Nestled in the sun-kissed hills of Provence, just north of Cannes and Antibes, is Sophia Antipolis, a renowned technology and science hub that is home to SAP subsidiary SAP Labs France. There are worse places to work. Surrounded by Aleppo pines and the odd palm, this modern building has been chosen to host the company’s first ever dedicated artificial intelligence (AI) customer experience centre. According to SAP, this is to enable customers to “discover and experiment with AI”, but it has to be so much more than that.

In many respects, generative AI (GenAI) has delivered an opportunity to all enterprise software suppliers. It’s a momentary levelling of the playing field, and this is where SAP believes it can use the labs to grow its position, both with existing customers and into new markets through its partners. What this means in terms of accelerating migration to S/4Hana remains to be seen, but there is certainly an expectation at SAP that its push to embed AI within its portfolio will prove a boon for the business.

Getting customers to migrate to the cloud is key to SAP’s strategy because business AI is at the centre of its product roadmap, at least according to Jesper Schleimann, who was recently promoted to head of SAP business artificial intelligence for EMEA. No cloud, no AI. And that’s as big a carrot as SAP can dangle for any wavering on-premise users wondering whether they should migrate to the cloud.