Yesterday’s emerging tech is now essential to business success — and the next wave is coming fast. To maintain competitive advantage through the next five years, which innovations must forward-thinking companies prioritize right now?
At VentureBeat’s Transform 2025, Yaad Oren, global head of SAP research & innovation and Emma Brunskill, associate professor of computer science at Stanford, spoke with moderator Susan Etlinger, senior director, strategy and thought leadership, Azure AI Microsoft, about the strategies needed today, for tomorrow’s transformative technology.
How the current landscape will shape the future
The fourth generation of AI — generative AI — marks a paradigm shift in what AI brings to the table, Oren said, outlining three major places it’s bringing significant value and disruption to the enterprise. The first is the user experience and how people interact with software. The second is automation on the application layer — SAP has embedded approximately 230 AI capabilities and agents inside its applications, and plan increase this number to 400 by the end of 2025, to drive increased productivity and reduce costs. The third area is the platform — the core engine that powers each enterprise — which raises new questions about the developer experience, as well as privacy and trust.
“We see a lot of disruption around UX, the application, and the platform itself that provides all the tools to deal with this new treasure trove of options AI provides to enterprises,” Oren summed up.
For Brunskill, the big question is how AI can integrate with humans to drive societal value, rather than acting like a thief of human creativity and ingenuity. A recent study found that if the enterprise framed AI tools as productivity enhancing, people will use them much less frequently than if they’re framed as task enhancing.
“That’s a pretty big take-home as we think about how to translate some of the extraordinary capabilities of these systems into systems that drive value for customers, for organizations and others,” Brunskill said. “We need to think about how these are framed.”
Business value at the enterprise level should be top of mind, Oren added, and that means even as technology evolves, AI in the enterprise needs to go beyond technology for technology’s sake. The sexiest new technology often delivers the least value.
“What you see today is a proliferation of many solutions out there that create great jumping avatars in movies that look amazing, but the value: how do you help the enterprise reduce costs? How do you help the enterprise increase productivity or revenue? How are you able to mitigate risk?” he said. “This mindset is not fully there with AI. You always need to start with a business problem. Quantify the value you would like to achieve.”
Predictions for the future of AI
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