Building Better Answers With AI Agents: SAP’s Walter Sun

**Sam Ransbotham** (0:02)
Hi, it's Sam. Are you looking for a podcast to help you better understand the future of business and the latest trends in tech? Then I recommend listening to Web3 with A16Z Crypto, hosted by Robert Hackett. The show digs into the ways blockchains intersect with trending topics, from AI to quantum computing. Produced by venture capital firm Andreas & Horowitz, Web3 with A16Z Crypto is a great resource for anyone who wants to learn more about the technology, people, and business ideas driving the next era of digital innovation. Be sure to find and follow Web3 with A16Z Crypto on your favorite podcast listening app or on YouTube.

**Shervin Khodabandeh** (0:56)
How is one enterprise resource planning company thinking about language models, both large and small, to benefit its employees and its customers? Find out on today's episode.

**Walter Sun** (1:08)
I'm Walter Sun from SAP, and you're listening to Me, Myself, and AI.

**Sam Ransbotham** (1:14)
Welcome to Me, Myself, and AI, a podcast on artificial intelligence and business. Each episode, we introduce you to someone innovating with AI. I'm Sam Ransbotham, Professor of Analytics at Boston College. I'm also the AI and Business Strategy Guest Editor at MIT Sloan Management Review.

**Shervin Khodabandeh** (1:32)
And I'm Shervin Khodabandeh, Senior Partner with BCG, and one of the leaders of our AI business. Together, MIT SMR and BCG have been researching and publishing on AI since 2017, interviewing hundreds of practitioners and surveying thousands of companies on what it takes to build and to deploy and scale AI capabilities and really transform the way organizations operate.

**Sam Ransbotham** (2:00)
Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining us. Today, Shervin and I are talking with Walter Sun. He's a Senior Vice President and Head of AI at SAP. Walter, great to have you.

**Walter Sun** (2:10)
Yeah, great to be here. Thank you for having me.

**Sam Ransbotham** (2:12)
Before we start, I wanted the listeners to know that we had a bit of a small world moment when I met Walter. We'll get a little bit into his background later, but we discovered we're both Georgia Tech grads in the same scholarship program. I'm wearing a Georgia Tech shirt for our recording session to make Walter feel at home. I hope it helps.

**Walter Sun** (2:29)
Yeah, excellent. Nice to see you representing the university.

**Sam Ransbotham** (2:32)
All right. Before we get into your background, let's start now. SAP is a European multinational software company based in Germany, largely known for its Enterprise Resource Planning, or ERP. I'm sure we're going to use that acronym today. Walter, first, tell us a bit about your current role at SAP.

**Walter Sun** (2:51)
Sure. Thank you for asking. My role entails working and leading the engineering team to build reusable technologies across the different lines of businesses at SAP. As you mentioned, we have ERP, but we also have many other areas of business applications, including human capital management with success factors. We have CRM solution, as well as procurement with Ariba. We also have travel, which a lot of people are familiar with, Concur, a couple of applications. My team builds technologies, AI technologies in particular, which are reusable by the lines of businesses. We also build them for our developers as well through our business technology platform, where we actually make more than 30 different large language models available. We have this dual consulting capability, which we released, and it helps consulting partners work with our joint customers on things like implementations and cloud migrations. And so the idea is we effectively uploaded with Retrieval Augmented Generation our help documents, our consulting docs, almost as a consultant, you can ask it natural language questions and get responses. And that feature, I mentioned it timely because we're having our annual conference, SAFIRE Conference, May 19th to 21st next week. And we'll talk a little bit more about that as well as other capabilities as agents. But that capability makes it easier for people to onboard to our SAP products.

**Shervin Khodabandeh** (4:11)
Walter, it seems like you're focused on two use cases for AI, or sort of two themes. There's the internal use, and then there's also the external use because you have so much presence within so many different organizations. Let's pick one to talk about first. What are you most excited about?

**Walter Sun** (4:28)
Thank you for asking. I think maybe we'll start with just the fact that we're building access to large language models, but we're not building our own LLM. Because that area has been well-researched and well-developed, and so what we feel like we want to do at SAP is we want to make the best of the technology and make our customers as productive as possible. What we have is basically generative AI Hub, which is in business technology platform, as I mentioned. The Hub has access to more than 30 large language models, and our internal developers can access it, as well as external developers. We provide business benchmarks to different cases, and then recommend the best language model for one's use case. Imagine if you tell me I have a Q&A scenario. It's maybe not super difficult, but it happens 100,000 times a day. Maybe I say, hey, we have all the 35 language models we have, these 27 likely will give you the right answer. So we can recommend one of these 27 Of these 27, we probably would sort them by price to make them as inexpensive for you as possible.