From the cloud to generative AI, there is an ever-growing list of new technologies in the age of digital intelligence. But it's also a time of inflation, geopolitical tensions, supply chain disruptions, and countless other challenges. How can businesses make sense of all these technologies while just trying to survive during these difficult times?
That's where Claudio Muruzabal, Chief Business Officer at SAP SE, steps in.
Muruzabal is responsible for supporting SAP's Customer Advisory Solutions area and Customer Success Management and Engagement teams. For over eight years, he has played a key role in not only understanding the increasingly complex technology landscape, but also understanding how companies actually use the technology at their disposal. He supports teams leveraging SAP solutions to move his SAP customers closer to their goals. This starts with advising customers through honest conversations about how they can apply the intelligent features currently included in many of his SAP solutions, such as generative AI.
I spoke with Muruzabal to learn more about his role, how SAP customers are succeeding with intelligent technology, and the growing influence of customer success management at SAP.
Q: AI is all the rage today, so let's start there. What are the biggest opportunities for companies to use AI?
Mursabal: AI opportunities are everywhere. And this goes beyond just automating processes and increasing efficiency, which has been discussed for a long time. At SAP, we are exploring how AI can support relevant business processes to drive innovation and competitiveness. While many companies in the industry are focused on developing AI engines and large-scale language models, we are focused on accelerating business value through generative AI. We can talk all day long about how AI is transforming data analytics, decision support systems, supply chain optimization, predictive maintenance, and human resources. Every day, we discover new opportunities to outperform the competition by combining the power of customer-generated AI with the context of business data and processes.
What are some examples of how SAP customers are using AI and what value have they realized so far?
There's a lot of really interesting things to see about how customers are using the AI capabilities included in SAP solutions. Employees everywhere, across industries, are using natural language to instantly get the data insights they need with SAP Analytics Cloud solutions. She loves that busy recruiters can use her SAP SuccessFactors solution to leverage generative AI to quickly create compelling job descriptions and interview questions. Joule, our AI assistant and co-pilot, helps end users get the right answers on how to get the most out of their cloud solutions. Joule is already integrated across our portfolio (generally available in SAP SuccessFactors HCM, SAP Start, and SAP S/4HANA Cloud), and we are all excited about the opportunities for our customers.
All industries can benefit from this unique value, including professional soccer clubs FC Bayern Munich and Hertha BSC, who are using AI-powered scouting prototypes to discover and develop the next generation of star athletes.
AI can solve many problems, but what about the underlying foundational technology stack that companies currently have? What conversations are you having with companies about investing in technology?
Early on in your customer conversations, it's important to understand how your company can set up a core foundational enterprise technology platform running on the cloud. This is important for establishing an innovation journey that includes SAP Business AI. Going back to basics, many of our customers have made numerous changes on top of their core ERP. Moving to a clean core model is critical to building a true cloud operating model, which is essential to embracing innovation, including AI. This means that changes to the ERP functionality provided by SAP are built outside of the core using extension solutions. This is not just a technical topic. While Clean Core helps the platform operate cost-effectively, its real contribution is in bringing flexibility and adaptability to businesses, transforming cloud operating models into unique “innovation-as-a-service” platforms.
What makes SAP's value proposition unique and outstanding for customers?
SAP has the unique value of being the world leader in best-of-breed suite solutions, built on more than 50 years of industry knowledge and ERP technology leadership. In addition to this, our cutting-edge 'best of' solutions such as HCM, Customer Experience, Intelligent Spending and Business Networks can provide the best functionality and the right integration to the core. Only SAP can offer this value proposition. This, combined with the cloud operating model widely adopted by RISE with SAP customers, provides exponential value for innovation as a service proposition.
How can customers get the most out of their investment? What support is there to help them transform and innovate?
Customer success management is essential in the cloud. This is an end-to-end engagement with our customers, from advisory to sales execution, onboarding, adoption, and usage. We provide tools, assets, and content to help accelerate adoption and usage to maximize the value of your solution from first use to full use and future use. With SAP Preferred Success services, you can further accelerate your time to value. To support this movement, we have built-in detailed telemetry into our cloud solutions, so you and our customer success management leaders can better understand how your solutions are being used. With a better understanding, you will be able to identify opportunities to increase usage.
Where do advisory services fit into the customer journey?
Customer advisory services may be the most important part of your customer interactions. A successful project begins with the best understanding of your industry and business, and defining the right business case. With this in mind, our customer advisory team helps enterprises build the right technology solutions that can support their architecture. This is the first step in the right direction of building a cloud operating model.
