“Today is very task oriented for most customers,” said Balaji Balasubramanian, president and chief product officer of SAP Customer Experience. Speaking as the customer, he described the pattern this way: “I go into this system to do this task.” He called this routine a mechanical way of working, and he wants customers to leave it behind.
His keynote at SAP Connect, “Running Autonomous CX,” argued that customer-facing AI needs the rest of the business behind it, from orders and inventory to financials. In the interview that followed, Balasubramanian described what he hopes customers do with them.
Customer Experience Depends on the Whole Enterprise
Balasubramanian has previously described customer experience as an enterprise-wide growth strategy. Now he spells out what an enterprise-wide approach requires.
“You only can deliver best-in-class customer experience when you take all the signals, and leverage AI to turn them into action, and that connects all the domains across [the] entire enterprise,” he said.
The domains he has in mind reach well past the front office. “It is connecting to supply chain, to inventory, to warehousing,” he continued, along with finance systems. In his example, a shopping assistant combines products, inventory, orders, and invoices.
A differentiated experience takes more context, he said, and the context has to be reliable and real time. It comes from engagement, experience, and operational data as well as external data on customer preferences. “Some more context leads to a better experience.”
Turning connected signals and reliable context into action also removes complexity for customer experience teams, he said, so they can focus on customers. Autonomous CX, he added, drives customer-facing engagement end to end, and in a lead-to-close cycle, it “frees up those sellers to go actually focus on the customers.”
Balasubramanian Wants Customers to Start From the Outcome
Invited to name a favorite among the customer experience developments at SAP Connect, Balasubramanian stopped short of choosing one.
Customer experience is “a collection of different processes that have multiple buying centers and personas to drive the outcome,” he said, and “each one has its own nuances, and the outcomes are very significant.”
Across those processes, SAP follows a set order. “We think of end-to-end process first, then [assistants] to support personas, then agents, and then the systems.” His example was autonomous selling, from lead management through quotations and pricing. “As a seller, it is almost automated, so I can see it. Review it. I can send it confidently.” The seller’s review step fits a wider picture: the system works within the customer’s guardrails, with a human in the loop “so that you can actually approve it and get things done.”
Asked what he hopes customers do next, Balasubramanian started with outcomes. “I want our users to start leveraging what we are building with an outcome in mind,” he said. He described what that looks like: “Tell me the outcome that you want, and let the system begin to orchestrate. Begin to pull the data together.”
SAP framed its own keynote around outcomes as well. “We took away all the product complexity and talked about outcome,” he said, describing what a marketer and a salesperson can each do. He added that the approach “resonated really, really well.”
What This Means for ERP Insiders
Customer experience now reaches into the whole business. Supply chain, inventory, and finance systems feed the context that customer-facing AI acts on, so decisions about those systems now shape what customers experience. Companies that connect them give AI the context Balasubramanian ties to a better experience.
Evaluation moves from products to outcomes. With buyers spread across marketing, sales, and commerce, a shared outcome gives each of them the same measure of success. Customers that define results first can hold AI to that measure.
Trust sets the pace for autonomous customer experience. How much work AI takes on depends on how well people can explain what it does. Companies that build the ability to explain AI’s actions early can widen its role with fewer reservations.
This article was published first by SAPinisder.
