SAP SECFO discusses challenges in applying AI to complex business processes, which may slow near-term AI revenue growth but positions SAP for long-term value.

SAP's finance chief said on Thursday that artificial intelligence in enterprise software must move beyond chatbots and coding tools into more complex business processes, where clean data, reliability and cost control matter more than access to the most powerful model. CFO Dominik Asam told reporters after SAP's second-quarter results that the lion's share of AI token consumption today was spent in low-hanging fruits like coding assistants and chatbots, where AI's hallucinations matter less because the output carries limited risk if it fails. But applying AI to finance, supply chain or other core business processes is harder because errors carry over multiple steps, increasing risk against compliance standards. Asam said the high-hanging fruit of AI is less about applying a generic plug-and-play large language model across a company than about building systems around specific businesses, which requires companies to make their own data usable and governed. He added that the most advanced model is not always the right one, and in practice companies will use the cheapest reliable tool that can deliver the required outcome safely.
SAP SECFO discusses challenges in applying AI to complex business processes, which may slow near-term AI revenue growth but positions SAP for long-term value.