The first hint that SAP’s Experience Centers are no longer “nice showrooms” but engines of transformation is that Andre Bechtold now calls himself a retailer. In Walldorf, SAP’s first fully productive S.Mart Store, developed in partnership with Aramark over four months and launched in April 2025, runs on the same systems it showcases. SAP employees buy real goods around the clock so the company can feel the pain and prove the value of its software in practice, not on slides, as described in SAP’s own S.Mart Store overview and joint announcement with Aramark.
For Bechtold, who leads Experience Centers, industry strategy, and Learning at SAP, the point is simple: If SAP expects customers to put their core business on its platforms, it must live those processes end to end itself. In sn exclusive interview with Bechtold, he explains: “We want to produce something together with a customer in the model factory, ship it to the store, sell it there, and handle returns—as our own customer,” describing the next evolution of Experience Centers as real laboratories for complex industry scenarios.
The timing is strategic. Research highlighted by Qualtrics’ XM Institute indicates that by 2025, 89% of businesses expected to compete primarily on customer experience rather than product or price, and that increasing customer retention by just 5% can boost profits by up to 95%.
From Showroom to Living Lab
SAP’s Experience Centers recently received an award from the Association of Briefing Program Managers, but Bechtold insists the real story is what happens next. What began as polished demo environments has become a continuously evolving network of physical and virtual spaces where SAP co-creates tangible, industry-specific use cases with customers and partners.
The S.Mart Store in Walldorf is the clearest proof of that shift. SAP notes that the original S.MART concept, unveiled in 2022 as a smart-store showcase, has now been reimagined as a fully operational 24/7 autonomous retail environment on the Walldorf campus.
SAP and Aramark’s 2025 announcements credit Aramark as the operating partner and name technology partners including Diebold Nixdorf, VusionGroup, C2RO, payfree, Lenovo, Intel, and Adyen. What they created is a store that customers gain entry to through the S.Mart Grocery App which generates a personal Store Access QR Code that is shown at the door. Once inside, the tech advancements continue via the use of an RFID checkout, computer vision for personalization and theft prevention, digital temperature monitoring, and automated stockout detection to let employees complete purchases in under 50 seconds, with no on-site staff.
This shift forces SAP to confront the pain and value of its products in day-to-day retail operations, from replenishment and merchandising to returns. Retail was a deliberate starting point because everyone understands how a grocery basket or fashion purchase works. “Consumer products and retail are always a little bit easier,” Bechtold says, because visitors can immediately connect their own experiences to SAP processes and software. The bigger ambition, he adds, is to take the same end-to-end approach into more complex domains such as semiconductors, high tech, life sciences, energy, and utilities.
Industry-First, Platform-Always
Behind the theatrics of model factories and smart stores sits a deliberate architectural philosophy. Bechtold frames it as starting with standard horizontal processes on SAP’s cloud ERP and Business Technology Platform, then layering in precisely focused, industry-specific extensions where they will generate future value rather than recreating customizations from the past.
“First we think about the process from here to there,” he says. “Then we decide where standard is enough and where a vertical extension will matter in two, five, or 10 years.” That discipline is critical in process-heavy industries such as chemicals, mining, and utilities, where regulatory constraints, technical sovereignty, and safety considerations make change both urgent and risky.
AI now plays a prominent role in those conversations. In Experience Centers, AI is not positioned as an abstract platform feature but as a concrete optimizer for industry processes—from predicting demand and reducing waste to steering maintenance, compliance, or water usage—according to Bechtold. SAP underlined this direction at its SAP Connect event in October 2025, where it announced that WalkMe, acquired earlier in the year, is now embedded across all SAP Customer Experience solutions to guide users through complex workflows in real time and drive continuous adoption.
Bechtold’s team uses the Experience Centers as neutral ground to prototype AI-enabled scenarios with customers, test their appetite for new operating models, and feed proven patterns back into SAP’s industry roadmaps.
Water, Climate, the Next Frontier
One of the most striking examples of that roadmap-first mindset is water. Bechtold describes water management as “maybe the next big thing,” citing the combined pressures of climate change, uneven distribution, and water-intensive industries such as mining.
In newer SAP locations such as India, where water scarcity is a daily concern, his team is exploring how SAP’s portfolio can help increase efficiency across sourcing, treatment, reuse, and distribution. That means looking beyond utilities into industrial water use, then designing Experience Center scenarios that show how data-driven optimization can reduce waste and improve resilience. The work is still in research and design, but Bechtold sees the potential to make water a flagship example of SAP’s ability to marry sustainability and operational excellence.
Turning Customers into Co-Designers
The Experience Centers are also changing how SAP talks to its customers. Installed-base clients still sometimes arrive expecting two days of PowerPoint and product pitch, but leave, Bechtold says, surprised by a different dynamic: The conversation starts with their industry, their key processes, and their outcomes. Only later do they ask which product sits behind each scenario.
That reversal is more than theatrics. By building demos as realistic, cross-product process flows, Bechtold’s team finds friction points and usability gaps that would be invisible in traditional feature-led demos, then feeds those insights back to product teams. In effect, Experience Centers act as a continuous usability lab, revealing where SAP can simplify flows, reduce clicks, tighten integration, and tell more intuitive stories through UX.
The approach works particularly well with net-new customers who still think of SAP as a monolithic ERP and a set of disjointed line-of-business tools. When they see the breadth of the portfolio in a single, concrete industry story—often delivered in an environment where internal satisfaction scores exceed 90%, according to Bechtold—many recalibrate their assumptions about cost, capability, and time-to-value.
Learning as Strategic Product
If Experience Centers are SAP’s front stage for customer engagement, learning is the backstage infrastructure that makes the performance repeatable. Bechtold’s operational scope spans product and solution learning, certification, and enablement for SAP employees, partners, and customers, and he has pushed to unify what were once separate tracks into a single, modular learning journey.
The logic is direct: Everyone touching a customer, from SAP sales and services to partners and student talent, should speak the same language and work from the same demo systems, content, and best practices. That has meant collapsing duplicate demo landscapes, aligning curricula across audiences, and embedding the SAP Discovery Center’s best-practice use cases directly into learning paths instead of treating them as optional extras.
Consistency is essential when release cycles are measured in weeks and customers expect cloud innovation to land without disruption. A certification that is two years old may still provide valid foundations, but without continuous learning around tools such as SAP Business Data Cloud, SAP Signavio, SAP Cloud ALM, and WalkMe, professionals risk making outdated recommendations that undermine transformation projects.
Students, Talent, the Boredom Problem
One of the most revealing insights in Bechtold’s portfolio came from a simple question to working students and interns in the Experience Centers: Are your SAP university courses engaging? “Most of them told me it’s super boring,” he recalls. They did not want generic training; they wanted real industry use cases like the ones they saw in the Experience Centers.
SAP formalized this shift in November 2024 when it launched SAP Learning Hub, student edition. According to SAP’s own FAQs for the program, actively enrolled students receive full access to the Learning Hub course portfolio, two free global certification attempts, unlimited live expert sessions with SAP instructors, and 12 months of renewable access to cloud-based practice systems, provided they verify enrollment with a university email and SheerID.
Because SAP certifications have a defined validity period and now require recurring assessments, students who certify during their studies can take those credentials straight into job applications with partners or SAP itself. Bechtold’s team is reworking content to be more tangible and narrative-driven, encouraging students to build on SAP technologies rather than other cloud platforms. For those interested in sales or pre-sales careers, SAP mirrors Experience Center setups in training locations and teaches not only product knowledge but also customer-centric storytelling—how to explain business value, not just features and functions.
Enterprise Architects, Composable Futures
As customers move to cloud ERP, modular suites, and AI-infused platforms, enterprise architects have become some of the most critical and overloaded roles. Recognizing this, SAP launched a major initiative to build new enterprise architect training and certifications in close collaboration with services teams and product experts, according to Bechtold.
He calls enterprise architecture “one of the most complex roles,” especially for installed-base customers transforming heavily customized landscapes while trying to keep the core clean and move toward composable architectures. The new curricula emphasize not just tool proficiency but also reference architectures and concrete examples from the Experience Centers, such as the retail reference landscape behind the S.Mart Store.
Modularity is central here too. Learning paths are structured so early-career professionals and students can gain entry-level knowledge that later stack into full enterprise architect certifications, shortening the journey while maintaining rigor. SAP is also pushing partners to bring their enterprise architects up to the same knowledge level as internal services teams, closing the gap that has historically plagued joint projects.
AI, Knowledge Foundations, Trust
Bechtold is candid about AI’s double-edged nature in learning and enablement. On one hand, he uses AI daily for research, briefing preparation, and summarization. On the other, he warns that without a strong foundational understanding, people will struggle to distinguish between trustworthy insights and hallucinations.
The answer, in his view, is to anchor AI-enabled learning experiences in authoritative content sources. For SAP topics, that means ensuring large language models are grounded in SAP-owned content and curated learning assets, so that personalized learning paths, summaries, and recommendations reflect the company’s latest thinking rather than random web content. That does not remove the need for human judgment, but it shifts AI from risky shortcut to reliable accelerator.
This AI-led approach also shapes how SAP supports different learning preferences and demographics worldwide. Whether a learner prefers interactive e-learning, classroom instruction, hybrid formats, or short-form mobile content common in markets like China, the underlying digital content is consistent and modular, ensuring that what is taught in one format aligns with what is offered in another.
Partners, Clean Core, Shared Accountability
For Bechtold, aligning partners around the same knowledge and practices as SAP is not a governance nicety; it is a survival requirement. Customers do not differentiate between a partner mistake and an SAP mistake when projects go off the rails; in both cases, SAP’s reputation suffers.
SAP has responded by designing enablement programs with partner organizations from the ground up, tying certifications and proven experience to the partner’s competency framework and access to certain categories of projects. Crucially, partners now share the same demo landscapes and learning content as SAP employees, helping reduce disconnects that once appeared between sales promises, pre-sales demos, and implementation realities.
The clean-core principle sits at the center of this collaboration. For large, complex legacy customers, partner architects are expected to understand SAP’s tools, methodologies, and transformation patterns for programs such as RISE with SAP, rather than defaulting to bespoke customization that undermines upgradeability and innovation. For mid-market customers, the emphasis is on keeping things as standard and simple as possible, avoiding over-engineered deployments that obscure value.
Adoption, Trial-and-Buy, Real Value
Adoption sits at the junction of Experience Centers, learning, and partner execution. Cloud business models depend on renewals; renewals depend on customers actually using what they have bought and seeing tangible outcomes. Bechtold rejects the idea that adoption and net-new customer acquisition are competing priorities. In his view, successful adoption stories provide the references and proof points that make net-new deals easier.
His team has connected prototyping closely with learning. In many engagements, particularly with net-new customers, SAP spins up a cloud ERP sandbox, loads customer data, co-defines key use cases, and prototypes the future solution together over several months. That “trial-and-buy” model means customers are learning how to use the system while it is being tailored to their needs, and when the license deal is signed, the prototype can go productive with minimal disruption.
ERP is not a simple SaaS app; wrong configurations can be expensive to reverse. Close support during prototyping reduces that risk while accelerating adoption, as users move into production already familiar with the environment they have helped shape. In the S.Mart Store and other Experience Center scenarios, that same principle applies internally: SAP’s own teams adopt and stress-test the solutions first, making benefits and pitfalls far more than theoretical slides—an approach the S.Mart materials emphasize in positioning SAP itself as an internal reference customer.
