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Thomas Saueressig

Customer Services & Delivery and Member of Executive Board, SAP

Search every verified Thomas Saueressig interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Thomas Saueressig, SAP's Chief Customer Officer and Executive Board Member for Customer Services & Delivery, has been a prominent figure at recent SAP events, including Sapphire conferences in Orlando and Madrid in 2026. At these events, he discussed SAP's strategy for the "autonomous enterprise," emphasizing the importance of a clean core, data harmonization, and business AI. He highlighted customer stories, such as ExxonMobil's transformation with RISE with SAP, and outlined five "defining moments" for customers on their AI journeys, including data foundation, customer experience, employee interaction, governance, and strategy. He also addressed a new API policy that restricts external AI agents, defending it as necessary for governance, security, and reliability in business-critical systems, while asserting that SAP remains an open platform through its partnerships with hyperscalers and data providers. Beyond Sapphire, Saueressig has spoken at the World Economic Forum in Davos and other industry events about digital sovereignty, AI's impact on the workforce, and Europe's competitive position. He has discussed SAP's partnership with OpenAI to bring ChatGPT to sovereign infrastructure in Germany for the public sector and regulated industries. He has also promoted SAP's customer innovation services, citing examples like a tariff agent that optimizes sourcing and procurement. In interviews, he has expressed optimism about AI's potential to create jobs and drive productivity, while emphasizing the need for Europe to accelerate innovation and cloud adoption. He has also highlighted SAP's significant presence and growth in India, where the company has a large development lab in Bangalore.

Recent appearances

Verified interview transcripts

Notable quotes

“So the way to think about it is that up until now our data center business has been almost entirely GPUs. Vera is our CPU, and you know what's really exciting is that Vera opens a brand new 200 billion TAM for NVIDIA, a market we have never addressed before, and every major hyperscaler is partnering with us to get it deployed, and that's huge for the company because for the first time we have a second engine of that ”

“Yeah. I mean, the transformation we're doing is first and foremost about the data. Data is the asset which has been trapped. And so what we really want to do, like I'm sure you two as well, we're really wanting to release that. And we believe that it is important that we spend the time to get that foundation right. I really liked what the gentleman from JPMorgan said yesterday. Completely aligned with that. If we can”

“Yeah, it's a really great question. And you're absolutely right about the scale we operate in. Everybody thinks about the gas station, and my first car was a Renault, by the way. Not many people will know what that was in this room. But we do so much more, truly global company. Not only do we have the oil and gas business, we have the plastics business. We have a lot of innovation in our products. And what we have be”

“I think it's absolutely important for us to be able to sort of go win in that new layer up top if you will and I do believe I think the thesis around our growth you know going back to a couple questions as well you know if if there's a belief in the thesis that hey the token consumption in the world is going to grow and it's going to grow exponentially in some ways and that's sort of what we've been seeing then you c”

“I think from the AI perspective for us it's super important. I think we all learned about AI that it's based on data in the end of the day. Which means a classical traditional LLM by definition gets commoditized because they are all trained by the same public information. Now, to make value out of AI, you need to get the business context in an enterprise environment. The business context in the mix. When I talk about”

“Well, first and foremost, it was an amazing event. And it's a significant award for Sam in that regards. But, it was also very important moment for us at SAP, but also, I hope, for the entire community in Germany, because we announced the partnership that we will basically bring OpenAI with ChatGPT and all the models in a sovereign infrastructure in Germany, operated fully by SAP for the public sector and the regulat”

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