SAP: Agents Will Enhance Apps, Not Turn to CRUD

Welcome to the Cloud Wars Minute — your daily cloud news and commentary show. Each episode provides insights and perspectives around the “reimagination machine” that is the cloud.

In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I break down SAP’s bold rebuttal to the “apps collapse” narrative.

Highlights

00:12 — I’m here at SAP Sapphire. SAP believes that agents will enhance applications rather than turning them into CRUD databases, as Microsoft and ServiceNow believe. Muhammad Alam, the executive board member at SAP for Products and Technology, said the big change that AI will bring is not the demise of the applications layer.

01:36 — In fact, quite the opposite. Alam said that when applications are paired with data and AI, as SAP is doing very aggressively, he said that trifecta will lead to what he called a flywheel effect — that this is going to bring considerably new insight, new opportunities, new productivity, new speed, and more.

02:34 — With the richness of the Business Data Cloud, SAP says, and the enhancement of applications with AI agents, these applications will continue to be that connective tissue that ties processes together. Alam says with the Business Data Cloud, the new Business Suite, and Business AI, there will be an end-to-end view of processes, data, and functions

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03:22 — We’re seeing sort of a lineup of two different camps here. On the one side, you have Microsoft and ServiceNow: agents are going to turn applications into little more than these CRUD databases that function deeply in the background. Then you’ve got SAP (also Oracle, Salesforce, and Workday) saying, no, agents are going to enhance applications.

04:20 — Executives across the Cloud Wars Top 10 have to think hard about how they articulate where this agent-AI interplay is going to happen. If they’ve just spent $10, $50, $100, or $150 million dollars on applications as part of a bigger transformation, is that money just flushed down the drain? Or is this going to be an enduring opportunity to make applications even more powerful?

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