SAP's stock climbed 6% in premarket trading in New York after the company reported strong revenue growth in its cloud business. The company's current cloud backlog grew 26% on a constant-currency basis to EUR22.93 billion in the second quarter, above analysts' forecasts of 24%. SAP cut its outlook for the year, citing a EUR100 million impact from the acquisition of data platforms Prior Labs and Dremio, and trimmed its guidance for non-IFRS operating profit. CEO Christian Klein joined The Opening Trade to talk with Bloomberg's Anna Edwards and Guy Johnson.
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What Christian Klein said
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Christian Klein, CEO of SAP, discussed the company's Q2 earnings, highlighting accelerated cloud growth and that 90% of cloud deals included AI. He addressed concerns about AI disruption, arguing that LLMs lack understanding of business processes, data, and governance, which positions SAP's ERP as essential. Klein dismissed the threat from OpenAI's new presence model, emphasizing SAP's open platform with APIs and MCP servers, and the value of its business AI platform. He acknowledged higher R&D costs due to token consumption but noted a 30% productivity increase. Klein stated that SAP can switch between frontier and open-source models to optimize price-to-outcome, and that managers now manage token budgets. He predicted no single winner in AI, with value moving to the agentic AI layer. Klein also confirmed that Chief Product Officer Muhammed Alam is leaving for personal reasons, and Klein has temporarily taken over his responsibilities while a successor is sought.
Key takeaways
90% of SAP's cloud deals in Q2 included AI, showing strong customer adoption.
SAP's open platform supports any LLM, including open-source, to optimize price-to-outcome.
SAP's R&D productivity increased by 30% from applying AI, offsetting higher token costs.
SAP will find a successor for the chief product officer role, which Klein temporarily assumed.
Klein predicts no single AI winner; value creation moves to the agentic AI layer.
Let us talk about some of those corporate earnings then. As mentioned, SAP's cloud revenue grew at a faster pace than analysts expected as customers move away from on premise licenses. Europe's largest software company is facing threats to its business from AI, well documented, of course, as it pushes clients to migrate accounts from locally installed programs to new products in the cloud. SAP's ADRs, their American Depository receipts jumped following the results and it looks as if we are expecting to see the stock pop a little higher at the start of trade this morning. Christian Klein joins us, CEO of SAP. Christian, very nice to have you with us. Lots to discuss. So, the good news in your numbers, cloud revenue, better than expected, your customers then migrating to the cloud, that continues to be a trend. What does that tell us about the underlying strengths of the business at this point, Christian?
Yeah, good morning Anna. Yeah, I mean we are very very happy with our quarter. I mean we have even seen an accelerated cloud growth compared to Q1 far ahead of our market and our competitors and even in the cloud 90% of the deals also had AI included. Yeah. So which shows that first the ERP is absolutely needed as this is the brain of every company and then the agents are built on top and that gives us a lot of confidence with such a strong half year one especially in such a volatile market environment.
Okay, so the migration to the cloud continues, Christian, but in amongst all of that, we add on, and you've suggested this includes AI, but we add on the concerns around AI. SAP's share price down by some 38% year to date because of concerns about the so-called SAS apocalypse, what AI will do to companies such as yours. Do you have a much better understanding now of where the vulnerabilities lie for SAP?
Yeah, absolutely, Anna. I mean first of all it's great to see that also our customers are now turning towards SAP as they understand that the LLMs they don't understand business process they don't understand business data and also they don't understand governance. I mean you cannot just have agents doing your financial close not adhering to the governance of a company so that is all sitting in our ERP and with the launch of the autonomous enterprise you know our customers have seen that SAP can deliver accurate and also compliant behind AI and that of course also is reflected now in our Q2 numbers and also gives us a lot of confidence for the second half where the pipeline actually looks pretty strong.
Christian, can I just pick up on that? Good morning. It's Guy. OpenAI is making waves again in this space this week with its new presence model which is causing not your direct competitors but people in the SAS space to see their share prices come under significant pressure. Now, in some ways, you could argue this software doesn't directly affect you, but in some ways you could argue further down the road it might. You've got your dual software. It's the integration kind of layer, the orchestration layer, which is quite a valuable space to occupy. And it's looking to target that kind of space. And I'm just wondering how worried you are to Anna's point about kind of understanding the risks about how big the risk could be of OpenAI coming in and controlling that kind of integration layer, that key interaction layer that we're dealing with here and I'm just wondering whether or not that is a threat that is emerging, a new threat that you see emerging right now.
Yeah, I mean absolutely Guy. I mean AI is a disruption to the software industry without any doubt. But look at SAP. I mean we are running the world's most mission-critical business processes, complex processes. And there is a lot of domain logic sitting in the ERP. And when you now look at our AI platform, you can choose any LLM you want. And by the way, not every frontier model is the best for every agent. You can also use open-source models where you have a much better price to outcome but then what you find on the SAP AI platform on the business AI platform is also the context layer so we are building our own AI foundation where we are building the ontology with our business data with our business processes because again the LLMs don't understand, are not trained on this logic and when the two worlds are coming together this is of course how SAP can really deliver accurate and also very compliant.
But is there going to be a fight over that interaction layer where the two systems integrate? Is there going to be a fight there? Do you need to make sure that you control that point?
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Klein, C. (2026, July 24). SAP CEO Christian Klein Talks Company's Q2 Earnings | Bloomberg Talks [Interview transcript]. Bloomberg Podcasts. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1119649/
MLA
Christian Klein. "SAP CEO Christian Klein Talks Company's Q2 Earnings | Bloomberg Talks." Bloomberg Podcasts, 24 Jul. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1119649/.
BibTeX
@misc{klein2026_1119649,
author = {Christian Klein},
title = {SAP CEO Christian Klein Talks Company's Q2 Earnings | Bloomberg Talks},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, Bloomberg Podcasts. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2026},
month = {jul},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1119649/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
