About Christian Klein
Christian Klein, CEO of SAP, stated during a July 24 Bloomberg interview that the company was "very happy" with its second-quarter performance, citing accelerated cloud growth and noting that 90% of cloud deals included AI. He described AI as a "disruption to the software industry" but argued that SAP's value lies in its ability to provide business context and domain logic that large language models lack. Klein emphasized that SAP maintains an open platform with APIs and third-party agent integration, and said the company sees "not one winner" in the AI layer for ERP. Following the departure of chief product officer Muhammed Alam, Klein took over oversight of development, saying that "it's good to be close to development these days" as the company shifts from coding features to coding AI agents.
On the July 23 earnings call, Klein said customers are realizing they need to "modernize" ERP landscapes alongside AI adoption, and noted that "a lot of customers" are choosing to do both with SAP. He discussed the company's AI agent hub and its new end-to-end user experience, Jewel Work, which has 4,000 internal users. Regarding pricing, Klein stated that "with AI... we can completely reset the price level" toward outcome-based pricing. He also said SAP had adjusted hiring plans and would "nowhere near" hire the number of people planned at the beginning of the year, citing increased productivity from AI tools.
Source: AI-verified profile updated from Christian Klein's recent appearances.
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Transcript (12 segments)
C
Christian Klein0:04
Jeremy, welcome to Sapphire. Look at all of these people. Is this your first time at Sapphire?
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Jeremy Barnum0:10
It is my first time, indeed. It's impressive and intimidating.
C
Christian Klein0:16
Every day, JPMorgan Chase serves millions of customers, and you're actually facilitating trillions of dollars in transactions. So clearly, technology is the backbone of your company. How do you manage the trade-off between fast innovation without compromising on risk and compliance?
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Jeremy Barnum0:36
Yeah, so let me give you a sense of that scale. We serve over 86 million U.S. customers and 7 million small businesses, and we process about 12 trillion in payments across 120 currencies every day, and technology is the backbone of all of that. It's what allows us to serve our clients seamlessly and securely. But that scale brings complexity, which can slow you down and introduce risk. So we're very focused on moving fast without compromising safety. And that means investing in common tools and platforms that are easily deployed and available firm-wide. So in that context, SAP has been a critical partner for us. And one particularly notable recent milestone in that partnership has been our decision to invest in a major upgrade of our general ledger to SAP's latest version, in order to bring our entire financial ecosystem into one unified, intelligent platform.
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Christian Klein1:36
So, Jeremy, I mean, when we talk about scale, this is scale. So we are super proud to be your partner on this journey. Now this morning we talked about how to make AI successful in business. Now for you, especially as a bank, 80% accuracy is not an option. Now, how can SAP and JPMorgan, how do we work together to make AI more accurate?
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Jeremy Barnum2:00
Yeah, I agree. I have to say at JPMorgan Chase, we like our unicorns with only two ears. Please. Thank you very much. It's very important. But no, AI is the most significant trend in technology in a generation and frankly, in society at large in a generation. And as a result, everyone, I think all of us, are experiencing pressure to use it everywhere. But in a finance organization, the risk of that is that you sprinkle AI on broken processes, and you miss the opportunity to retire technical debt and modernize the entire ecosystem. So from our perspective, AI is only as good as the data and processes underneath it. It can't reach its full potential in a fragmented legacy environment. So we're very focused on end-to-end process re-engineering. And through RISE with SAP, we're embedding intelligence directly into the workflows. We're already starting to integrate agents to make the day-to-day management of the ledger more efficient. One example is an upstream agentic solution that proactively catches issues with systemic feeds, so we can correct them before anything posts to the ledger. And over time, it learns patterns so we can fix root causes permanently. Importantly, the agents that we've built are not inventing their own business rules. Those rules, rather, come directly from SAP's embedded control framework, and every AI-driven intervention is logged and fully traceable, giving us the transparency and audit trail that we and our various stakeholders expect.
C
Christian Klein3:34
Sounds like music to me. JPMorgan Chase and SAP. You are not only a customer to us, we are also partners. We are partners in the payment space. We are embedding banking services of JPMorgan Chase into SAP's workflows for our joint customers. So what is your view on our partnership and any ideas for the future?
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Jeremy Barnum3:57
Yeah. Now the partnership between JPMorgan Payments and SAP combines enterprise software and AI expertise with an extensive set of integrated payment solutions at real scale. What this means in practice is that clients can seamlessly access JPMorgan Payment solutions directly within their SAP system, everything from trade finance and real-time reporting to global payment rails without leaving the workflows they already operate in. We're continuing to develop new solutions together that enhance digital experiences and help our clients grow. And this partnership is only getting deeper. We're now beginning to work with the SAP team on exploring agentic capabilities to create a much more automated and intelligent treasury environment for our joint customers.
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Christian Klein4:44
Could not have said it better. Jeremy, if you could summarize our partnership in a few words.
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Jeremy Barnum4:51
Sure, Christian, I can do that. I'm going to use three words: scale, speed, and trust.
C
Christian Klein4:57
Perfect. Jeremy, first of all, thanks a lot for the trust, for the partnership, the AI co-innovation. And I wish you, and JPMorgan Chase only the very best.
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Jeremy Barnum5:08
Thank you very much. Thanks a lot.
