The new resilience: automating to innovate

For Jan Gilg, SAP's co-chief revenue officer and head of the Americas market and the global Business Suite, thriving within today's economic climate and technology imperatives isn't about avoiding disruption. It's about using the agility those challenges cultivate to drive innovation.

That can start with understanding what's proprietary about your business versus what's a process most businesses rely on. Gilg refers to this as "standardizing where you don't differentiate." In other words, automating standard processes that don't create value.

The question, Gilg then posed, is "where is the innovation happening?" In his view, determining which area of their enterprise management tech stack to target for innovation can be as critical as the areas of the world where they do business.

"I see that as being located on the layer above automated processes, where you can tap into your data," said Gilg.

"It's really about having an integrated set of business applications based on harmonized data models and a unified user experience." That, Gilg said, "is where you build your innovation and drive the most valuable business outcomes."

Innovation atop automation

The SAP Business Suite — where SAP's core applications, data, and AI come together — supports this operational layering: connecting processes with modular business applications, on top of which AI and other innovations can cut through complexity to supercharge transformation.

The symbiosis the suite strikes between automation and innovation is in step with the current global C Suite perspective. In surveying 3,000 C-suite executives for its recent Pulse of Change report, Accenture found that 39% of organizations are accelerating automation to mitigate the impact of tariffs. Nearly 70% reported seeing AI as a driver of revenue growth, with half saying they would accelerate AI investment even in a recession.

To turn this resolve around AI into real ROI, Gilg and his team advocate a unified, intelligent approach that can yield insights from increasingly dense data and create system-wide visibility to drive business outcomes. This, a key foundation in the architecture of the SAP Business Suite, creates the ability to keep pace with rapid technological shifts. This includes agility to onboard emerging technology, like the current rise of AI agents — autonomous and proactive taskmasters empowered to pursue pre ordained goals.

Enterprise management in the age of agents

Signaling their momentum in business applications, earnings-call mentions of AI agents quadrupled across the fourth quarter of 2024, according to analysis by CB Insights. The group also found that more than 60% of leaders place high importance on AI agent deployment over the coming year.

Watch episode 1 of the new Beyond Resilience vodcast, featuring Jan Gilg, here.

Gilg sees the rise of agentic AI as analogous to the early days of the SaaS movement, when individual software vendors would bring customers a solution for a single need, creating a patchwork system that IT teams found difficult to integrate. Those arduous integrations as companies migrated from on premises to the cloud are a reason SAP worked to make its native AI agents compatible from inception.

"I believe we are really at the brink of a new era of intelligent operations. Because agents don't care about organizational silos, and they just want to get the job done as efficiently as possible. That's why I really think we will see another leapfrog now in terms of productivity gains."

"Having your agents communicate with each other out of the box is a huge advantage with the Business Suite," Gilg said. They can hand over tasks along a process and get work done end-to-end. That way you can address much more complex scenarios."

Gilg also draws on his background overseeing on-premise to cloud transitions to understand that customers won't accept breaks in the fluidity of hand-offs between AI agents — an orchestrated flow built into the ways SAP supports agentic infrastructure.

"I know it sounds futuristic," he said, "but the workforce of the future in my mind will be a hybrid force between humans and agents."

On the horizon: uncertainty tempered by insight

That future also appears to be one characterized by uncertainty. In its most recent quarterly survey of global financial professionals to determine economic outlook, the Association of International Certified Professional Accountants found that confidence in their own organizations' prospects fell from 50% in the first quarter of the year to only 37% as of May. The global outlook held by these leaders dropped 10 points between surveys, with only 19% expressing optimism.

"Every C-level leader feels the pressure to do more with less," Gilg said. The bright side, as he sees it, is that technology has matured to the point it can deliver on that need.

"I truly believe companies have an opportunity right now to modernize their IT to really embrace that: to have a hard look into how to optimize the way they're working and leapfrog in productivity gains and insights."

The outcome of that ERP modernization, he promised, will be unprecedented insight and foresight.

"Suddenly, you'll see far above and beyond the four walls of your enterprise, allowing you to see disruptions much, much earlier. And that creates a much more sustainable resilience."

Explore the SAP Business Suite here.

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