SAP CTO Philipp Herzig Explains SAP’s Enterprise AI Strategy at Sapphire

Bob Evans speaks with SAP CTO Philipp Herzig from SAP Sapphire in Orlando about SAP’s AI strategy, platform evolution, customer modernization challenges, governance, and enterprise-scale agent deployment. Herzig lays out SAP’s positioning around openness, business AI, autonomous agents, security, and migration support, while addressing confusion around API policy changes and fair-use limits. SAP’s AI Inflection Point The Big Themes: SAP’s AI Platform Is Becoming Cohesive: A major theme in the conversation is that SAP is presenting a more integrated AI vision rather than a collection of disconnected announcements. Herzig describes a layered architecture spanning UX, autonomous assistants, business process orchestration, governance, and the underlying AI platform. The emphasis is on a consistent enterprise AI framework rather than isolated tools. Migration Support Is Becoming Strategic: Migration is no longer framed as a technical back-office concern. Instead, it's becoming a strategic AI enabler. Herzig discusses SAP’s toolchain investments, including LeanIX, Signavio, migration automation, testing support, code modernization, and agent-assisted implementation. The idea is to reduce friction in modernization so customers can reach AI readiness faster. Instead of treating migration as merely an ERP upgrade journey, SAP increasingly positions it as foundational infrastructure for enterprise AI transformation. Change Management Extends Beyond Technology: Herzig acknowledges that deploying AI agents is not simply a software problem, it’s an organizational transformation issue. While SAP can accelerate technical deployment through tooling, governance, observability, and automation, customers must still rethink workflows, roles, and operating models. The discussion around developer productivity, AI-assisted coding, and human-agent collaboration reinforces this broader perspective. The Big Quote: ““There are good agents out there… there’s also a lot of really bad agents out there… and they, of course, set the enterprise system under risk.” More from SAP and Philipp Herzig: Connect with Philipp Herzig on Linkedin or learn about SAP Sapphire. Visit Cloud Wars for more.