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Christian Klein

Chief Executive Officer & Member of Executive Board, SAP

Search every verified Christian Klein interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Christian Klein, CEO of SAP, discussed the company's third-quarter 2026 results in an October 22 earnings call, citing a 26% increase in current cloud backlog to €24.1 billion and 25% cloud revenue growth in constant currencies. He attributed the performance to the adoption of SAP's business AI capabilities, stating that AI was embedded in all deals closed, and highlighted the rich scope of the company's "RISE" contracts with AI and the Business Data Cloud platform. In a subsequent CNBC interview, he said Europe is doing "innovation and regulation in the wrong order," arguing for transformation before regulation, and he emphasized the importance of applied AI in European industries over chips. At the SAP Connect keynote in October, Klein introduced "Joule Work" as a new AI engagement layer for SAP users and announced the acquisition of Tech Wolf, an AI-native work intelligence platform, to address workforce skills gaps. He described SAP's vision of the "autonomous enterprise," with over 200 AI agents generally available and more planned. In other appearances, including a DSAG conference and a podcast, he defended SAP's strategy of integrating external large language models rather than building its own, citing the company's 50 years of process and data know-how, and argued that AI requires high accuracy, such as a 95% or better threshold for financial closing agents, before it can handle mission-critical tasks. He also noted that SAP itself uses Joule internally with 90,000 employees, reporting productivity gains in HR, finance, and procurement.

Recent appearances

Verified interview transcripts

Notable quotes

“I would say Karen also I mean being a European tech company when I'm looking into the AI startup community in China, in the US, all over the world I mean it's also a growing startup community here in Europe. I would say look there will be a drastic disruption of every industry. I mean I see startups AI startups in life science. I see AI startups in retail who are coming with a completely different business model real”

“There's a lot of criticism and part of this criticism is absolutely justified. I just came back from China. I mean these AI startups they move with a speed which is unbelievable. And also SAP needs to move with a speed to compete in the market and we are transforming at high speed. When I now look into Europe and I see all these regulations sometimes I wonder okay can we maybe first create outcomes and impact and tra”

“We have around 900 test customers since Sapphire. We use Joule ourselves as a test customer; 90,000 employees use Joule. We already see productivity gains of 20% in HR, finance, and procurement. We see even higher productivity gains in development when it comes to coding. The LLM models are already trained on that, so we already see what's possible with AI. I just mentioned that even the role of a CEO will change. If”

“There are also clear voices in the market saying, with all this AI, do we even need software anymore, do we even need SAP? And I believe we do well to consider that. There were also many voices saying why doesn't SAP develop its own large language model? I believe SAP's strengths lie in our incredibly deep process know-how, in the data know-how we have, in the business logic we've developed over 50 years. And I belie”

“Why would anyone build agents stand alone on an LLM platform? The business AI platform gives you the choice between the best frontier and the best open weight models for every agentic AI use case, plus the deepest out of the box context. Plus SAP Managed governance, it gives you the best business AI for enterprises.”

“For decades people had to learn how SAP works. I'm sure many of you can remember. I certainly do. Memorizing all the transaction codes. If you are lucky, you can export data down into an Excel spreadsheet. You have to build PowerPoints. End users did all the work and told the system what to do. A very manual way of working. But now with Joule Work, the more than 400 million SAP users can talk in their own language to”

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