Sap

Software in the Age of Agents | The a16z Show

Software in the Age of Agents | The a16z Show

This conversation explores the shift in enterprise software as AI agents become primary users, moving towards 'headless' architectures where data and logic, rather than UIs, hold key value. It delves into the enduring stickiness of systems like SAP, driven by deep business process codification, and highlights that 'exception handling' is central to enterprise complexity. The discussion identifies new startup opportunities arising from AI, focusing on enhancing existing systems and bridging organizational functions rather than direct competition.

SAP: Bringing the ‘Operating System’ of a Company into the AI Era with CTO Philipp Herzig

SAP: Bringing the ‘Operating System’ of a Company into the AI Era with CTO Philipp Herzig

SAP CTO Philipp Herzig discusses the company's AI-driven transformation, focusing on three core pillars: generative UI, AI-native business processes, and a unified data layer. He explores the primary challenges to enterprise AI adoption—scale, data fragmentation, and security—while emphasizing the critical role of verifiability and "agent mining" in creating reliable, compounding value. Herzig also details the limitations of LLMs for predictive analytics on tabular data and introduces SAP's alternative, Relational Pre-trained Transformers (RPT1).