From its early days building ERP systems in Germany, SAP has evolved to become a backbone of global business. Today, many of the largest companies in the world depend on SAP systems to run everything from financial accounting and supply chain management to e-commerce and data analytics, making the company’s strategic choices uniquely consequential.
When Christian Klein became CEO in 2020, he made a bold call: Move SAP decisively into the cloud and prepare the company for an AI‑driven future. Now, he argues that while AI is rapidly advancing, its effectiveness depends on a few things only SAP can offer at scale.
In this episode of Exceptional Leaders, European Software analyst Adam Wood sits down with Klein at SAP’s headquarters in Waldorf, Germany to discuss SAP’s cloud shift, its AI ambitions, and why human insight and collaboration still matter—even as intelligent agents become ubiquitous.
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