together, to be able to create all these unique… because it must just be a… Like, an endless set of possibilities to be able to take this information and show your customers and help your customers use it in ways that are just… just unlock all sorts of things they didn’t even know existed.

Mark Niemiec:

Yeah, you know, there’s so much opportunity these days to help our customers solve more complex problems, especially with AI. It’s certainly an enabler, but at the end of the day, customers are interested in three things. How do I make money, save money, and reduce risk, right?

And how do they translate that in helping their customers solve their problems? And so, so much of the work we do is about helping our customers get visibility to the processes of what their business looks like from a, you know, what do we buy from a supply chain perspective?

How do we create value from that, and then how do we get delightful customers or delighted customers at the other end of it?

And so, a lot of the work that we end up doing is about how do we optimize those processes, how do we reimagine those processes in some cases, but it always goes from what are the raw materials that the business takes in to create their products and services, and how do they build those into capabilities their customers customers are going to be able to use and take advantage of, and then how do you make the customer happy at the other end?

And so one of the things that we do, you know, a common use case we do a ton of, our customers are always asking for, how do we help our customers, so our customers’ customer, get more visibility into the status of an order? How do we make sure that we can forecast exactly when that product that you need or you want is going to be on your doorstep?

How do we ensure that We’re going to get it there in a way that’s going to be profitable for you.

So, you know, our customers can certainly get their customers what they need, but how do they build their supply chain in a way that’s going to be, you know, profitable and accretive to the business while delighting their customers and being competitive on the other end?

And that takes real coordination and takes real deep understanding of how our customer’s business works.

And AI is a big enabler of lifting everybody up in that regard, but at the end of the day, it’s about how do we help our customers service their customers more effectively, and we believe that our customer experience capabilities sit, they sit directly inside of our ERP, and so we get, you know, native data, native information about where exactly our customers’ products and services are, and how we’re going to get those to our customers.

And that’s really, I think, the opportunity we have is real visibility, deep data, and knowledge and awareness of exactly what’s happening in the business at any given time, and making sure our customers are able to delight their customers every time, and do it in a consistent way that remains profitable.

And so that’s a really, like you said, complex set of challenges that we work through with our customers every day.

Seth Marrs:

Yeah, it’s interesting, because everybody talks about, I want to see all the buying data, like, what are they doing to buy, what are the intent signals, all of that type of stuff, and then everyone wants to see, well, how are they using the product? Are they using it?

But there’s a whole machine that’s arguably more complex on, once the buy happens. how do I actually get it in the hands in a way that they could actually use it? And I would… I would… think that that tells you a whole other story that would just broadly enrich both sides of the equation.

Future buying cycles, how it’s being used, all of that type of stuff.

Mark Niemiec:

Yeah, for sure. And so, you know, our customers are the biggest and most complex in the world, and so think about the scale that we have to, and they have to work on, and one small decision, one small change can have a massive ripple effect in ensuring that they’re able to delight their customers.

And so, understanding that entire process, getting visibility into exactly how everything is working inside the business so that they can deliver things, again, consistently, reliably, and and delightfully in every case, is definitely complex.

It’s certainly, you know, selling is a hard aspect of things, and buying is certainly challenging as well, but one of the things that we love to look at is what are our customers’ buy flows, and what are the journeys that they put their customers through online?

How do we help them optimize those processes that’s going to get a customer more likely to go through each step of the buying process so they finally get to the end? And make the purchase decision for the right product. And then when they get it, they get it in a way that is when and how they expect it, so that they come back again.

And when we do that right, or help our customers do that right, those customers become customers for life. And when you get that wrong, it’s got a massive impact on our customer’s customer. And so it has to be right every time.

And like you said, that deep visibility into the data and exactly what’s happening, what are the small changes that we make in each of those processes to ensure that our customers are going to be able to delight their customers at the end of the process is the thing that keeps us kind of up and excited every day.

To help our customers solve those problems.

Seth Marrs:

Yeah, makes sense. And very few companies work in that space. Like, that is not… that is not knowledge that’s available for very many people. So, we talked a lot about infrastructure, we talked a lot about process, we talked a lot about how pragmatic the enterprise seller is, or the enterprise companies are that you work with.

So, let’s kind of bring it back, because everyone’s still thinking in agents, and kind of, how can I deploy agents? What is that? Can you talk through, like, one agent use case that you’re seeing enterprises adopt that is truly valuable, and that ticks all the boxes that you’ve talked about before, that they’re implementing, and getting value from?

Mark Niemiec:

One of the things that you folks might be surprised by, and I was certainly when I got here, is how many of our customers’ processes still work on paper and email?

And I know so many companies who are watching this are super modern companies that are at the cutting edge of delivering unbelievable capabilities to their customers, but so many of our customers still rely on very, sort of paper and email processes, and so one of the things that the very popular agent we created was the ability to take in a handwritten post-it note, turn it into an order.

turn that order into a purchase order, and turn that into a delivery for a customer that’s going to provide them, again, maybe it’s the, you know, maybe it’s the 100 cases of Coke, or maybe it’s, you know, a thousand bicycles that are gonna go out to a certain store or distributor. But so much of that information comes in through email.

Even more of it comes in through, you’d be shocked, but post-it notes.

But being able to take that, read it, turn it into reliable business, usable data, and then put it through a process to be able to go manufacture those products, build them, ship them, deliver them, and service them to our customers, that agent capability has been one of the most exciting for our customers to get value from.

And just think about how much time saving goes into, or would be a result of, allowing our customers to identify that capability. The ability to take a post-it note, not have to type it in. You got the mistyping that may happen, and all that sort of stuff.

You got all the friction of humans being able to do all that work, and that just slows things down, and it’s error-prone.

Being able to identify that is a wonderful… sort of fun and simple example for folks to think about, but it does impact so many of our customers who still use those kinds of capabilities, and their customers honestly use those capabilities.

I’m here in Munich, and yesterday I was in the Netherlands talking to a company who is a large grocery retailer, and they have to take in all kinds of orders from their customers.

And those orders are coming from customers who are maybe small mom-and-pop shops, and those folks are using handwritten paper orders, and that’s delivering all the buying data back to this large grocer who has to go and make big supply chain decisions on how and when they’re going to, you know, bring those products to market, and how they’re going to make sure they have the right stock.

And that was just an amazing story to hear, and hear how they’re using agents to make that process faster and help Small business owners, you know, use technology in a way that they never thought was possible.

Maybe the small business owner writes down their, you know, their order on that postnote or on a piece of paper, takes a picture with their phone, emails that picture to one of our customers, and that runs through our entire process. turns that into a digital order, and it shows up on their doorstep a week or two later, and that’s just amazing.

And those customers are able to live and work in the way that they’re used to, but also experience these unbelievable capabilities that are available to them now. So, it’s an exciting place to be.

Seth Marrs:

Yeah, and like, I want to double-click on that, because I think the part that may not be understood in what you just talked about there is the precision required, right? Like, all of us can take a picture on the phone and have it translate and send it over.

What you’re talking about is someone’s handwritten note that you would take a picture of, send it, turn it into an order that a customer would have to pay for, and then deliver that thing on time. most LLMs are not ready for that yet. You need a precision to be able to do that.

So it’s not just as simple as the way it works, but it’s how do I turn something that’s soft.

Mark Niemiec:

Very soft.

Seth Marrs:

to a precision instrument that, I mean, your accuracy rates in terms of on-time delivery, every miss you have costs your customer money, and you’re able to not just to do it, which sounds like, oh, I could do that, but I don’t know anybody that would be willing to put down, like, I scribbled this out and I can get it accurate at a rate that would ensure that I don’t have a churn or return rate that comes with it.

So I think that’s the part that fascinates me about it, is… Yeah, this is a cool use case, but the precision required to do that well, that a customer would trust it to put it in and charge a customer for it and deliver something is phenomenal.

Mark Niemiec:

Yeah, yeah, it’s one of the favorite ones we talk about, because of what you just mentioned, it’s a very soft capability, but it requires to be turned into a very hard data-driven capability that is going to make major buying decisions and major selling decisions, and we can’t afford to get that wrong.

And that’s just a result of, you know, all the decades of doing this that we have with our customers and training our own systems and capabilities to be able to deliver with that level of precision. And that’s why customers, you know, use SAP.

That reliability and that precision that when it has to be right and it has to be reliable, our customers definitely look to us for that level of capability.

Seth Marrs:

That’s awesome. Okay, so let’s talk… I mean, you talked about Sapphire, and that’s where you kind of go and announce all the things that you’re doing, and AI plays a big role. What’s the one thing that you’re seeing SAP work on in AI that really kind of gets you excited? You’re like, I can’t wait to have this in my team’s… Book to be able to sell.

Mark Niemiec:

Yeah, yeah, so my role is the CRO for the customer experience business, and it’s the most critical, in my mind, business inside of the company, because nothing happens until somebody sells something, and so we are the ones that are responsible for helping our customers sell and service their products and their capabilities.

And the thing that I am most excited about is some of the agentic voice capabilities that we are bringing to bear for our customers and helping to ensure that they have access to multimodal technologies in a way that allows them to get the best and most out of their users.

And so that’s just… that is the most exciting thing, I think, that we are… we’re doing these days, and our customers are super excited to see it.

But it’s something that is definitely cutting edge and is something that I think we’ll have some great use cases and examples over the next coming months as we bring some of these capabilities more broadly out in the market.

Seth Marrs:

Awesome. Mark, thank you so much for doing this. It’s always great to get to talk to you, and also to hear about this. Having worked in this environment on the B2B side, in big enterprise, you under… like, the complexity levels can often get… lost, but they’re so, so critical in the success of these organizations.

So, yeah, with that, I really appreciate it. Julie, I’ll turn it back to you.

Julia Nimchinski:

That was fascinating.

Mark Niemiec:

Thanks so much.

Julia Nimchinski:

Thank you so much, Mark. Thank you, Seth. And Mark, before we let you go, what’s the best way for the community to engage with you, follow you on LinkedIn, go to SAP?

Mark Niemiec:

Mark Niemek at LinkedIn.com, you’ll find me there. We post quite often, and we’re excited for the announcements that we’re sharing around what CX is bringing to the market from the SAP team. So, thank you so much, everybody, for joining and following.

Julia Nimchinski:

Thank you so much. Seth, how about yourself?

Seth Marrs:

Yeah, same, go onto LinkedIn, could follow me there, and then also go to Sandler.com to learn more about what we’re doing.

Julia Nimchinski:

Amazing. You’ll be joining us soon. Next session is tomorrow. And, thank you, Mark. We’re about to transition to our next fireside chat with the CRO oversell. Super excited about that one as well, and and yeah.

Mark Niemiec:

Excellent, thank you.

Seth Marrs:

Right? Thank you, guys.