The future of SAP inno­va­tion recent­ly came into focus at ASUG Tech Con­nect, the North Amer­i­can stop on the SAP TechEd tour.

Held Nov. 12 – 14 in West Palm Beach, Flori­da, this sec­ond edi­tion of ASUG’s des­ti­na­tion event for the SAP prac­ti­tion­er com­mu­ni­ty, which debuted last year in New Orleans, drew more than 1,200 SAP pro­fes­sion­als from over 31 coun­tries for three days of hands-on access to the lat­est and great­est from SAP and its part­ner community.

Par­tic­i­pat­ing in deep dives, inno­va­tion spot­lights, hands-on labs, expert 1:1 appoint­ments, and oth­er ses­sion for­mats designed to help them bring out the best in their busi­ness­es, atten­dees dove deep into inte­gra­tion, data and ana­lyt­ics, appli­ca­tion devel­op­ment and automa­tion, sys­tem mod­ern­iza­tion and arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, archi­tect­ing busi­ness trans­for­ma­tion, sys­tem oper­a­tion and admin­is­tra­tion, and SAP tech­nol­o­gy fundamentals.

Emceed by Kel­ly Dowl­ing, Head of Con­tent Strat­e­gy at ASUG, all three days of ASUG Tech Con­nect fea­tured morn­ing keynote ses­sions designed to cap­ture com­mon themes present in the hun­dreds of ses­sions avail­able to atten­dees, fea­tur­ing insights and announce­ments from indus­try pro­fes­sion­als and promi­nent SAP leaders. 

Unlock­ing the Future of SAP Innovation

Pro­vid­ing in-per­son inter­ac­tions and hands-on learn­ing to a degree unprece­dent­ed for the North Amer­i­can SAP com­mu­ni­ty, ASUG Tech Con­nect embod­ied ASUG’s long-stand­ing com­mit­ment to help its mem­bers learn, con­nect, and grow in recog­ni­tion of ​“the col­lec­tive pas­sion and com­mit­ment we all share glob­al­ly,” said ASUG CEO & Chief Com­mu­ni­ty Cham­pi­on Geoff Scott dur­ing his open­ing keynote address. 

Reflect­ing on chal­lenges faced by today’s SAP prac­ti­tion­ers — from tal­ent and skills short­ages to sup­ply chain dis­rup­tion, eco­nom­ic uncer­tain­ty, polit­i­cal tur­moil, and geopo­lit­i­cal insta­bil­i­ty — Scott empha­sized that the sig­na­ture strength of a uni­fied SAP com­mu­ni­ty is its abil­i­ty to help its mem­bers over­come such obstacles. 

“ASUG is your com­mu­ni­ty of fel­low SAP pro­fes­sion­als who are look­ing to con­nect, learn, and grow,” he told atten­dees. ​“This — today, and these next three days, and this year — is exact­ly where you belong. Hav­ing a sense of com­mu­ni­ty and belong­ing is more impor­tant than ever. It is your calm in the mid­dle of the storm.” 

Scott was joined on stage by Patrick Dineen, Senior Vice Pres­i­dent, Finance Sys­tems Trans­for­ma­tion at NBCU­ni­ver­sal (NBCU), whose expe­ri­ence over­see­ing trans­for­ma­tion projects at multi­na­tion­al firms across lead­er­ship posi­tions on both busi­ness and IT sides of the busi­ness has giv­en him a unique van­tage point from which to iden­ti­fy key prin­ci­ples for dri­ving busi­ness val­ue.

“It starts with pur­pose,” Dineen said. While ensur­ing sys­tems worked effi­cient­ly and were pro­duc­ing data peo­ple could trust was a crit­i­cal part of his work as a tech­nol­o­gy leader, instill­ing pur­pose across an orga­ni­za­tion turned out to be equal­ly impor­tant in ensur­ing busi­ness stake­hold­ers actu­al­ly uti­lized those systems. 

One of Dineen’s guid­ing influ­ences in over­see­ing change man­age­ment is the late Amer­i­can author William Bridges, who wrote about ​“four Ps” of man­ag­ing change:

• Pur­pose: ​“Why you’re doing it. Pur­pose can­not be clean core. Pur­pose can­not be that you’re try­ing to get past an issue with soft­ware main­te­nance. Those are not moti­vat­ing pur­pos­es. Pur­pos­es are about mak­ing you feel like a winner.”
• Pic­ture: ​“What does it look like?’ What does a great day at work look like after S/4 has been implemented?”
• Plan: ​“What is the day-in, day-out transition?”
• Part: ​“Each one of your con­stituents, your busi­ness col­leagues that are going to use these new sys­tems that you’re going to put in place, they need to know exact­ly what their part in all of this is: shut­ting down the old, start­ing up the new, and then mak­ing the tran­si­tion from one to the other.”

Lead­ing SAP S/4HANA trans­for­ma­tion at NBCU­ni­ver­sal, Dineen head­ed an inter­nal cam­paign to impart the mes­sage that ​“this is what win­ners do,” explain­ing that ​“every­one wants to win, and win­ning is worth the sac­ri­fice of a dif­fi­cult trans­for­ma­tion,” such as a dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion. ​“Win­ning is an impor­tant way of fram­ing what SAP S/4HANA and dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion deliv­er,” Dineen said. 

Cit­ing SAP research, he added that ​“com­pa­nies that show a high­er lev­el of dig­i­tal matu­ri­ty, that have tak­en the step to be dig­i­tal­ly trans­formed, out­per­form their peers… by sev­en to eight per­cent when it comes to the return on their cash invest­ments. That’s incred­i­ble. That’s the story.” 

Even so, Dineen added: ​“It’s not about the tech­nol­o­gy. It’s about change man­age­ment, and mak­ing the shift from tech­nol­o­gy leader to finance leader gave me an oppor­tu­ni­ty to real­ly see that in clear relief. The first thing I had to learn is you have to trust that your tech­nol­o­gy teams are going to do the right thing, and it’s going to make the soft­ware work. What you real­ly have to work on is hearts and minds.” 

To that end, Dineen encour­aged atten­dees to attend hands-on learn­ing labs and as many prod­uct demos as pos­si­ble while at ASUG Tech Connect. 

“What this group real­ly can’t under­es­ti­mate is the pow­er of great demon­stra­tion,” he said. ​“Your busi­ness col­leagues can’t see what you can see. You have a unique oppor­tu­ni­ty here, over the next cou­ple of days, to bring the tech exchange back to your col­leagues: ​‘Why are you going through this trans­for­ma­tion? Why are you going through this pain?’ ​‘Because this soft­ware rocks, and here’s what it can do for you.’” 

Inside SAP’s ​‘Suite-First’ Men­tal­i­ty with SAP BTP; Plus SAP TechEd Announcements

Scott was next joined on stage by SAP’s Michael Amel­ing, Exec­u­tive Vice Pres­i­dent and Chief Prod­uct Offi­cer, SAP Busi­ness Tech­nol­o­gy Plat­form (BTP), who detailed the solution’s role in max­i­miz­ing oper­a­tional effi­cien­cy and fos­ter­ing data-dri­ven deci­sion-mak­ing while recap­ping recent announce­ments made at vir­tu­al SAP TechEd in Octo­ber.

Among the top takeaways:

• SAP Build is SAP’s cen­tral suite of tools for exten­sion devel­op­ment, with SAP Build Exten­si­bil­i­ty Wiz­ard (allow­ing cus­tomers to cre­ate on-stack and side-by-side exten­sions in SAP S/4HANA in an embed­ded expe­ri­ence) and the addi­tion of ABAP envi­ron­ments to the SAP Build suite both pow­er­ing full-stack appli­ca­tion devel­op­ment and fur­ther­ing SAP’s declared inten­tion to democ­ra­tize access to devel­op­er capabilities.
• With its announce­ment of a new embed­ded data lake for SAP Data­s­phere, avail­able by year’s end, SAP is expand­ing its pre­vi­ous­ly avail­able data lake ser­vice (via SAP HANA Cloud, data lake), enabling enter­pris­es to store large amounts of data while retain­ing valu­able busi­ness context.
• In intro­duc­ing col­lab­o­ra­tive mul­ti-agent sys­tems to Joule, SAP aims to enhance the solu­tion and expand its capa­bil­i­ties to sup­port 80% of SAP’s most-used busi­ness tasks by year’s end. These spe­cial­ized AI agents will tack­le spe­cif­ic tasks and com­mu­ni­cate with one anoth­er on com­plex work­flows, work­ing both autonomous­ly and col­lab­o­ra­tive­ly to break silos across organizations.
• A knowl­edge graph engine for SAP HANA Cloud allows users uncov­er com­plex and mean­ing­ful rela­tion­ships between data points that would not be oth­er­wise dis­cov­er­able with tra­di­tion­al data mod­el­ing tools.
• Joule will be avail­able to all cus­tomers on SAP S/4HANA Cloud, pub­lic edi­tion, by year’s end; the dig­i­tal copi­lot will also be avail­able in SAP HANA Cloud, SAP LeanIX, SAP Sales Cloud, and SAP Sig­navio, with avail­abil­i­ty in SAP Con­cur and SAP Ser­vice Cloud planned for ear­ly 2025.
• SAP Ana­lyt­ics Cloud com­pass allows non-tech­ni­cal users to mod­el com­plex risk sce­nar­ios, while a Watch­list func­tion­al­i­ty allows them to ben­e­fit from per­son­al­ized KPIs.
• New inte­gra­tion adapters let SAP users opti­mize cus­tom scripts with AI-gen­er­at­ed recommendations.

For more insights into SAP TechEd announce­ments, read ASUG’s full cov­er­age here, as well as our inter­views with Dr. Alexan­der Rother, Head of ABAP Prod­uct Man­age­ment at SAP, and Dr. Wal­ter Sun, Glob­al Head of AI at SAP.

Amel­ing also pro­vid­ed an overview of SAP BTP for appli­ca­tion devel­op­ment, automa­tion, inte­gra­tion, data and ana­lyt­ics, and Busi­ness AI, cit­ing more than 2,800 part­ners and 27,000 glob­al live cus­tomers run­ning SAP BTP (includ­ing more than 7,000 in the Amer­i­c­as) as evi­dence of the platform’s cen­tral­i­ty to SAP innovation.

Orla Cullen, Solu­tion Man­ag­er for Plan­ning and Ana­lyt­ics at SAP, took the stage to demon­strate how a user would com­plete a task in SAP. In her sce­nario, which involved coor­di­nat­ing a project by assem­bling a glob­al team then bring­ing them togeth­er in per­son, Cullen gained vis­i­bil­i­ty of the project in SAP Start, iden­ti­fied cor­rect employ­ees to assign in SAP Suc­cess­Fac­tors, assessed bud­get and expens­es relat­ed to their trav­el and lodg­ing in SAP Ana­lyt­ics Cloud, asked Joule to antic­i­pate pend­ing expens­es and to deter­mine there was suf­fi­cient bud­get remain­ing to cov­er the trav­el costs, then pro­ceed­ed to SAP Con­cur, where Joule had already sup­plied rel­e­vant con­text from those pre­vi­ous tasks to sug­gest the best flight options. 

“Apply­ing a suite-first per­spec­tive means that it’s even more impor­tant to deliv­er a great user expe­ri­ence,” Amel­ing said. ​“We want the end-users of our prod­ucts to nav­i­gate seam­less­ly through their work­day and be more productive.”

For more from Amel­ing, read his SAP com­mu­ni­ty blog post, shar­ing rel­e­vant links and demos from his ASUG Tech Con­nect keynote.

Unlock­ing the Future: How Gen­er­a­tive AI is Trans­form­ing Industries

To assess the trans­for­ma­tive poten­tial of gen­er­a­tive AI across indus­tries, ASUG Direc­tor of Research Maris­sa Gilbert con­vened a day-two keynote pan­el of indus­try lead­ers, includ­ing Jared Coyle, Chief AI Offi­cer at SAP North Amer­i­ca; Soulat Khan, World­wide Tech­ni­cal Alliance Lead for SAP at AWS; and Geoff Scott, ASUG CEO & Chief Com­mu­ni­ty Champion.

The dis­cus­sion, record­ed live as a forth­com­ing spe­cial episode of the ASUG Talks pod­cast, allowed Gilbert to shed new light on AI trends in the ASUG com­mu­ni­ty by shar­ing exclu­sive research — the first of its kind — that illu­mi­nat­ed how AI is shap­ing the SAP ecosys­tem and reflect­ed orga­ni­za­tion­al readi­ness to embrace this emerg­ing field.

Eval­u­at­ing the views of ASUG mem­bers on ben­e­fits of enter­prise AI through ASUG research, Gilbert revealed that 87% of those sur­veyed had stat­ed that AI ben­e­fits will rev­o­lu­tion­ize indus­tries, with 48% rec­og­niz­ing that there will be benefits.

Stat­ing that, in his view, ​“it’s impos­si­ble to be a con­trar­i­an” in the face of such wide­spread sup­port for AI, Scott not­ed that ​“prepar­ing our datasets to be AI-enabled” is an urgent oppor­tu­ni­ty across the SAP ecosys­tem. ​“The chal­lenge that I see with AI is, I think it will deliv­er amaz­ing results, but it neces­si­tates that we have data avail­able to dri­ve those results.” he said. 

“To the extent that we have old data sit­ting in our SAP land­scapes, we haven’t nec­es­sar­i­ly kept up with archiv­ing, [and] we haven’t real­ly thought about the com­plex­i­ties of mas­ter data man­age­ment, we might be set­ting our­selves up for a dataset that isn’t quite ready for prime time,” Scott added. ​“Now, maybe AI will be able to engi­neer around that, but I think there is a huge oppor­tu­ni­ty for all of us to think about the promise of SAP as the offi­cial source of truth inside an organization.” 

Coyle not­ed that, in dig­i­tiz­ing busi­ness process data by enter­ing it into SAP and non-SAP sys­tems across the past few decades, pro­fes­sion­als in all indus­tries have already been ​“estab­lish­ing that struc­tured data that can pro­vide the con­text for your busi­ness and pro­vide val­ue,” thus prepar­ing their com­pa­nies for AI to lever­age that data and dri­ve busi­ness value.

Khan added that the way cus­tomers see the val­ue of AI is fast-evolv­ing as well. Dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, ​“Mod­er­na need­ed a way to quick­ly scale clin­i­cal tri­als and devel­op­ment of vac­cines, and they were able to do that with a high­ly scal­able and secure ser­vice, with Ama­zon Web Ser­vices, and devel­op a vac­cine with­in 100 days,” he explained. Doing so with AWS as its cloud ser­vices provider involved lever­ag­ing on-demand com­put­er pow­er and machine learn­ing to accel­er­ate dis­cov­ery and devel­op­ment, as well as build­ing flex­i­ble capac­i­ty and real-time ana­lyt­ics into Moderna’s cloud-native man­u­fac­tur­ing facility.

As AI sweeps the SAP land­scape, ASUG research found that sev­en per­cent of mem­bers report using AI in many areas, while 25% are using AI in some areas and 25% are doing pilot projects; 20% are con­sid­er­ing a pilot AI project, while 10% are not involved in any­thing relat­ed to AI. 

Coyle not­ed these results reflect the lin­ger­ing ques­tion of ​“how orga­ni­za­tions can deploy AI both effec­tive­ly and mean­ing­ful­ly,” ask­ing atten­dees to con­sid­er prac­ti­cal appli­ca­tions to dri­ve bot­tom-line improve­ments, from reduc­ing user time in sys­tems with in-sys­tem copi­lots like Joule to improv­ing effi­cien­cy or tar­get inven­to­ry lev­els with AI algo­rith­mic capabilities. 

Khan encour­aged mem­bers explor­ing AI to ​“geek out and try it out,” to deter­mine how they can acti­vate ser­vices and explore ref­er­ence archi­tec­ture with­in their enter­pris­es — as well as those AWS has pub­lished with SAP, avail­able via SAP Dis­cov­ery Center. 

“When you’re build­ing out these ser­vices and these exper­i­ments, secu­ri­ty is job zero,” he added. ​“If you find some­thing real­ly unique that’s work­ing for your orga­ni­za­tion, you’ve got to work in the con­text of your secu­ri­ty team. You’ve got to help them under­stand what it means for your inter­ac­tion with your data; they’ve got to learn as well how you’re inter­act­ing with those mod­els and what that looks like in production.”

For more insights from this keynote pan­el on AI in the enter­prise, keep an eye out for next week’s ASUG First Five newslet­ter for ear­ly access to the full ASUG Talks live tap­ing of this insight­ful dialogue.

Con­nect­ing the Ecosys­tem: Unit­ing Cus­tomers, Part­ners, and SAP through AI and Strate­gic Collaboration

The val­ue of a cus­tomer-cen­tric SAP ecosys­tem pow­ered by dynam­ic part­ner­ships took cen­ter stage on ASUG Tech Connect’s third and final day, as lead­ers from SAP, Kyn­dryl, and Microsoft reflect­ed on the vital roles of SAP cus­tomers and part­ners in dri­ving innovation.

“Cus­tomer feed­back is a true north star for us at SAP,” said Wal­ter Sun, Glob­al Head of AI at SAP, in con­ver­sa­tion with emcee Kel­ly Dowl­ing, ASUG’s Direc­tor of Con­tent Strat­e­gy. ​“It guides us to ensure that our solu­tions are not only inno­v­a­tive but also valu­able to our cus­tomers. With a fast-mov­ing AI envi­ron­ment, it’s impor­tant to under­stand where our cus­tomers are in their journey.”

While ASUG is a val­ued part­ner to SAP year-round in pro­vid­ing direct, unfil­tered feed­back from its mem­bers to inform SAP prod­uct strat­e­gy and roadmap, Sun not­ed that peer-learn­ing and knowl­edge-shar­ing spaces such as ASUG Tech Con­nect are ​“the best way to learn” what’s on the mind of SAP cus­tomers, encour­ag­ing all atten­dees to take every future oppor­tu­ni­ty to attend sim­i­lar in-per­son events.

Sun rec­om­mend­ed that SAP users take a ​“crawl, walk, run” approach to imple­ment­ing gen­er­a­tive AI solu­tions, deter­min­ing which busi­ness process­es can be auto­mat­ed most effec­tive­ly and focus­ing on high-pri­or­i­ty areas of their businesses.

Read our recent inter­view with Wal­ter Sun.

Exper­i­ment­ing with enter­prise chat func­tion­al­i­ty and see­ing what types of respons­es large lan­guage mod­els (LLMS) gen­er­ate via SAP AI Core and the company’s Gen­er­a­tive AI hub are rel­a­tive­ly easy ways to ini­ti­ate AI imple­men­ta­tion at work. Iden­ti­fy­ing sce­nar­ios with high human inter­ac­tiv­i­ty that could ben­e­fit from gen­er­a­tive AI can then give employ­ees more con­fi­dence in under­stand­ing how the tech­nol­o­gy works while automat­ing more repet­i­tive tasks, he said. 

Sun spoke of his excite­ment for col­lab­o­ra­tive AI agents, as well as the AI Foun­da­tion on SAP BTP, where SAP is build­ing out its orches­tra­tion lay­er in gen­er­a­tive AI to sim­pli­fy the work of devel­op­ers build­ing AI applications. 

At SAP Sap­phire, it was announced that Joule will be inte­grat­ed with Microsoft Copi­lot to cre­ate a uni­fied work expe­ri­ence for busi­ness users. SAP’s part­ner­ship with Microsoft, is about ​“com­bin­ing our busi­ness and tech­ni­cal exper­tise,” said Sun, who pre­vi­ous­ly held lead­er­ship posi­tions at Microsoft. 

“SAP brings deep busi­ness insights, and Microsoft’s cloud and AI capa­bil­i­ties allow us to cre­ate pow­er­ful tools for our cus­tomers,” he said. ​“For exam­ple, both BTP and RISE with SAP are pow­ered by Microsoft dat­a­cen­ters around the world using Azure. With respect to AI as well, we have a very deep partnership.”

Nathan Weaver, Senior Direc­tor of SAP Busi­ness Unit at Microsoft, detailed this 30-year part­ner­ship fur­ther, along­side Robert Her­nan­dez, Prin­ci­pal PM Man­ag­er at Microsoft, who joined Weaver on stage to dis­cuss AI-dri­ven tech­nolo­gies that can ben­e­fit SAP customers. 

Read a recent guest per­spec­tive authored by Nathan Weaver on har­ness­ing the pow­er of AI with SAP and Microsoft.

“Every day, over 200,000 Microsoft employ­ees touch an SAP sys­tem,” said Her­nan­dez. ​“I believe the sta­tis­tic is over 5 bil­lion trans­ac­tions take place every year on SAP for our inter­nal sys­tems at Microsoft. SAP is at the core of every busi­ness process that Microsoft runs.”

Com­ple­ment­ing this, uti­liz­ing Microsoft Azure’s cloud infra­struc­ture to host the SAP busi­ness suite offered through its RISE pro­gram (com­mon­ly referred to as RISE on Azure) is one of the most com­mon ways SAP cus­tomers pro­vi­sion the nec­es­sary vir­tu­al machines to con­fig­ure a RISE envi­ron­ment. ​“We have the most VMs, in the most places, to ful­fill your needs for run­ning your SAP RISE sys­tems on Azure,” Her­nan­dez said.

Else­where, Microsoft’s secu­ri­ty assets extend to SAP solu­tions, and the com­pa­ny has worked dili­gent­ly to inte­grate its flag­ship solu­tions with SAP; Microsoft is next ​“almost dou­bling” its SAP BTP foot­print to ensure that SAP BTP ser­vices are avail­able in more pub­lic Microsoft Azure regions, ​“to make sure that you have all the ser­vice capa­bil­i­ties you need in the loca­tions that you need to be able to run your BTP ser­vices on Azure,” Her­nan­dez said.

Weaver detailed Microsoft Copi­lot as ​“our dig­i­tal assis­tant across the entire Microsoft stack,” as well as one of the company’s biggest growth sto­ries across the past years. Con­nect­ing Joule and Microsoft Copi­lot togeth­er, he went on to explain, is an ongo­ing process with major impli­ca­tions for data gath­er­ing and searchability:

“This is not some­thing that just mag­i­cal­ly hap­pens. Microsoft isn’t actu­al­ly open­ing up a lot of the API calls here. This is an engi­neer­ing-lev­el con­ver­sa­tion that’s hap­pen­ing to hook these things togeth­er. This is not just pass­ing infer­ence. This is actu­al­ly very tight. Why do we do this? The rea­son that we’re doing this is because we don’t want sin­gle con­nec­tions that have to be maintained.” 

Kyn­dryl pro­vides ​“mis­sion-crit­i­cal” ser­vices to some of the world’s most com­plex busi­ness­es, from all five of the top auto­mo­tive busi­ness­es to five of the 10 largest air­lines. Chuck Kich­ler, VP, Dis­tin­guished Engi­neer at Kyn­dryl, which is both an SAP part­ner and cus­tomer, took the stage to reflect on Kyndryl’s trans­for­ma­tion jour­ney with SAP and Microsoft, which came after Kyn­dryl was spun out from IBM. 

“Dur­ing that peri­od, we had to spin out all of our busi­ness sys­tems, all of them, sep­a­rat­ing from IBM and becom­ing a new com­pa­ny, and we had to do that while run­ning your com­pa­nies’ busi­ness­es,” Kich­ler said. ​“It was not a small task.” 

Kyn­dryl is cur­rent­ly run­ning SAP S/4HANA on Azure, with plans to move to RISE next year; to get to this point, automa­tion was essen­tial, Kich­ler added. 1,800 sys­tems were dri­ven down to 360, and Kyn­dryl con­tin­ues to reduce, com­bine, and migrate to more effi­cient sys­tems as it pre­pares for its RISE journey. 

Kyn­dryl recent­ly shared its trans­for­ma­tion jour­ney with ASUG in an exclu­sive case study; read more here.

Exec­u­tive Lead­ers Reflect on Col­lab­o­ra­tion to Fos­ter Inno­va­tion in SAP Community

As Sun, Weaver, Her­nan­dez, and Kich­ler recon­vened on stage for a dis­cus­sion, it soon became clear that none of the four could be described sim­ply as part­ners, solu­tion providers, or cus­tomers. Instead, these lead­ers pow­er the SAP com­mu­ni­ty for­ward from the unique per­spec­tive of work­ing togeth­er in mul­ti­ple capacities. 

SAP uti­lizes Microsoft 365 appli­ca­tions inter­nal­ly; SAP relies on Kyndryl’s mod­ern­iza­tion ser­vices while count­ing the man­aged ser­vices provider as a major cus­tomer. Kyn­dryl lever­ages Microsoft’s AI-pow­ered ana­lyt­ics to enhance its Kyn­dryl Bridge open inte­gra­tion plat­form; that stan­dard envi­ron­ment runs on Azure. Weaver describes Microsoft’s strong rela­tion­ships with Kyn­dryl and SAP as ​“sym­bi­ot­ic rela­tion­ships that ebb and flow through the years,” enhanc­ing cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion as they strengthen. 

Reflect­ing on the rise of AI, Weaver not­ed that Moore’s Law — named after Gor­don Moore, co-founder of Intel — observes that the num­ber of tran­sis­tors on a com­put­er chip dou­bles every two years, where­as a more recent­ly observed ​“scal­ing law” observes that com­put­ing pow­er, par­tic­u­lar­ly for train­ing LLMs, is dou­bling every six months. 

How can ASUG mem­bers posi­tion them­selves best to take advan­tage of the explo­sion? Kich­ler advised orga­ni­za­tions to host ​“hackathons” and engage employ­ees’ cre­ativ­i­ty and imag­i­na­tion. At Kyn­dryl, 40 teams came up with ideas, with nine co-win­ners includ­ing holis­tic advi­so­ry jour­neys, intel­li­gent migra­tion assis­tants, and deal insights. ​“A hackathon is a great way to throw open the doors, shed some light, and get amaz­ing peo­ple to think about what they maybe didn’t think about before,” he said. 

Her­nan­dez sug­gest­ed that those want­i­ng to get start­ed with AI solu­tions install pre-pack­aged, pre-built solu­tions direct­ly on their sys­tems. ​“Start deploy­ing today, so that you can learn its ben­e­fits, then uti­lize those learn­ings and ben­e­fits” to guide your roadmap, he said. 

In clos­ing, each pan­elist shared what they’re most excit­ed about in terms of gen­er­a­tive AI. 

• Sun pre­dict­ed ​“2025 will be the year of enter­prise imple­men­ta­tion,” with users past the stage of grasp­ing LLMs con­cep­tu­al­ly and ask­ing ques­tions focused on secu­ri­ty, com­pli­ance, and privacy.
• Kich­ler shared his excite­ment for look­ing across mas­sive datasets with AI to help clients run their sys­tems more effectively.
• Her­nan­dez pre­dict­ed excite­ment for agen­tic AI will sur­pass the hype for dig­i­tal assis­tants, with a high-lev­el orches­tra­tion lay­er dri­ving inter­ac­tion between var­i­ous spe­cial­ized AI agents and bring­ing their func­tions togeth­er for aggre­gat­ed best solutions.
• Weaver reflect­ed that the next gen­er­a­tion, grow­ing up around gen­er­a­tive AI, will learn how to har­ness these inno­va­tions intu­itive­ly and dri­ve ​“what’s next” beyond anyone’s abil­i­ty to predict.

For more cov­er­age of ASUG Tech Con­nect, sub­scribe to ASUG First Five newslet­ter and stay tuned for more cus­tomer sto­ries, expert inter­views, guest per­spec­tives, and ses­sion recaps in the weeks ahead.