Cloud Wars Live with Bob Evans

In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I unpack SAP CTO Philipp Herzig’s perspective on AI, APIs, and the company’s next era beyond traditional software.

Highlights

00:01 — As part of our ongoing analysis of the massive changes that SAP rolled out this past week at their Sapphire event in Orlando, I had an interesting one-on-one conversation with SAP Chief Technology Officer Philipp Herzig, where he discussed a range of things. Particularly this notion of how, as SAP begins to move beyond applications into the realm of AI, what that means across everything from their new Business AI platform [to] updates to their API policy.  

00:37 — I think some people got their knickers in a knot unnecessarily over those API changes and the general pace of innovation that not only SAP is cranking out, but that customers are working very hard to consume so that those customers can become leaders in their industries.

01:24 — How does this shape the company that SAP is becoming in the future? And even as talked about with CEO Christian Klein posing the question during his keynote, will SAP be a software company in the future?

02:07 — One of the things that Herzig said was, we've got so many more people using more and more of our APIs, agents are going to access data from all across the company, and certain things just have to be tightened up. One of the biggest things [SAP] did, was try to ensure that there's more security.

03:20 — So, lively discussion here. I think this was a momentous event for SAP, the things they introduced, the way they're talking about going to market, the new sorts of expertise they're putting in. Philipp touches on a lot of this and gives a good insight into the foundational technology layer.

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Bob Evans speaks with SAP CTO Philipp Herzig from SAP Sapphire in Orlando about SAP’s AI strategy, platform evolution, customer modernization challenges, governance, and enterprise-scale agent deployment. Herzig lays out SAP’s positioning around openness, business AI, autonomous agents, security, and migration support, while addressing confusion around API policy changes and fair-use limits.

SAP’s AI Inflection Point

The Big Themes:

SAP’s AI Platform Is Becoming Cohesive: A major theme in the conversation is that SAP is presenting a more integrated AI vision rather than a collection of disconnected announcements. Herzig describes a layered architecture spanning UX, autonomous assistants, business process orchestration, governance, and the underlying AI platform. The emphasis is on a consistent enterprise AI framework rather than isolated tools.

Migration Support Is Becoming Strategic: Migration is no longer framed as a technical back-office concern. Instead, it's becoming a strategic AI enabler. Herzig discusses SAP’s toolchain investments, including LeanIX, Signavio, migration automation, testing support, code modernization, and agent-assisted implementation. The idea is to reduce friction in modernization so customers can reach AI readiness faster. Instead of treating migration as merely an ERP upgrade journey, SAP increasingly positions it as foundational infrastructure for enterprise AI transformation.

Change Management Extends Beyond Technology: Herzig acknowledges that deploying AI agents is not simply a software problem, it’s an organizational transformation issue. While SAP can accelerate technical deployment through tooling, governance, observability, and automation, customers must still rethink workflows, roles, and operating models. The discussion around developer productivity, AI-assisted coding, and human-agent collaboration reinforces this broader perspective.

The Big Quote: ““There are good agents out there… there’s also a lot of really bad agents out there… and they, of course, set the enterprise system under risk.”

More from SAP and Philipp Herzig:

Connect with Philipp Herzig on Linkedin or learn about SAP Sapphire.

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In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I explore how SAP’s AI Revolution could redefine enterprise software through agents, data, and industry-specific intelligence.

Highlights

00:03 — We are reporting here from the Sapphire show floor in Orlando. It's been a wild week here, and I had a great chance to talk with SAP Chief Operating Officer, Sebastian Steinhäuser about some of the changes that are going on there inside what I call SAP's AI Revolution.

00:21 — Covering everything from what it's doing with agents, how it's redefining their apps, how it's building up its Data Platform, and more. Sebastian offers some great insights into all of that, and we talked about it in a full-length video linked to down below.

01:13 — (Sebastian offers insights about) the rise of data within SAP becoming the foundation for everything, the Business Data Cloud moving into a very powerful area, the Business AI Platform now consolidating some different sort of platforms and technologies that SAP had so that customers can gain more from that more quickly.

02:00 — SAP sees the world, and Sebastian describes this, where there's going to be tens, hundreds of thousands of agents, perhaps millions, you know, a few years out. And certainly SAP is not going to build all of those. So it's going to be the partners that do this.

03:09 — SAP is more focused than ever before on delivering not just code (that happens to be what they make) but what SAP's real focus is: delivering superb business outcomes for customers.

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At SAP Sapphire in Orlando, Bob Evans sat down with Sebastian Steinhäuser to discuss what may be one of the most consequential strategic shifts in SAP’s history. As enterprise AI moves from experimentation to execution, Steinhäuser outlines SAP’s vision for the autonomous enterprise: where AI agents, assistants, business data, and deep industry expertise come together to solve real operational problems.

AI with Industry Depth

The Big Themes:

Customers Want Outcomes, Not AI Demos: A recurring theme in the conversation is that enterprise leaders are not buying AI for novelty. They want measurable business outcomes. Customers are focused on solving hard operational problems such as improving supply chain resilience, winning in retail execution, streamlining regulated manufacturing, and modernizing enterprise workflows. This reflects a broader evolution in enterprise buying behavior. The AI conversation has moved beyond experimentation into operational accountability.

The Autonomous Enterprise Is SAP’s North Star: SAP’s central narrative at Sapphire is the autonomous enterprise. Steinhäuser describes a future where AI agents and human workers collaborate, with AI taking responsibility for repetitive, process-heavy, and data-intensive tasks while employees focus on higher-value decision-making. This is more than a product launch — it is SAP’s strategic framework for the next phase of enterprise software. The company references hundreds of AI agents and dozens of assistants spanning functional domains. Importantly, SAP is positioning these capabilities as practical rather than speculative.

Ecosystem Scale Will Determine Execution: SAP clearly sees its partner ecosystem as critical to AI transformation at scale. Steinhäuser points to thousands of ecosystem participants at Sapphire and outlines investments designed to accelerate migration, implementation, and AI activation. This reflects enterprise reality: large organizations rarely transform through software vendors alone. Systems integrators, consulting firms, implementation specialists, and migration partners often determine whether transformation succeeds.

The Big Quote: “Building the technology is one thing. Really changing processes, people, and systems to adapt AI, it’s a totally different one."

More from SAP:

Learn more about Sapphire and about Joule Assistants.

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In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I examine why OpenAI bringing frontier models to AWS signals a new era of AI platform pragmatism.

Highlights

00:03 — Hot on the heels of the news that OpenAI and Microsoft have re-explored the terms of their partnership, leading to a much more flexible outcome for OpenAI, the company has introduced an expanded partnership with AWS to bring OpenAI's latest models to Amazon Bedrock.

00:23 — The new solutions currently in preview include the launch of Codex on Amazon Bedrock and Amazon Bedrock managed agents powered by OpenAI. Now AWS customers will be able to leverage the latest OpenAI models through their existing Amazon Bedrock APIs and controls.

00:46 — Customers will be able to utilize OpenAI's coding agents to scale software development on Bedrock. And with Amazon Bedrock managed agents powered by OpenAI, teams can build and deploy production-ready OpenAI-powered agents on AWS, benefiting from the global infrastructure and security AWS provides.

01:06 — At the heart of this expanded partnership, particularly in terms of messaging from AWS, is the delivery of frontier AI to the infrastructure millions of organizations already trust, and this is one of the cornerstones we're seeing now in the AI Revolution in terms of partnerships.

01:39 — Companies are focusing on their strengths, which is crucial for the parts of the business that customers rely on and that really define them in the eyes of their users. Ultimately, it's the customers who will benefit from these collaborations moving forward.

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