SAP disaster—AI and CRM

Missing out

The German magazine Manager Magazin ran the headline "Is SAP Missing Out on the Next Opportunity for the Future?” Anyone familiar with SAP's history over the past 50 years knows that SAP has always lagged behind in terms of IT innovation. Here is the link to the aforementioned article in German.

Only once was SAP a true IT pioneer: when SAP’s founders realized that mainframes were a dying computer category, they turned to minicomputers such as IBM AS/400 and servers from DEC, later from HP. This evolved into the legendary three-tier client/server model for SAP R/3, which was and remains a tremendous success. The successor products were just as sought after: R/3 Enterprise and ERP/ECC 6.0.

At the time of SAP R/3, many analysts and journalists scoffed at the notion that SAP would sleep through the Internet revolution. This was, unfortunately, not the case. Though SAP seemed to be wide awake due to its successes with R/3 and was by no means asleep, the ERP company failed to leave its own comfort zone. While the Internet storm was breaking, SAP was content with lucrative R/3 license sales. SAP executives failed to think out of the box. The Internet was beyond SAP's horizon and did not interest anyone at SAP. Even today, this deficit remains uncorrected, even neglected. The careless handling of IoT, CRM, ML and AI is clear proof.

AI, ML and ChatGPT

The upcoming AI revolution will also affect and change B2B applications. While SAP CEO Christian Klein is still busy optimizing individual applications through AI, elsewhere entire business processes are being transformed. The AI revolution is not an optimizational machine, as CEO Klein believes, but rather a disruptive technology that creates new organizational structures and processes.

Having scoured the entirety of business literature available online, ChatGPT will make innovative end-to-end process suggestions to SAP's customers, with no regard for SAP's own offering. See also Handelsblatt online for more information (in German).

The death of C/4 Hana

Originally, ex-SAP CEO Bill McDermott wanted C/4 to overtake rival Salesforce, however things turned out quite differently. C/4 was never completed and now Qualtrics has been sold. SAP's customers search in vain for the customer experience function in SAP's catalogue. SAP had good ideas and approaches for its own CRM, but after CEO Christian Klein set his focus on ERP and SCM, there were ultimately too few resources for a C/4 Hana success. SAP has not answered what will happen in the future with the customizing of C/4 that has already begun. The company's own customer journey remains a journey into the unknown.