SAP: Bringing the ‘Operating System’ of a Company into the AI Era with CTO Philipp Herzig

Hey, listeners. Welcome back to No Pires. Today, I'm here with Filip Herdzik, the CTO of SAP, the enterprise juggernaut. We talk about their AI strategy, why SAP has endured and thrived through several technology transitions, why entrepreneurs are underestimating the challenges of scale, why AI is a business model transition, not just a technology transition, why he thinks that LMs are not enough for predictive analytics and even about the traveling salesman problem in the real world and the Strait Of Hermos. Welcome, Philip. Philip, thanks so much for being with us. Yeah. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you. Everybody knows the name SAP, but I do think that for, lots of engineers or people who aren't close to the system in a larger enterprise, they don't really know, like, the breadth and function of the platform. Like, can you just describe, what you guys do for customers? Oh, absolutely. I mean, look, SAP is the market leader, right, in enterprise of software applications and platforms. Right? I have some 400,000 enterprise customers. And usually, I just running their finance, HR, and supply chain, manufacturing, execution, logistics, warehouse management, and then, of course, everything on the customer side, sales, services, commerce, procurement, you name it. Right? End to end. Right? Like SAP, we always say we have the broadest portfolio in terms of, end to end, running the business end to end. This is where SAP started with. Right? Giving real time insight. And, usually, I really describe this as it's not just software in itself. It's kind of the operating system, right, of a company, essentially, in order to, get, you know, from from everything from order to cash or source to pay, right, end to end managed for companies around the and around the entire globe. Mhmm. I definitely wanna talk about AI, LLMs, some of those stuff that you guys are doing internally and then around, predictive models as well. But just because the the macro backdrop is on everyone's mind, both from a technology and an economic perspective Oh, sure. I wanna talk about, like, SAP's position in the market a little bit. SAP has has stood the test of time through multiple technology and market cycles. I, as a early stage venture capitalist, I'm I'm kind of on the other side of this where the narrative is like, well, when you have Internet and cloud and mobile and AI and social, like, you have, an opportunity for new players. What what do you like, SAP, you know, even today is the, I believe the largest, like, market cap enterprise software vendor versus sort of the the last generation of the new guard, like the sales forces of the world. How has that happened? Like, how did you how did you do it, and what does make what makes it so durable? Well, what makes it so durable, right, at the end of the day I mean, if you think about this and …