SAP boss Christian Klein sees historic growth opportunities through AI products

SAP boss Christian Klein sees a historic opportunity for significant growth for his group through new AI products. “The greatest opportunity for a further real push is currently opening up for SAP,” said Klein to the German Press Agency in Berlin. Investors expected sales to accelerate. “The chance that SAP will once again outgrow itself has never been greater,” said Klein. SAP wants to exploit a “unique advantage” through its corporate management software, industrial knowledge and wealth of data.

Klein, who grew up not far from the headquarters, has been with SAP since 1999 and has been CEO since 2019. Klein is currently focusing the software company heavily on new business with AI products, after initiating a shift in business to the cloud in previous years.

SAP presented the “autonomous company” at a customer conference in mid-May in the USA. A uniform AI platform is intended to optimize customers’ business processes. According to Klein, SAP AI agents should be anchored in business processes, data and company management, deliver results and save costs.

Klein: AI in the corporate world is about to make a broad breakthrough

SAP has also made good progress with the further development of software and applications, said Klein. “But AI agents give our customers - and therefore us - a completely different lever,” said the 46-year-old company leader. “In the corporate world, AI is currently on the verge of a widespread breakthrough,” said Klein. Now it's about demonstrating the strengths of your own platform to customers on a large scale. “We are seeing great progress and are convinced that SAP agents will ultimately produce better results,” said Klein. However, relying solely on the large language models from well-known AI companies would have made SAP interchangeable.

“Our AI agents achieve enormous productivity gains,” said Klein. He thinks that customers are gradually transferring more and more responsibility to agents. “But an AI agent will not act 100 percent autonomously in critical company areas in the future,” said Klein. In the end, someone is always responsible.

SAP is one of the most valuable DAX companies. In 2025, the group's revenue rose by eight percent to 36.8 billion euros thanks to the strong growth in cloud software. The bottom line was a net profit of 7.5 billion euros.