When you think of AI and innovation and especially understanding your customer in India and around the world, there's a company named SAP and they have a fantastic little setup over here. SAP House at Davos and one of the most important people at SAP House is with me, Thomas Saueressig. What a pleasure to have you on the show. Thomas of course is a board member at SAP, leads customer engagement experience and of course SAP is the most valued, highly valued publicly listed company in Germany. So we're in the right place then, Davos.
Absolutely. That's where all the innovation is discussed about.
Absolutely Thomas, it's a pleasure to have you early in the morning and you know you're a Davos veteran but you're still young. I mean we can, you're 39.
That makes you the youngest, the youngest board member perhaps.
I was back then when I was appointed the youngest board member of Germany. Absolutely.
That's what we want to do. We want to have the young conversations here at Davos. What a pleasure to have you. Thomas, when you come here to WEF and you see while you're walking down the promenade right here, of course there are world leaders and geopolitics but our narrative has been that technology has taken center stage this year. There is a lot more AI, not just lip service but in practice this time.
And I think the reality is actually what we clearly see that AI is changing the lives of people, which means society, and that's a topic where for sure in the World Economic Forum it's not only a business topic but also for politicians how to deal with the productivity gains of AI, what does that mean with labor law for instance. So there's a multitude of conversations which are coming here together and that's what makes the World Economic Forum so special to bring academia, governments, business leaders, everybody together in one place. And I think the motto of this year's World Economic Forum, a spirit of dialogue, is more important than ever.
Has the spirit of dialogue really been shining through? Are the conversations happening when it comes to tech and AI, the entire tech stack, understanding your customer, digital transformation, have these been key themes with some of the stakeholders, the conversations you've been having?
No, absolutely, it was clearly one of the top of mind discussions here in Davos and already in the chat house, rule conversations which are happening here. It's interesting to see how businesses adopt actually what they do with AI and also the learning the last couple of years. I mean after the ChatGPT moment end of 2022 we clearly see a huge excitement about AI but a question also how do we embrace it in the context of the enterprise. And here for sure we need to talk about data, how do we bring the relevant data, the business context, business processes, business data into the mix to make really relevant and reliable decisions. Because if you do a decision in a business context you don't want to have hallucinations if you take a huge investment decision as a company. And that's the reason why it's so essential that we talk about how we best support our customers and clients around the globe with AI.
You know, it's interesting when we talk of AI, it should be a democratic sort of decentralized, everyone, AI for everyone. But we still see that a lot of the big tech conversations are happening in the US. Over here, you see, you know, contingents from India, Asia, Europe as well. Do you think maybe it needs a little bit more of a push in some of these jurisdictions in terms of talking about, like you said, regulations, like you said, innovation and digital transformation, it's happening. Is it a case of maybe slightly lackluster marketing or is the time going to come soon?
I think there are two aspects to that question. It's a phenomenal question by the way, two aspects. So one is for sure if you think about Europe and you mentioned regulations. I mean on the one hand side for sure we need to always be cautious that we don't have too much regulations which also hinders innovation. So we need to be very careful but if you think about responsible usage of AI you need to trust AI and for trust you need regulations. If you go on a plane, just an example, you trust that this plane is maintained and working, the pilot has a license. It's regulated. That's the reason why you trust to go on a plane to go in risk exposure. If you want to use AI in simple terms you need the same. You need to trust AI. That's the reason some sort of regulations make sense but we should not overdo it for sure. The second aspect is to your point, I absolutely see a lot of companies, US companies coming to Europe quite frankly, coming to us asking for partnerships. Right, I mean OpenAI came to us, asked for, hey can SAP help to bring OpenAI to Germany. We saw companies like Snowflake, Databricks, Microsoft, AWS, Google all came to us to talk about how can we bring SAP which is the world market leader for enterprise applications together with AI foundational technology to make more out of that. And that's exactly this combination, this fusion, this collaboration which we see across the world and that's the reason where I have to say I see a lot of US-based companies coming to us to see how we can do that together because again without the business context in the enterprise context it's meaningless.
And what's interesting and relevant and germane to the Indian audience as well is that when you say US, SAP of course headquartered in Germany but has such a huge presence in India as well, probably one of the biggest offices anywhere in the world right there in India.
Yeah, I'm very excited about it. I'm personally the board sponsor of the lab in India. We have more than 15,000 employees in Bangalore which is phenomenal and we just opened our second campus even. So basically we continue to grow significantly and it's also unique because we fundamentally have from all across our portfolio, from the full suite of SAP, every single product is in Bangalore. So if we talk about integration, if we talk about AI, this is happening right now in India as one of the main spots, the largest development lab which we have. So we are super pleased to see the development and it's quite, quite honestly phenomenal to see the talent base which we see there. So no, I'm a big fan of the lab in India and for sure will continue to grow.
