Some SAP board members told Klein to build only on OpenAI. He refused.
SAP CEO Christian Klein told diginomica this week that members of his Supervisory Board pushed him three years ago to stand the whole company on one model vendor: "There were people in my Supervisory Board who told me three years…
SAP CEO Christian Klein told diginomica this week that members of his Supervisory Board pushed him three years ago to stand the whole company on one model vendor: "There were people in my Supervisory Board who told me three years ago, 'Let's bet the whole company on OpenAI.'"
He did not do it. Klein said it is sometimes worth holding your own opinion and strategy rather than following what everyone tells you.
What SAP runs instead, in his words: "We have agents which have seen in the meantime five different models because we see that not one model always delivers the best outcome."
SAP says it can move a workload onto a different model inside a day, according to diginomica, and shifts to open-weight models when they match the frontier ones at lower total cost.
Klein said buyers increasingly ask for the total cost of ownership of tokens, because they can see token spend running away. OpenAI is not quoted in the piece.
Two things are worth separating. Redirecting an inference call is a technical change. Swapping the model under a live ERP process also means regression testing, audit evidence and revalidating the controls built on the old one.
How long would that second version take in your organisation?
Sources
Our file on SAP
- 20 Sept
SAP's chief executive said voice replaces much data entry in three years.
- 19 Sept
KPMG cut jobs in its SAP and AI teams. Partners averaged £880,000.
- 17 Sept
Broadcom raised VMware prices by 10x or more, European cloud providers say.
- 17 Sept
Grocery Outlet's SAP launch cut gross margin by almost 2 points.
- 11 Sept
Zeiss dropped the clean rebuild of its SAP after about €200 million.
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Welcome back. · Issue 01