Episode 181: The Role of AI Across SAP Business Network with SAP's Atena Reyhani

And you mentioned the autonomous enterprise, and I've been hearing a lot about that on autonomous supply chains in the last few months.

But let's talk about it in real world scenarios.

What are some tangible examples of large scale business problems that companies are solving and the trend towards increasingly autonomous B2B commerce? How can SAP help in that space?

Well, I think a real opportunity here is really going from these isolated automations that are within functions and even within companies to this intelligent cross enterprise orchestration.

So when we really think about it, when agents can really act on network data, not just internal data within a system or internal data for a function, I really believe that we are going to be finally having the opportunity to to go from firefighting to really shaping business outcomes, right? There are so many examples of this across procurement, across finance, across supply chain.

So you ask about the tangible example.

Let's take order prioritization, for example, right? The use case that really balances revenue, it balances service levels, inventory, sales.

production constraints all together all across multiple parties in real time right and then it does simulations on top of it for proactive disruption management right and as a result we are looking at surfacing recommendations around alternative configurations around alternative sourcing strategies redistributions to just take those as some examples These are all before these disruptions, before this like a shortage, let's say, hits the P&L, right? So if you really think about it, these are not incremental speed ups.

These are really solving multi-party collaboration problems that We're previously, I think, just too complex, too fragmented, too slow to be able to really address at the scale.

So that's the opportunity.

Opportunity is really going from my process is automated.

I think it's great, right? But this is shift from my process is automated to my whole ecosystem is connected and it's intelligent.

That's a great example because it's not a point solution.

It's solving an end-to-end business problem.

And I think that the challenge with technology today and AI in particular is it's a technology looking for a problem to solve sometimes.

And we should be looking at it the other way around.

Exactly.

Because we're hearing AI everywhere and it seems to be the answer to everything.

But we're also hearing it popping up from a supply chain perspective at ever increasing frequency.

So why does generative and agentic AI solutions lend themselves so well to the supply chains and the business problems that we're seeing across supply chains?