[DigitalToday reporter Chi-gyu Hwang] SAP CEO Christian Klein (크리스티안 클라인) said at a Goldman Sachs investment conference that he is focusing on developing AI agents that automate the most complex corporate business processes.

Constellation Research said on Wednesday that Klein said executive conversations used to mostly stay on cloud migration, but AI is now the central topic. He said companies want to automate business processes and manage AI agents more easily.

He also said SAP ERP handles the world’s most complex business processes. He added that SAP will launch only agents that solve customers’ complex tasks, rather than easy assignments that any large language model can handle.

SAP is also placing weight on the accuracy of AI agents. Klein stressed that data, ontology and the business data cloud are very important, adding that while a semantic layer can be built with Palantir, SAP’s out-of-the-box coverage is broader.

SAP plans to work with Snowflake and Databricks to handle external data as well.

Klein said many customers, even for simple AI use cases, ask about ID management, authorisation, agent read, change and write permissions, and compliance requirements such as U.S. FedRAMP or German bureaucratic regulations. He said those requirements are already addressed within SAP ERP, but become problems to solve again when customers operate agents themselves. He added that SAP will directly manage all agents, regardless of whether SAP, partners or customers build them. He said SAP Joule Studio is not tied to any specific model and chooses the model with the best price and performance.

Klein said such AI use cases are premised on migration to the cloud and a transition to S/4HANA. He said 60 percent of on-premises customers have not yet moved to the cloud, adding there is a lot of work ahead.