Previously president and chief product officer for Cloud ERP, Jan Gilg is now stepping into an even more high-profile position at SAP: that of Chief Revenue Officer & President for SAP Americas and the SAP Global Business Suite organization.
In co-leading the company’s global SAP Customer Success organization, which is responsible for the totality of SAP cloud revenue and customer growth, alongside Emmanuel Raptopoulos (previously regional president of SAP EMEA), Gilg will specifically lead the SAP Americas region and maintain oversight of the global SAP Business Suite organization, which provides an end-to-end operating model from customer advisory for customers deciding on SAP technology, to sales of SAP cloud solutions, to customer success management.
Gilg’s new role further cements his ascendance at SAP after an 18-year career as an enterprise software executive. As adoption of cloud ERP solutions continues to accelerate in the SAP community, alongside surging interest in artificial intelligence and enterprise data strategy, Gilg is committed to helping companies meet today’s complex business demands and thrive in the face of ongoing volatility.
Ahead of SAP Sapphire & ASUG Annual Conference, Gilg sat for an interview around his new role and responsibilities, the intensifying impact of SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC), and what SAP users can expect to hear about from the keynote stage at this year’s conference.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Congratulations on your new position at SAP. What can you tell me about the new role, responsibilities, and how this has come about in the past few months?
It’s been quite an interesting change overall in the board structure for SAP. As you know, three board members left last year. The discussion was always: how is this going to reshape the board?
The decision was made to install an extended board, which now has ten senior executives of the company. A specific topic here is customer services as a board area. While there is not a one-to-one replacement for Scott Russell, we’ll keep the board area, because it’s obviously important to have a sales and CS board area. We split it between myself and Manos Raptopoulos and have a direct reporting line to Christian as the CEO. Technically, he’s also the board member behind CS, but Manos and I are running the board area jointly.
We both have responsibility for specific regions, as well. For me, it’s the Americas region. That just came together in April, combining North America, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Manos has EMEA and APAC.
In addition, I have global responsibilities for the SAP Business Suite, which includes all the global CROs for SuccessFactors, CX, HCM, and so on, as well as the corporate business, which is our mid-market business and GROW with SAP.
It’s a big scope, for sure—and also an interesting step coming from a product leader role. Christian Klien, SAP CEO, and the supervisory board made a very conscious decision to say: we’ve been working for the last couple of years to turn SAP into more of a product-led company like many of our competitors and classic software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers are. So, we should also maybe put somebody from product at the helm of the Customer Success organization.
Especially since it’s a co-leadership role, and Manos has a very strong sales background, he and I complement each other very well. Often, those co-leadership models are impractical, but this is a little different. We both have clear responsibilities, and we share some global responsibilities.
Because we’re so complementary, it works very well. So far, we’ve received very good feedback, specifically from customers, who say, “Hey, it’s actually a good thing having somebody responsible for the region who comes from the product side and knows the product’s value.”
Within that realm of customer feedback in the early months of being in this position, what have you seen and heard that’s new? Coming from that product background you mentioned, what have you been newly exposed to in this more overarching role?
I did have a lot of customer interaction before as well. But to your point, it’s different. In product, you talk a lot about feedback specifically tied to the product, such as escalations, where they need support and help, or roadmap requirements customers want to see.
Here, it’s more about go-to-market topics: commercial issues, contracting, and so on. But I also feel that people appreciate being able to talk to me about more strategic topics like product strategy and how it all fits together.
It’s really the entire value chain from commercial contracting processes at the beginning to “What is the right scope for me,” to “What’s your strategy on the product side,” and then post-sales topics. We talk about clean core; we talk about standard processes. The questions are always: How do we get there? How do you help us get there? How do you help me adopt the solutions?
One thing we’ve discussed before is the foundational role of ERP data in providing stability and long-term visibility. Could you talk a bit about your recent thought leadership around ERP data—why it’s so important and why it’s maybe been overlooked or undervalued in the past?
I think, funnily enough, the biggest lever for change is the cloud. When we started pushing RISE with SAP, there was a lot of pushback from customers. We’d get into technical discussions: Can you make AI capabilities available for on-premises? But it’s really not about that. It’s not about whether I can connect an AI service to an on-premises system—of course, I can do that. The question is: What is the additional value if you do all of this in the cloud?
We started talking about this vision of intelligent ERP back when we launched S/4HANA in 2015. We put a ton of machine learning algorithms into the product, but it never took off. Why? Because the hurdle was large in setting up and training the model for each customer’s data. And even for large companies, the individual data sets were just too small to generate insights that were valuable enough.
What’s changed significantly is that when you move this to the cloud, you can combine it with different data sources. Plus, we’re collecting the data of all our customers in the cloud—if they consent, as part of the contract. We anonymize this data and feed it into a foundational model we’re building based on structured, tabular data. That model can drive insights no single company could generate on its own.
On top of that, we have the Business Network, which I still believe—and have been saying for years—is undervalued. Visibility into your ecosystem, supply chain, and multiple tiers of suppliers is critical for companies but really hard to get. At the end of the day, most supply chain issues come down to visibility. You can’t plan well enough.
Then, it came down to whether you could crunch the data well enough and have the technology to drive predictions and simulations. That’s where the AI boost has helped tremendously. The speed with which generative AI has developed is remarkable. It’s almost like a perfect storm. Sometimes, it is a question of timing. That’s why cloud and AI development now come together to elevate operational data’s role. If you look across our customer base, it can help explain how business works in the world and across all industries.
If you bring all of that together, you can drive amazing insights. And I think only SAP can do it because we have such a large installed base. That’s why I believe ERP data will see a huge boost in importance. The SAP BDC story resonates extremely well with customers because that will be the platform where everything comes together as a data fabric for our software.
As you think about embedding AI into all of this, what do you see as the agentic possibilities? How can AI help business managers make more secure decisions in a volatile market by bringing together all that data?
I think reliability in decision-making is extremely important in the B2B space. Over the last few years, companies have started experimenting with AI. Still, you see very few big use cases in production where mission-critical decisions are being made based on AI. You see it a lot more at the edges, where you can automate mundane tasks.
But take a more serious example: new tariffs. As a customer, I would wonder if I should pass those additional costs on to consumers, shift manufacturing elsewhere, or change suppliers to avoid tariffs. If I build up inventory, I tie up working capital. But what if the tariffs are lifted again? Then I’m stuck with the inventory, and I’ve made a bad strategic decision.
That kind of decision relies on structured data. This isn’t something where I just ask ChatGPT what to do. When you think about enterprise-grade AI that answers those kinds of questions, customers expect a foundation, something rooted in truth.
That’s why the Knowledge Graph is such an important ingredient. It describes the semantic web: how all the business entities we represent in the system are connected. Now, you start feeding unstructured information and data from different sources into that. There are also ways to trace how a given decision was made. That takes us into the agentic world. That’s the next step.
The vision with agentic software is that the algorithms we’ve traditionally hard-coded in software don’t need to be hard-coded anymore. Instead, the software is the agent. You’ll have agents for procurement, manufacturing, and supply chain. What if the aluminum tariff goes up by 15%? How can I still offer my car at the same price to U.S. consumers? Then, those agents develop the algorithm necessary to answer that question.
There were a bunch of articles talking about software as a service versus service as software. And I think that’s really where we’re heading. That allows us to tap into a market that wasn’t accessible to us before. It’s super attractive to offer an entire service to a customer rather than just saying, “Here’s your login. Now figure it out.” Of course, that means you need a system of record and very reliable AI running on top of it for the tool to work.
Could you speak more about the balance between real data and assumed scenarios? How do they work together within a system of record, and how is the Databricks partnership helping?
That’s always been one of the challenges: how to marry structured and unstructured data. That opened the door for companies like Snowflake and Databricks to step in and say, “Hey, we’ll give you the data platform and world-class ML and AI capabilities on top of it.” What’s always been missing there is the semantics of the structured data. They could pull data from an SAP system, but it’s just raw data. You lose the semantics.
Now, we’re bringing this together. We’re integrating it natively, connecting our world to the Databricks world. That allows us to bring in unstructured information like sensor data, weather data, and so on and mesh that for analysis by an AI agent.
From an IT perspective, the question is always: Do I need to replace my environment? Do I have to copy all this data back and forth? That’s why we said, “No, we cannot ask customers to do that. Let’s make it complementary.” Let’s make it zero-copy—non-disruptive. That opens up the SAP world to the unstructured world.
It’s also important to keep a hand in the data gravity of our own data. Once someone pulls data out of our systems, it’s gone. The connection is lost. Now, with BDC, we’ve found a way to be as open as customers expect while maintaining control over our data.
Do you see the Knowledge Graph evolving to map semantic relationships with external third-party data?
It could be. In general, we’re very open and always take an ecosystem approach. We’re already doing this with data products; we invite our partners to expose their data entities through data products into BDC.
We’re even creating a marketplace where those data products can be offered. The same could be thinkable for the Knowledge Graph. First, connecting structured information to our partner solutions.
In the unstructured realm, I don’t know. It could be thinkable. There’s no concrete action at the moment. But what’s definitely the case is we want to be open. It’s been proven in the cloud: you have to be open. In the enterprise space, customers always win. They demand openness. They all have heterogeneous environments. Every vendor has to cater to that. You don’t expose everything, but you do create the handshakes.
In terms of customer examples that illustrate the interconnection of cloud, data, AI, and orchestration coming together for SAP BDC—what do you see as the integration of BDC and Business Suite? For an ASUG member looking for practical benefits they can achieve immediately, what would you say?
Historically, a big challenge across our solutions has been cross-domain integration. It’s been painful to bring things together and create overarching reporting and dashboards, even between very close domains like HR and Finance.
With BDC as part of the application fabric and exposing all those data products, this will now be easily possible. Some of those will be very powerful. Spend Control Tower we already have in Ariba, which we’re expanding to manage overall spend across S/4HANA, Fieldglass, Concur, and so on. Other data products will have more of a dashboard or template character tools that customers can take and adjust to whatever they need to accelerate value.
Now, we’re managing those data products underneath. In the past, customers had to do that themselves. Now, we’re ensuring that everything still works and is managed with each release upgrade.
Planning is another huge domain, bringing together financial, supply chain, marketing, and other planning silos. With BDC as the underlying fabric, that kind of integrated planning will now be possible. This is something customers can benefit from quickly because it’s non-intrusive. It doesn’t require a major S/4HANA upgrade. BDC is something they can do. It sits on top of BTP and is decoupled. You can start creating value-added scenarios even while still on the path to RISE.
What are you most looking forward to at SAP Sapphire this year?
First of all, it’s about meeting as many customers as possible in my new capacity. Many of our largest customers, especially in North America, will be there. It’s a great opportunity to connect.
One big thing I’d like to push more strongly is reestablishing strategic relationships with our customers. In some areas like Germany, being close to headquarters, we see very strong relationships. Take BMW, for example. We do co-innovation together, and those relationships are deeply embedded.
We have such great companies here in the United States. Whether that’s ExxonMobil, which is on a greenfield RISE journey, or life sciences companies like Pfizer and J&J, I’d like to establish those kinds of lighthouse customers here in the region again.
We’ll hear a lot about BDC, and specifically agentic AI, and how it’s all coming together. Some customers have already started using it, and we’ll see how they’re doing that. We’ll also hear more about how RISE is evolving into a true transformational offering. It’s always been that, but over the last couple of years, it’s sometimes been reduced to more of a lift-and-shift commercial approach.
We’ll talk more about real transformation journeys, starting with business process management, gaining visibility into how their business works, and moving toward best practices, clean core, and value capture in post-sales. That whole “did the business case become a reality?” question is top of mind for customers, and we’ll go deeper into that at Sapphire.
I’m sure the Enterprise Architect embrace, as part of the RISE program, will also be something people are excited to hear more about.
It’s a huge investment, but, frankly, we have to make it. This hybrid world is a reality for many, especially very large customers. And it’s complex.
On the one hand, the openness and modularity of the cloud world give customers flexibility and agility. On the other hand, it introduces technical complexity.
A proprietary, monolithic on-premises system is easier to manage. That’s why we said we need to take a bigger stake in this. We’re deploying an Enterprise Architect as a person to hold all of it together. I think it will show customers that we’re serious and make them more open to pursuing a transformational route.