SAP enabling SEA organizations unleash their future with Business AI

Liher Urbizu, President and Managing Director at SAP Southeast Asia believes that AI is no longer confined to niche use cases anymore. Instead, he said it’s being embedded in some of the most fundamental parts of business.

Companies in Southeast Asia continue to benefit and are seeing more value from their AI investments. This was among the findings shared by SAP at the SAP NOW AI Tour Southeast Asia.

According to SAP, some of the most popular AI use cases for organizations in the region between May 2024 and May 2025 include the use of AI to generate expenses using pictures of receipts as well as verifying expenses to ensure compliance with company policy.

When it comes to GenAI, popular use cases among employees include using the technology towrite clear, concise copy in HR applications and create performance goals. Another use case is on integrating key business documents into co-pilots to improve Q&A responses.

“Organizations across Southeast Asia are adopting AI, fast. And, by bringing together enterprise apps and mission critical data, they are realising tangible business benefits in terms of efficiency, growth, and revenue,” said Urbizu.

For Urbizu, SAP’s goal is to integrate AI in every single business process for every single customer in every single country. He highlighted that SAP expects to release about 400 use cases this year. In the region, there are currently more than 345 customers who live with SAP AI. There are also over 60 customers using SAP Joule AI in Southeast Asia.

Enabling this is SAP Labs Singapore. Urbizu pointed out that since its launch in 2022, it has experienced more than 3 times growth in tech talents. Also, over 100 customers around the work are using AI use cases that have been built the team in Singapore.

One customer in the region that is working with SAP to enable AI in their organization is Singapore Airlines. The airline recently launched a Proof of Concept (PoC) with SAP and Digital Industry Singapore address the complex challenge of digitizing procurement contracts.

The PoC was about automating the extraction of contractual rates from PDF-based contracts and migrate them to the Ariba procurement platform. One of the key hurdles in the previous automation efforts was the unstructured, multilingual, and highly varied nature of the contract formats. The PoC delivered promising results, achieving 100% accuracy and completeness for less complex contracts, and over 70% for contracts with greater complexity. It also demonstrated multilingual adaptability for non-English contracts, offering greater efficiencies through optimised translation processes.

SAP Business Suite

During his presentation at the summit, Stephan de Barse (pictured below), President, Global Business Suite Leader at SAP explained that many customers are trying to deliver the best AI use case for their business. However, one the biggest challenge they face is their enterprise landscape which can be a very fragmented landscape of applications.

Barse explained that with a fragmented landscape of applications, moving customer information from the customer applications to other applications, to get order information from app A to app B, and to see supply chain and inventory information from a supply chain application back to a customer application is challenging, even though it’s crucial to run the business.

Another issue for businesses is how they use their data. With these fragmented systems, Barse stated that companies would need to add another layer of complexity if they want to extract all that data from those fragmented systems and put that into a data layer and try to harmonize the data models.

The complexity is that the moment an organization tries to extract data from the source applications, the data gets disconnected from the source application and it loses its rich semantical context. Now, that creates then another issue where SAP estimates that currently businesses spend 80% of their time and budgets in managing this fragile balance between apps and data. That only leaves 20% of their time to actually deliver value to business users.

“It is very much like an iceberg. An iceberg where 80% of the work happens under the surface and only 20% is visible to the business users. Now, we believe that this fragile balance of data and applications breaks down in the era of AI. Why does it break down? It is because you need AI to deliver value, data and the end-to-end business process context to come together. If you think about enabling that in a very fragmented, disconnected landscape, that is close to impossible. And that leaves you with less reliable and less connected AI and an energetic experience. Now, it could be even worse. You now might need to add yet another layer of applications to this already very fragmented system and one integration to support AI. This is suboptimal at best,” explained Barse.

Interestingly, Barse acknowledged that even SAP has not innovated fast enough to deliver a seamless experience where the different applications come together and offer a seamless experience from an application and a data perspective.

“Now, this capacity and integration void, the best of great vendors, came to the forefront and has completely proliferated the enterprise landscape. If we think about the iceberg on the left side and the flywheel on the right side, those two could not be further apart. But you now have a choice. You can either add another application or a data product to an already very fragmented landscape and create more complexity for your business users and move to the iceberg, or you can significantly simplify and move towards the flywheel to get value from bringing apps, data, and AI together,” said Barse.

He added that SAP believes that the differentiation that best of great vendors have been no longer there. And just as the infrastructure layer, while critical, has been commoditized by the clouds, SAP believes that the application layer, while still mission critical to run business processes, will be commoditized in the age of AI. This means a feature here or a feature there, or a slightly better user experience, will all be marginalized with AI.

“What is the alternative? And that's what we call the ‘best of breed as a suite’. This will allow you to take full advantage of the flywheel and at the same time allows you to focus 80% of your time in generating value for the business, rather than the 20% that we've seen before. The business suite, in our mind, is the future. It brings together the broadest portfolio of apps combined with our business data cloud, which is SAP data and non-SAP data being brought together, and then an agentic experience on top. This business suite also has a sovereign cloud component, which is important to some of you,” concluded Barse.