In his role leading the SAP Americas region as co-lead for SAP’s global Customer Success Board area, Jan Gilg is responsible for the totality of the company’s cloud revenue and customer growth.
Additionally maintaining oversight of the global SAP Business Suite organization, which is tasked with providing an end-to-end operating model from customer advisory to sales to customer success management, Gilg is uniquely well-qualified to speak to the overarching strategic objectives of SAP in a time of macroeconomic instability and rapid technological evolution.
At the 2025 SAP Connect conference in Las Vegas, an inaugural event that integrated five separate line-of-business conferences into one unified experience, SAP emphasized its interconnected, AI-driven, suite-first approach to enterprise technology and outlined strategies for embedding AI, data, and applications into its core business suite. It did so through new product announcements—from the introduction of role-aware AI “assistants” in Joule, orchestrating and invoking specific agents across business functions to complete complex tasks, to SAP Business Data Cloud Connect, brokering a zero-copy data pipeline between SAP BDC and partner platforms—but also by reaffirming the practical value of SAP Business Suite’s ambition to unify technology across critical business areas.
Gilg sat down with ASUG to discuss the event’s strategic significance to SAP, the synergy of continuous process improvement within SAP Business Suite, and much more.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
We’re speaking at SAP Connect, where SAP’s strategy has focused on unifying line-of-business solutions—in areas like finance, supply chain, HR, and CX—by integrating data, applications, and AI in a way that emphasizes breaking down traditional silos. What points of interconnection are you seeing attendees find beyond their individual business functions?
First of all, the community within the functional domain is important, and we want to continue to drive that, to ensure that we have a strong CXO community, a strong finance community, a strong procurement community, and so on. But of course—and this came across in the opening keynote from Muhammad and Stefan, when they demonstrated what the end-to-end Business Suite could look like—there are lots of connection points, and our customers realize nothing happens in a silo. There are always dependencies, for everything. Being able to come together and talk about that is something people really enjoy, I believe.
Of course, some areas are naturally closer together — between finance and procurement, for example, or between those areas and supply chain. CX is a little bit further out, though more exists between CX and supply chain; some combinations are more natural than others, but I feel our customers really enjoyed this experience. We organized dinners to mix people together, so they’d have opportunity to talk, and this mirrors what’s going on inside of companies. I see it with SAP as well; we used to be much more siloed, and everybody would look at their own domain, and that has changed quite a bit in the last couple of years, because of the realization that there are always dependencies.
I’m originally from the product side; when you develop a product, you also must make sure marketing’s in place to discuss the product, so you set up campaigns and have a field team that’s able to sell it, that is compensated for doing so. Those business areas need to come together; otherwise, you launch a product into a vacuum. And that has happened as well in the past, admittedly. [laughs] It shows you how important it is to connect the dots; this is the same, in my mind, at any company — because you typically see the results of this in customer experience, which is why it’s important to consider things holistically.
SAP introduced SAP Business Data Cloud in 2025 — and with it introduced this concept of a data-product economy, which intrigues me because of what you’re saying about those noticeable connection points between line-of-business functions, how the need for data to flow between different areas of an organization provides an opportunity to structure data—for example, between finance and procurement—into products that can uniquely strengthen collaboration between those business areas. As SAP has explored conceptualizing data as a product within the SAP Business Data Cloud strategy, what can you say about that strategic shift and how it advances the larger synergy of SAP Business Suite?
That’s really at the center of differentiation, those data products. If you think about how this all started, we had an integrated suite of products, which we already referred to as the business suite. At the beginning of the 2000s, these were all on-premise, proprietary, ABAP-based products. And then, as the cloud wave started, we started acquiring other products, like SuccessFactors and Ariba; suddenly, you have a purchase order in S/4HANA, which involves very different semantics than a purchase order in Ariba, but at the same point in time it needs to be very seamless.
Customers came to us and said, “Well, now I have all this work to do the mapping and the translation myself, and a purchase order here does not equal a purchase order there” — and the same for other data entities. We started to put a lot of effort into data harmonization, to bring together the semantic model across the cloud business suite, so to speak. Eventually, we said, “Okay, now let's expose the semantic model into SAP Business Data Cloud,” because that has been an ask from our customers forever.
We've been hesitant to expose that semantic model, because it’s our “secret sauce” in a sense. But on the other hand, the world has changed, and there is an expectation that, if you don’t do it, they’ll just extract the data from your product on their own. And that’s why I believe this is really the key benefit of data products: that customers can now consume those data products on top of SAP Business Data Cloud and start to combine it with other data that's non-SAP, then build their own reports, dashboards, and intelligent applications on top of that. Now, we’re doing the same. If you compare what we launched earlier in 2025 to today, our number of data products is increasing. We started, as we often do, with our core ERP, then we added more of our line-of-business solutions to get them to expose their data for data products as well. You end up with a catalog that covers the entire SAP Business Suite.
Which accelerates that data-product embrace not only for SAP but also for the partner ecosystem, now tasked with developing their own unique data products.
We’re only scratching the surface now, right? Partners have started to come on board; we have some very large partners that we even resell; we’ve asked them to do the same, to expose their data as data products into BDC. We want to create an ecosystem of partners around the SAP Business Data Cloud. This should not be an SAP-only opportunity.
With regard to SAP Business Suite, what’s the process of finding a unique buyer for SAP Business Suite? Which individuals at organizations are really engaging with the idea of wider orchestration through SAP Business Suite?
That’s very important. It's still the functions that have the most cross-views, so to speak, which are naturally the CIOs, the COOs, and sometimes the CFOs, which have been the traditional buyers of ERP packages. What has changed in my mind is, when we started to become successful in the 1990s with SAP R/3, it was a time where a CIO would basically buy this package and impose it on the line-of-business; there was no possibility for the line-of-business persona to purchase anything else. That has changed completely.
Nowadays, there’s much more choice. The LoBs have become much more independent. Often, they have buying power, they make their own purchasing decisions, and therefore you have to appeal to those buyers much more — even though, ultimately, the orchestrator is always the CIO. What we have seen over the last few years, with the rise of SaaS, is the proliferation of a number of applications or cloud services that customers run; that has led actually not to a further increase in productivity but rather slowed it down, because the price you pay is that you have to connect all of that. You must integrate it together, and it becomes very complex. While you, of course, have a solution for every single problem, and it's probably the best solution you can find, that has then brought back the role of the CIO as an orchestrator. The line-of-business needs to give buy-in. They potentially even contribute budget, so they need to be convinced. But ultimately, as a CIO, I’m in charge to make sure things fit together. And that’s why the SAP Business Suite decision is then a good one.
To be honest, we don’t usually sell “SAP Business Suite.” We always land somewhere in the suite, perhaps with core finance, and then supply chain, then HR, then procurement, and so on. The broader you become in your embrace of SAP Business Suite, the more benefits you can capture, because those solutions fit seamlessly together, rather than requiring you to stitch together solutions that come with very different data models. AI makes this whole integration process even more complicated.
It's not always a function that buys SAP Business Suite, to answer your question. I think the CIO is still the orchestrator for SAP Business Suite, and they have a broader view, together with the COO — but you have to appeal to each of the functional leaders, and that’s why a conference like SAP Connect is important, as is us building those communities with CFOs, heads of supply chain, heads of procurement, and so on.
As SAP focuses on bringing together solutions into this unified SAP Business Suite, how has that momentum changed the way you think about heterogeneous customers not running end-to-end SAP?
It’s just reality that customers run heterogeneous environments. Of course, I would love a customer who runs only SAP, but it’s not reality. The question is, how do you balance that openness with the unique benefits of running SAP-to-SAP? We understand we need to be open; that’s the name of the game, in the cloud environment specifically. We need to offer APIs, we need to adhere to AI ethics standards, and we are working with the industry on agent-to-agent protocols.
On the other hand, when you run SAP-to-SAP, the bar is higher. When you run supply chain planning in SAP Integrated Business Planning (IBP) with SAP S/4HANA, you can expect a higher degree of integration and more out-of-the-box than if you run a competitive product with S/4HANA. We also provide APIs, so you can connect it if you’d prefer; you must start a project, you must do data mapping, you must make sure everything works after the upgrade, and so on. Those are complexities that we can take away. And therefore, we believe SAP Business Suite will help us to expand our footprint within our customers and maybe gain back also line-of-business stakeholders that decided to go with somebody else. The beauty—or the threat—in the cloud is there’s always a renewal. It’s just a subscription, right? And it’s possible to switch solutions, which keeps us on our toes, because we want to be the best, but that also presents an opportunity for us to show clear benefits of going with SAP.
Certain SAP customers on earlier versions of SAP ECC are reaching their maintenance deadlines. Of course, you’ve focused on SAP’s cloud ERP push, but it’s been notable to me at SAP Connect how various line-of-business leaders are already moving parts of their business toward cloud. ERP isn’t always the first domain to move to the cloud; I’m curious what you’ve observed of how organizations can transform from the outside in, ahead of making that cloud ERP decision.
Core ERP, it almost seems, is the last domain that moves to the cloud, the closer you come to the operational parts, like manufacturing and supply chain. Cloud works well with those vertices — CRM went to the cloud early on, as did HCM and procurement, and now ERP is needing to fit into that cloud equation seamlessly.
The conversation has changed quite a bit. It’s not so much, “Should I do it?” It’s more like, “When do I do it, and where do I start?” The end of maintenance is not so much the main driver for cloud transformation; that was very early days, as companies were starting to think about adopting the next generation of ERP through SAP S/4HANA. Today’s customers are more seeing the benefits of running their ERP solutions in the cloud, whether they go with private or public cloud; they want to do that, and they want to combine that with an effort to reevaluate their business processes in terms of standardization. They’re looking at their customizations, at what is really needed. It’s been much more of a transformational effort than purely a technical effort.
That’s true of the ERP core, because it’s so mission-critical, and so, of course, companies spend more thought on it. That’s why, in my mind, it also took a while for this wave to start to rise. But now, I do see it rolling, and I see that companies are making the move, and a lot has also improved in the last two years with tooling, AI has influenced the tools to help with data migration, with custom code remediation, and so on. Those topics can be addressed much better than five or 10 years ago. We see less objection nowadays to starting the journey. I don’t see many customers that are falling out of maintenance windows.
And as customers explore their options, between private and public cloud routes, you have also built much more flexibility into RISE with SAP. What is your sense of where the RISE program sits today, and how that flexibility will continue to evolve for customers with different states of readiness for cloud migration?
It has evolved quite a bit. We’ve always said that RISE is not a product, and it’s also not “ECC to S/4 private cloud.” It’s the journey that we define for our customers to move to the business suite, ultimately. What does it take? What are the critical ingredients for that, and what is the skin in the game that we must have?
That’s why, for instance, we added an Enterprise Architect to the RISE journey; there is now discussion about whether we should add a data architect, given how important SAP BDC and the role of AI is now. Should we add a business process expert—above and beyond the tooling that we added with SAP Signavio—to help customers move towards best practices in their specific industry?
In terms of the software components that are part of RISE, as well, there have been changes over the years based on customer feedback and what they need. This will continue to evolve as a journey. The methodology has evolved. Underneath the methodology, the clean core concept is an important one, and we’ve driven that through customers that have really helped us to define what clean core actually means, what it means we have to deliver in terms of white-listed APIs, in terms of being prescriptive with how to develop extensions in a clean-core-compliant way.
That thinking has all evolved in the context of the RISE journey over the last couple of years, and that will continue. Data migration is an important topic, as is testing. How can AI be used across this integrated tool chain to make the journey quicker, to take project cost out? That’s the goal: to make this journey as smooth as possible for our customers.
What excites you most about the agentic orchestration layer that’s being introduced beneath Joule, through these role-based AI assistants? Where is this making a real difference for customers going through cloud journeys, be that in terms of influencing stakeholders within businesses or directly driving value with specific agents?
In general, it is helping quite a bit on the journey in the context of the integrated tool chain, helping customers to get there. And when you look into the applications themselves, and the capabilities that are in there, there’s so much more possibility now. We announced SAP Supply Chain Orchestration at SAP Connect, which could move the needle and have a significant impact on business outcomes for customers; now, they can look into their supply network across multiple tiers and detect disruption early on. That means they have time to react, to make the right decisions, so they make can make sure that the supply chain is not disrupted, and customers still get whatever they ordered at the right point in time.
That is possible because, first, we have this massive amount of data available through SAP Business Network. Second, we have AI technology on top of it, and an agent that we can deploy to reason over what is the best reaction to such a supply chain disruption. And that requires agents to communicate with each other, which speaks to the whole orchestration layer and the benefits you get when you run the whole business suite from SAP. Now, the supply chain agent can talk to the logistics agent, and to the procurement agent and to the finance agent to come up with the best plan on how to react to a certain disruption that happens in some part in the world with a tier-3 supplier, right? That wasn’t possible before. That will, in my mind, unlock a lot of productivity and business growth opportunities for our customers.
When I’d asked earlier about those unique buyers for SAP Business Suite, the role of the VP of supply chain, for those in organizations without that transformative CIO role, came to mind — so I’m excited you’re discussing the value of SAP Business Suite in terms of the integrated, intelligent supply chain. SAP Connect 2025 brought supply-chain leaders into the fold, so I’m curious what else you can say about the role of supply-chain leaders in initiating larger business transformation.
I couldn’t agree more. The closer you come to the inventory, that’s where you talk about big value drivers. That’s why I mentioned the COO, who is also often the head of supply chain, in one function. That is one of the key cross-functions in the company, and exactly where the money is.
What we at SAP have realized is that what’s often underestimated is the footprint that we have in supply chain with our ERP solution alone. We have a huge suite of supply chain applications in the cloud, but 80% of the data on supply chain sits in the core ERP, in the inventory, the material master, and so on. That’s what we are trying to unlock right now, to combine it with capabilities for supply chain planning with SAP Business Network, for supply chain collaboration, and for logistic processes.
In my mind, that is really one of the biggest growth opportunities that we have, where we also have the most tangible business value for customers, so it was important to bring the supply-chain leaders into SAP Connect.
You touched earlier on the importance of process mining and optimization within specific business areas via SAP Signavio. What excites you most about recent developments in the business transformation management space?
This whole area of business transformation management has always been a key component of the RISE journey, with Signavio as the central tool for that, and that has evolved. At the beginning, it’s about diagnostics: to look into how you run your processes, how many process variants you have, how much does it deviate from a standard process, what is the impact that on certain process, KPIs compared to what are best practices or industry benchmarks, and so on. What is best-in-class, versus where you stand? That’s an initial diagnostic.
The second is, then, to make this an ongoing improvement activity; that’s one of the key benefits of being in the cloud, and it connects to this notion of continuous engagement that we have with our customers. It’s not about an initial one-off: “I use this to build a business case, then I implement the software, and then we never look at it again.” Rather than concluding it’s normal, once you are in operation, for processes to start to deviate, we are asking customers about how many procurement processes they have to procure indirect materials; they say there should only be one or two. In reality, it’s 15 processes, because of those deviations. A business transformation management suite helps you to keep that in check, to continuously stay on the best practice and adjust.
What we can do now, in the cloud, is have access to all this data that companies produce. Of course, it’s anonymized, aggregated data, gathered with consent, but many customers have given us the consent to use this data and refine best practices on an ongoing basis, then bring that back into SAP Signavio as a tool and help customers to continuously stay up to date on whether they’re running a best practice process.
Historically, when you’ve discussed benchmarking, it hasn’t been based on real, live data but rather customer surveys and other more slightly delayed ways of establishing standards — but what you’re detailing here is a tactic for leveraging real-time data to tighten up those benchmarks.
When I was working in value engineering way back, you had those surveys, and you had to build those best practice benchmarks. Everything was very static, kind of a snapshot, and no live data access, as you said. That’s the big change in the cloud.
What else are you exciting about in the coming months for SAP?
Front and center is the entire AI stack. At a conference like SAP Connect, you discuss the business processes and outcomes. At conferences like SAP TechEd or ASUG Tech Connect, you go much deeper into the technical details of what’s happening on the AI Foundation or in Joule, how Joule becomes an orchestrator of agents and what protocols to use, as well as how to put customers in a position to build their own agents.
We discuss identity management, authorization and so on — all those enterprise-grade characteristics that are needed to gain trust for companies to use our AI. Then, how do we make this real in the context of our application? Business AI is our strategy; we are not selling that technology, but we are using that technology to make our applications more intelligent.
In terms of intelligent applications, SAP Supply Chain Orchestration is one powerful example of what’s possible, but there will be more happening on that front in the other lines of business in the next few months. It’s the path of innovation. We are moving away from placing all those features and functions into the core; every upgrade brings a lot of new features inside the applications themselves, for faster innovation cycles on top of the platform, via AI-driven applications that can connect back into SAP Business Suite. Finally, I’m closely watching user experience with Joule. This will fundamentally change how end users interact with our systems.
Reflecting on 2025 as a whole—from SAP Connect to SAP TechEd and all the announcements along the way—what was a particularly key accomplishment for you? What excited you the most about SAP’s strategic announcements?
A key accomplishment in 2025 was bringing the SAP Business Suite together as an integrated, AI-enabled operating model. At SAP Connect and SAP TechEd, we showed how Joule, Business AI, and SAP Business Data Cloud are embedded directly into end-to-end processes and showed our first foundational model, RPT-3 specifically designed for business context to ensure that these innovations are built to be responsible, secure, and ready for real business use. What excited me most was how clearly this tied AI innovation to measurable productivity outcomes for customers.
Finally, from your position in your SAP Business Suite organization, what topics do you advise ASUG members to keep top-of-mind going into 2026? Where should their attention be focused as they navigate cloud journeys and AI innovation?
Going into 2026, I would encourage ASUG members to stay focused on three things. First, adoption—making sure cloud and AI capabilities are actually embedded into day-to-day work, because that is where productivity gains come from. Second, maintaining a clean core and strong data foundation, which allows customers to innovate faster and adopt new AI capabilities without disruption. And third, process standardization, taking an end-to-end view of their processes across the SAP Business Suite, so AI, data, applications, and processes work together to drive measurable business outcomes.