 Hi, this is Yoosupan Bharti and we are here at SAP Safari event in Orlando. And today we have with us Ritu Bhargav, President and Chief Product Officer SAP Industries and Customer Experience. Ritu is great to have you on the show. It's great to be here. Thank you so much for having me. Before we start this discussion, I would love to hear if you folks, since we are at the event, any announcement that were key or highlight for you? Oh my God! So there are three announcements that we made today. The first one I'm very excited about, which is CX is now entering the market of industry tailored applications. So think of these as custom built applications for the industry that you operate in. So if you're in retail or consumer product or automotive or utilities and many, many more health sciences, we have applications that will cater to your unique needs. So that's the first one. The second one is our entry into not just generative AI, but we have been working on a proprietary AI model technology, which we are calling as the SAP Digital Assistant. And so think of it as a contextual and a proactive assistant that sits on top of any application, any context that you use in SAP. So if you are in a browser, if you're in an email, if you're in the SAP system, this application brings the contextual and the operational data together to power all of those experiences. So you're not just looking at a supplier order. You're not just looking at data from one of the systems, but you're looking at all of the systems. So that is the SAP Digital Assistant that we are announcing today. And the third one is SAP ReCommerce. Think of this as our answer to sustainability in the commerce angle. So reuse, reduce, recycle. This is where if you have returns managed, returns of goods, what do you do with those returns of goods? You bring it back, but you also want to surface it back to your suppliers and it helps with the sustainability of a lot of consumer products, for example. Excellent. And there's something to talk about all of these announcements. But I want to go back to the customer experience. Talk a bit about these days we are talking about customer experience a lot, especially during the COVID era when everybody moves through the cloud. Digital experience was becoming very, very important. I don't know how important it was earlier, but a lot of focus we are paying now. So talk about how you have seen the evolution of customer experience and its importance. It doesn't matter which industry one is operating in. We all have been buying goods. We all have been going online. And then sometimes we not only go online, we go and we look at, okay, how is this going to be available in store? And you have done this too. You have gone and looked online. You bought it in store or you have looked it in the store. You bought it online. Normal stuff happens. And then you place the order and you get a notification that this is out of stock. How many times has that happened to you? It does happen once in a while. Once you place the order, add to the card and suddenly it's not in the stock anymore. Right? Or even you place the order and then you get a cancelled order because, hey, you know what? This is not in our inventory. And this is where SAP's Intelligent CX is going to change it. It's a differentiator because SAP has uniquely the data, which is the inventory data, the supply chain data, the operational processes data, which means that if I am creating an order to buy a t-shirt, SAP knows how much inventory do I have? What is the supply chain looking like? What is the lead time for that delivery? And we can keep that promise every time that a customer engages with the product. And so that is what is changing for me. The change is that it's not just about the front office part of how an experience is surfaced. It's not just about the order process or the service process. It's how intelligence can power that experience. And so I think the connectivity of the systems, the operability of the systems, the intelligence of the systems is a differentiator. And when we look at customer experience, it's not just one medium. A lot of voice systems based, a lot of things people just interact through voice. If you are in a smart car, you are just talking. So how have you seen the interface also changing? But that interface may not be just a web page as somebody is scrolling. Right, right. Absolutely. The convenience of where you are. You can be operating through a chatbot. You can be operating through a text message. You can be surfing. You can be actually calling. Any of that experience has to be seamless. You do not care as to how you interface with a brand. What you care about is what kind of customer experience do you get back? And so increasingly that connectivity happens to this. Number one with the data. So the data that powers through the systems helps in knowing who you are. The second is it helps in enabling the experience that you will get agnostic of the channel that you are operating in. So it's an omnichannel experience that is a seamless experience. And it's kind of name of the game. It's not even new anymore. I think every brand should be able to operate in the same way. You should be able to chat, take it on, go in store and continue from there. Unfortunately, these experiences are still siloed and not connected. Nobody wants to talk to a chatbot or a phone or auto chat. But Genetic AI, you talk about that. That is also changing the game. It almost looks like you're talking to a real person. And when I was talking to folks here at SAP, I see a common thing which is AI, Genetic AI. So talk a bit about the rule that you see of these technologies are going to pay the customer experience. And also, are we at the very early stage of this? Or from SAP's perspective, have we to market where customers can actually start using that experience? Yeah, so there are two parts to this. The first is the personalization. So the personalization in context. So for example, I want this jacket. But you have unique needs. You may want a black jacket. And so how does the system know that I want a black jacket? And so, of course, it learns. It has learned. And that's not new. The models, the AI models and the large language models are not new. The models have been learning what the surface, in context, the personalization happens. What Generative AI has done is it has leapfrogged some of that business application to many, many years forward. And so we are using AI. We are using intelligence. But now it is becoming very useful to you very, very quickly in a way that is very humanly understood, very easy to consume in a way that is very commonly surface for any use case. As you were talking about, you know, Industry Tailoring, I think you touched upon that as well. Can you talk a bit about, you know, once again, in the post-pandemic era, how you have seen the industries also kind of changing, evolving to serve their customers better, which also kind of led to this Industry Tailor, you know, customer experience? It boils down to the same thing, the personalization and uniquely catered to my needs. So you may be operating in a retail industry, but you may be a grocery retailer or you may be a high fashion retailer. And so the needs of a high fashion retailer to a grocery retailer also changes. And then similarly, if you are an automotive dealer versus you're an automotive manufacturer, that experience is also different. And so increasingly, the personalization that people want for their unique needs is important. And then the companies want to cater to those needs, but they also have the problem of maintaining the whole back office operations, the manufacturing, the procurement, the supply chain, the finance, the human capital management. So how does all of that come together? And that's where the industry expertise, the industry know-how. And SAP has 50 years of industry know-how. I can tell you no one in the entire world understands industries like how SAP does. And so think about bringing and making your strengths your superpowers. And SAP superpowers already industry expertise. Now just imagine bringing that in a customer experience makes it so powerful. Are there certain industries which are more receptive to these, you know, Tailor or, you know, like Genetic AI, or usually it's across the spectrum, or you feel these industries, we need to kind of, you know, tell them more so they can embrace these factors as they are still a bit... I think every industry is transforming. And every transformation is a digital transformation. And every application is increasingly going to be an AI app. So it is agnostic of industries, health sciences, education tech, life sciences, mills and mine and chemicals, oil and gas, and of course retail manufacturing, all of the industries I talked about, every industry is trying to disrupt, every industry is trying to be intelligent, every industry wants to be intelligent and meet the customers where they are. When we are talking about, you know, certain things which are not really futuristic which have become realistically changing with other certain technology or emerging technologies, emerging trends that you are seeing are going to further improve the customer experience. I think the connectivity is super important because the fragmented experiences and fragmented silos of data is making it very hard. Everyone is going crazy about data, right? But data alone is nothing. What can data do for you? What can it make your life more efficient for? How can it surface productivity in every touch point? That is the name of the game. Technology for the sake of technology is, I think, is gone. Technology that, and that's why I think Generative AI has hit home so quickly because it suddenly made it so useful. And so the use of data silos to bring them together, the use of that to power intelligence, power automation so that from a salesperson to a serviceperson leave the nuanced conversations or the interactions to the human being, everything else needs to be done by the system. One more thing, you know, in addition to Generative AI, I am hearing here is also sustainability but sustainability can mean different things. It could be planetary sustainability, it could be sustainability of the economy, depending on how you look at it. So first of all, from your perspective, how you look at it and from, once again, customer experience perspective, what do folks are doing for sustainability? Sustainability, so SAP is in a very unique position to be able to really talk about sustainability right from tracking and tracing to really doing something about it. If other companies talk about it, they really don't have all of that data, all of that business processes, all of that visibility into like the end to end experience. And so for SAP to think about sustainability as a back office, as a track and trace to the experience we can surface to the way that, you know, goods can, as I talked about earlier, goods can go back into the system because do you know how much of revenue gets stuck in returns management? You buy 10 items and you return eight of them. The supplier can do nothing about those goods. And that's a big revenue loss for millions and millions of suppliers around the world. And SAP has that, has that visibility. So this is just one example where we can really bring and make a difference into every touch point, be it like return goods but also the reuse, reduce, recycle kind of aspects of commerce. And that's where I think when you talk about re-commerce. Re-commerce absolutely is a big innovation but SAP is in a very unique position because we have, you know, we have the green ledger, we have, we can talk about it from the back office every aspect of the business in a sustainable way. Excellent. Thank you so much for sitting down with me and share of course the whole customer experience story and I would love to share with you. Thank you so much for having me.