The Gutenberg Moment

Savoir-vivre—the art of enjoying life! The French seem to have mastered this with information technology. Viva Technology, an annual IT and AI festival in Paris, attracts 180,000 visitors. AI is revolutionizing IT. Even former SAP CEO and current Siemens Supervisory Board Chairman, Jim Hagemann Snabe, spoke enthusiastically about AI's potential in Paris. VivaTech celebrated AI ideas and brought together the global IT community. Many African countries had a strong presence, and there was admirable gender parity—a completely new picture for a visitor from the German-speaking SAP community. At a DSAG Annual Congress, over 80 percent of the managers, SAP experts, and computer scientists are male. In Paris, it was an experimental field and a Gutenberg moment. Using AI is comparable to the invention of the printing press. The topic is not optimization, but revolution. Can SAP keep up?

At VivaTech, the upcoming AI revolution was equated with a Gutenberg moment. AI is an event that represents a turning point. Gutenberg's printing press was not an optimization of an existing process or technology; it was a social revolution in knowledge and education. With the printing press, knowledge could be disseminated in a new way. It democratized knowledge formerly held only by rulers. Gutenberg revolutionized news, information, and education systems. 

The phrase "knowledge is power" was coined by Francis Bacon, an English philosopher who lived in the 16th and 17th centuries. With the advent of the printing press, knowledge became widely accessible. From that point on, knowledge was no longer an instrument of power; it could emancipate itself. AI in the form of large language models (LLMs) will trigger a similar democratization, a trend that was evident at Viva Technology in Paris. However, the question of whether AI systems will ultimately promote or prevent fake news was barely discussed in Paris. The enthusiasm was impressive. Whether the systems will regulate themselves remains an open question.

SAP has experimented with classic algorithms from the fields of optimization, simulation, statistics, and AI for many years. They have developed many IT tools that contribute to the optimization of business processes. However, there is no holistic approach that will trigger a Gutenberg moment. At SAP, AI is used to optimize existing processes. This results in new requirements and ideas, meaning that AI at SAP continues to evolve. SAP's AI is sustainable because it creates something new from existing resources. Despite the collaboration with Nvidia, a revolutionary momentum cannot be observed.

What was experienced at VivaTech in Paris was not sustainable because it did not build on the evolutionary development of previous years. It was revolutionary because it disregarded traditional IT. It wasn't about optimization, but innovation. The Gutenberg moment has been missing at SAP for many years.