SAP SE Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference 2026

Yeah, thanks for having me, Mou.

Yeah. That's a lot in this question. Let's start with the geopolitical situation. I mean, throughout the whole year, we were always mentioning the geopolitical conflict, especially in the Middle East. I mean, now we are so much into the year that I can say, at least for SAP, we don't see now an impact at a global scale. Obviously, the Middle East is not a small business for us, so it's a very well-run business for SAP, but definitely it will not have an impact now on the cloud revenue anymore. Now on CCB for Q4, obviously, it's still a sizable business, but that's why it could have a certain swing, but it's not something what we are heavily concerned about anymore.

Now, the board level, the C-level conversations, and I can also shed some light on the conversations we're having with our ecosystem and partners, where you also hear a lot about what they are hearing from the market and the customers. I mean, when we are going to send our customers to the cloud, I mean, 12 months ago to 24 months ago, it was more about, "Okay, Christian, let's get it done. Automate my business processes. Let's get rid of the custom code and show me the outcome of the RISE journey. So how are you going to make it work together with us?" Now, the C-level conversation is, "Christian, I can't wait another 12 months for these business processes to be automated or infused with intelligence via AI." So AI is now in every conversation.

Yeah. Even if the customers in the C-level doesn't have really a concrete idea, they just want to see AI connected to it.

And that's why when we are now doing this, it's very important for us to really look into, first of all, what business use cases have the best ROI. Customers also are asking more and more for, okay, the TCO token because they see the token spend running away. And then the last piece, which I feel is a very good sign for all the announcements we did at Sapphire, is that customers who even did build some agents with open-weight models on third-party platforms, they are coming saying, "Christian, I'm honestly completely overwhelmed my IT organization by making sure that these agents deliver the right outcome." Accuracy is a big problem oftentimes. And the governance of these agents.

I mean, we have so many compliance requirements, audibility of a financial close. Payroll needs to run 100% perfect. So a lot of customers are saying, "Hey, SAP, can you not do this for us before my IT teams are dying a lot of complexity on running and managing those agents?

Yeah. Being here in San Francisco, memories are coming back at the time when I was the CFO of SuccessFactors, and right after the acquisition, we did not have so many good times, also with some other acquisitions, not integrated, sitting on a stack which was not really scalable, not performing. I mean, that has changed a lot. Looking at the CCB quotes of 26% in Q2, it is not only S/4. All LOBs are winning market share, and I am so happy that when we did this cloud move, a lot of customers were really quite concerned, "Oh, how do we do this? Are the products competitive," et cetera. In the meantime, we are winning market share in all LOBs, which was definitely not the case in 2 or 3 years.

Also the channel is performing even better than our direct sales, which I always find a good indicator that we are not only converting install base to the cloud, but that also we are winning a lot of new family members with SAP. Also here in the Valley, a lot of startups who want to scale their business say, "Okay, SAP has localization for over 100 countries. The platform works." Public cloud end-to-end, why not SAP? Also some private investors are saying, "Okay, let us really close a framework contract for our SAP because our startups should just use the best platform to scale their business." That is good. Going forward, we talk a lot about AI, but in my financial plan for the next years, still there is 60% of our installed base is not yet in the cloud.

There is stuff to come, work to be done. Just this morning, I talked to Julie Sweet from Accenture, and she asked me, "Christian, I have so many SAP consultants. How long will this party continue?" I said, "This party will continue, but in a different way and form." Also for the customers who are now moving to the cloud because they want to be moved to the cloud with AI tooling, with the AI use cases, which are then showing them the value and not just do a technical migration. There is enough potential also on the cloud side. The maintenance is coming to an end, standard maintenance. 2030 is then the end of the extended maintenance, and again, 3 years sometimes for such a ERP modernization is not a long time.

But again, it is not even the dominating factor for the next years why to move to the cloud. Even some customers who moved before my tenure as a CEO to S/4 on-prem, they see now the value with AI and to make the move to the cloud. Yes, there is enough business left to be converted. Yes, I am not seeing that our subscription business will decline. It is just the opposite. I still see very healthy growth. Maybe one last piece, which is maybe also important for the audience to understand. When now Lockheed Martin, BMW, and others are coming say, "Christian, we need more features in our S/4 system." I said, "Features? I would love to talk about agents." So how can we convert that? Even there, we are now seeing that we see a lot of growth also in the subscription business by adding features.