Sanjay Kulkarni, SVP and Global Head of SAP's Global Delivery Hub, explains how a 12,500-strong services organization translates AI ambition into measurable business value - and why people, not technology, remain the decisive factor in every successful enterprise AI transformation.

What does it actually take to move from AI ambition to measurable enterprise value? In this episode, Sanjay Kulkarni - SVP and Global Head of the Delivery Hub within SAP's Customer Value Group - brings a direct, frontline perspective from leading an organization of 12,500 to 13,000 delivery experts, consultants, architects, and project managers who help customers across every SAP solution and industry turn software investments into concrete business outcomes.
Sanjay opens with a clear diagnosis of where enterprise AI conversations have shifted: from exploratory use cases and proof of concepts to hard questions about scale, governance, and ROI. Customers are no longer asking whether AI is interesting. They are asking how to operationalize it, how to put a hard dollar value on it, and how to make it run responsibly at scale across connected global ecosystems.
Three strategic priorities frame the conversation. First, accelerating time to value - customers expect concrete business outcomes from software, not just successful implementations. Second, embedding AI into core processes in ways that produce tangible, measurable results. Third, using AI to make services delivery itself dramatically more efficient, freeing consultants from repetitive tasks to spend more time solving complex business problems. At the heart of all three, Sanjay returns repeatedly to the same conviction: his top three priorities are people, people, and people.
The General Motors case study illustrates the pattern in action. GM - a long-standing SAP customer managing finance, procurement, supply chain, manufacturing, and HR on SAP - has been embedding Joule and Business AI directly into workflows: helping planners identify supply constraints, supporting procurement sourcing decisions, and enabling finance teams to extract real-time insights from operational data. The goal is not AI as a standalone tool but AI woven into the fabric of how the business runs.
The conversation then turns to what separates organizations that have successfully scaled AI from those still running isolated pilots. Sanjay identifies three consistent markers: a business-outcome-first mindset (not a technology-first one), clean and well-governed data, and genuine organizational transformation - with executive sponsorship, change management, workforce enablement, and a culture of continuous learning treated as non-negotiables.
On the evolving role of SAP consultants, he introduces what he calls a "beautiful trifecta": industry and process knowledge, core product capability, and the technology foundation. All three must come together to shift the consultant's role from functional implementer toward strategic partner who works across lines of business to solve real problems.
The episode closes with a leadership principle that applies well beyond SAP: stop thinking about AI as automation of existing processes, and start rethinking which decisions should remain human, which should be AI-assisted, and which can be fully autonomous. Accountability, Sanjay argues, is not reduced by automation. If anything, it is strengthened.

Manos Raptopoulos, SAP’s Global President Customer Success EMEA & APAC, joins Julia Kloppenburg and Benedikt Gieger on what turns AI adoption into real transformation, how regions differ, and what the autonomous enterprise takes across the world.

Manos Raptopoulos, Global President Customer Success for Europe, APAC, Middle East & Africa at SAP, joins Julia Kloppenburg and Benedikt Gieger for a journey across a region that spans from the industrial powerhouses of Germany and Japan to the fast growing digital economies of the Middle East and Asia. They explore what separates the organizations achieving measurable business value from those simply deploying more AI, where customers are most eager to experiment with AI and where they need reassurance and trust, and what companies really expect from SAP as a long term partner beyond contracts, licenses and SLAs. Manos shares a customer story that made him proud, practical advice on where to start on the path to the autonomous enterprise, and the one thing every leader needs to get right. It is a transformation that is anything but uniform, yet universal in its ambition from Walldorf to Tokyo, Riyadh, Lagos and Munich.

A look inside Essity: Daniele Tedesco, Global Process Owner (eCom & CX), joins Julia Kloppenburg and Benedikt Gieger on running global digital commerce, and how customer experience, reliability and trusted AI shape the path to the autonomous enterprise.

Daniele Tedesco, Global Process Owner (eCom & CX) at Essity, joins Julia Kloppenburg and Benedikt Gieger to discuss how the global hygiene and health company is approaching the autonomous enterprise. They talk through Essity's perspective on customer experience as the driver: running truly global digital commerce operations across consumer and B2B channels, pairing reliability and flexibility on the S/4HANA and SAP Commerce Cloud backbone, and building trust with both employees and customers as AI and automation move into everyday operations.

Interview with Sindhu Gangadharan, MD of SAP Labs India and Head of Customer Industry Solutions at SAP, on how Indian enterprises are adopting business AI and autonomous enterprise capabilities.

In this episode, Julia Kloppenburg welcomes Sindhu Gangadharan, Managing Director of SAP Labs India and Head of Customer Industry Solutions at SAP, to explore how Indian enterprises are embracing the Autonomous Enterprise vision. Sindhu shares how customers reacted post-Sapphire, which industries in India are moving fastest and how her team turns the Autonomous Enterprise vision into concrete customer projects through co-innovation and design thinking. The conversation also covers governance models, the importance of CEO-led AI strategies, upskilling as a board priority, balancing global strategy with local Indian market requirements, and what to expect in enterprise AI adoption over the next two to three years.

Insights from the CEO and Chief Community Champion of ASUG, the Americas’ SAP User Group, on how SAP customers are adopting the Autonomous Enterprise, trust in AI agents and closing the skill gap.

This is a special episode as for the first time we recorded in video format, in the podcast studio in Walldorf, with Geoff Scott, CEO and Chief Community Champion of ASUG, the largest independent SAP user community in the world. In an exchange with Julia Kloppenburg and Benedikt Gieger, he shares the honest customer reaction to SAP's Autonomous Enterprise vision, discusses whether organizations still on ECC can realistically pursue AI-driven transformation, and explores what it takes for customers to trust AI agents in core business processes. We also cover the skills gap, the evolving role of SAP partners, and ASUG's influence on shaping SAP's strategy through customer feedback.

A look inside Uniper: Achim Löbke, Head of Digital Enablement & Automation, joins Julia Kloppenburg and Benedikt Gieger on enablement as the foundation for the autonomous enterprise and the shift toward AI agents.

Achim Löbke, Head of Digital Enablement & Automation at Uniper, joins Julia Kloppenburg and Benedikt Gieger to discuss together how the energy company is approaching the autonomous enterprise. They talk through Uniper's perspective on enablement as the foundation: bringing people along, driving digital transformation toward autonomous AI agents, and pairing automation with the enablement it takes to give end users seamless support as agents move into everyday operations.

Stephan Klein talks about what it takes to move from AI enablement to real transformation in the enterprise, and what autonomous domain blueprints mean in practice.

In this episode, Julia Kloppenburg and Benedikt Gieger talk with Stephan Klein, Chief Business and Delivery Officer for Customer Engagement and Adoption at SAP.

Stephan supports the Agentic AI Zone initiative. In this conversation, they dig into what good delivery actually looks like today, why enablement and transformation are not the same thing, and where most organisations get stuck when trying to move forward with AI. They also talk about what it means to shift from human-centric workflows to machine-centric process design, and why that mindset shift is harder than most teams expect.

The episode also touches on where enterprise AI is heading: from assistants to agents to fully autonomous business domains, and what that means for how organisations will operate in the next few years.

Augusta Spinelli, SAP's President for Europe, Middle East and Africa, joins Julia Kloppenburg and Benedikt Gieger on the two paths to the autonomous enterprise: RISE with SAP and SAP Grow, agent-led transformation, and moving from ambition to execution.

Augusta Spinelli joins Julia Kloppenburg and Benedikt Gieger to unpack the two paths to the autonomous enterprise: RISE with SAP for established enterprises and SAP Grow for fast-scaling companies, both leading to a modern, AI-enabled cloud ERP. Augusta explains what the autonomous enterprise means in practice, the role of clean core, and the new agent-led toolchain in RISE that embeds AI directly into the transformation. She also covers how eligible customers can bring Joule assistants and agents to their on-prem systems during the hybrid transition, the four pillars of SAP Grow, and the one thing leaders need to get right: building a solid data and process foundation.