THE AI INTERVIEW
W alter Sun arrived at SAP in 2023 from Microsoft with a specific brief: solve the application chaos that forces enterprise employees to navigate dozens of systems just to complete basic tasks. Now, as SVP and Global Head of AI at SAP, he oversees the company’ s attempt to convert that complexity into a single conversational interface.
The challenge is familiar to anyone who has worked in a large organisation. Booking travel requires logging into Concur. Hiring staff means opening SuccessFactors. Checking customer data involves yet another system. SAP’ s answer is Joule, an AI assistant launched in September 2023 that aims to handle tasks across the company’ s entire application portfolio.
“ The biggest value driver for business AI for SAP is that we actually have products in all different lines of businesses,” Walter explains during an interview at SAP Sapphire 2025.“ So if you’ re a business, you could potentially have SAP applications from your ERP to your Human Capital Management and SuccessFactors, you use Concur for travel. And the fact that we have all the different systems and AI underneath all of it is that you can actually connect the dots to all of them.”
Walter leads SAP’ s AI product engineering organisation, which builds reusable technologies for its Business Technology Platform. Document extraction capabilities built once can power expense processing in
“ The biggest value driver for business AI for SAP is that we actually have products in all different lines of businesses”
WALTER SUN, SVP, GLOBAL HEAD OF AI, SAP
Concur, invoice handling in supply chain systems, and financial ledger analysis. The approach contrasts with building separate AI tools for each business application.
Joule now covers 80 % of common scenarios across the company’ s business applications: substantial progress towards SAP’ s goal of embedding over 130 outof-the-box AI capabilities across its cloud portfolio by 2025. The assistant operates through what SAP calls“ omnipresence” – maintaining conversational context while executing tasks across multiple systems that would traditionally require separate logins and navigation paths.
“ Because Joule is omnipresent and it also has history, you can actually ask a question and chat with it like you chat with a human assistant,” Walter describes.“ Say, look, I need to go to Sapphire. Book me a trip to Orlando, it goes to Concur and does that. And then a few minutes later say, oh, I need to hire
42 August 2025