The Chief Executive Officer of SAP which is used by several consumer electronic companies to create efficiencies, control spend, and drive policy compliance, has called on international governments to avoid a tariff war.
“My advice to all political leaders is to find a way for global trade, and don’t punish each other because there will be no winners at the end of the day and consumers will also feel it,” Christian Klein told the Australian Financial Review.
Alongside CE companies and retailers, SAP’s software is reportedly used by 91% of ASX 200 companies, which makes Klein’s assertions of the impact that the tariff wars will have on consumers all the more stark.
Klein visited Canberra and Melbourne last week, as the company is supporting clients making major changes to their deployments of SAP software.
Australia and New Zealand are SAP’s fifth-biggest markets for cloud use behind the US, Germany, India and Japan.
In 2020, the company announced it would no longer support clients that hosted its Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems on their own premises after 2027, forcing them to move to the cloud.
A key focus for the company is on AI integration into its software, with SAP now reportedly using the technology to help retailers predict orders.
The company is evolving its generative AI assistant, Joule, which acts as a copilot within SAP’s ecosystem, designed to simplify and streamline tasks, provide quick answers, and automate processes across several business functions.
“There is no other company than SAP that has this rich treasure of business data. It is the business data and the understanding of the business context that makes any large language model successful,” said Klein.
“We have had a super start with over 10,000 customers using our AI, but the next big thing around the corner is agentic AI, where you can really automate and orchestrate processes, like a sales agent talking to a supply chain agent.
“The technology is there now, we just need to get it out in the next year and get it adopted by our customers, to show that this is not only hype.”
