Muhammad Al0:00
Fundamentally, what Control Tower does is it allows customers who have bet on SAP as their end-to-end spend management platform to take the data that cuts across from travel and expense, indirect and direct spend, as well as contingent and services, bring that together into a unified data model where we apply AI on top of it, and then have out-of-the-box dashboards with critical insights that they can then take action from, either within the Control Tower, which is why it's a Control Tower, or in the contextual apps that are feeding the data. So it allows them to actually get a full view of what's happening, which we think is pretty phenomenal. And in the fullness of time, this in and of itself, while today when we launch it, it will work out of the box with our SAP procurement and spend applications, but will allow you to bring data from other non-SAP procurement applications. And as long as that data can be translated into the canonical shape of that unified data model, the insight and the AI would just work out of the box for you. It's a big step because a lot of the customers, if not all the customers, are looking for resiliency in their supply chain and in their operations. And you don't really get resiliency unless you have visibility in terms of what you're doing. And this is a big step forward in having full visibility and transparency into your spend that can identify where you have opportunities for improvement or where you have risks, where you need to take action. And that's what it allows them to do. The other thing it does, which is what we demoed on day one in the keynote, is because spend is a big part of Scope 3, and Scope 3 generally is a big part of an organization's sustainability footprint, their emissions footprint, up to 90% in some cases. It behooves us to have all the spend data in one place where you can then get a view of where your Scope 3 is, because then you really know where you are, and then you can set strategies and objectives to be able to be more environmentally conscious and socially responsible. And then Spend Control Tower allows you to do that by, if you have the actuals, great. If you don't have the actuals and there's a gap in your data, using AI and generative AI capabilities allows you to, using the right industry average, complete the picture so that at least then you can start towards making some tangible actions to be more responsible. Two things: this architecture has been a long time making for us, so we're really excited to actually announce it now to the customers, because we're already working with some early customers, as you heard from one yesterday in the keynote. But also, this is the same platform that, while it's available from an end-to-end spend perspective as Spend Control Tower, it also powers the in-app analytics and dashboards that exist in Ariba, Fieldglass, and others as well. So it sort of serves that dual purpose. But in the fullness of time, we're going to continue to add more data, both from internal sources but certainly from an external perspective as well, external data sources with our partners to enrich it to then drive real-time insights to the businesses in terms of what's going on. So while it's a huge step forward and I think organizations today will get a tremendous amount of value from it, our excitement in the roadmap and our vision for it is actually much longer than the runway we've covered.
