Thomas Saueressig
Chief Customer Officer & Member of the Executive Board of SAP SE
Sessions (2)
Sessions featuring Thomas Saueressig at Bits & Pretzels 2026 | Founders Festival in Munich
Industrial AI: From Experimentation to Execution
The core message of the session was that enterprise AI value will not come simply from using the same public models as everyone else; it will come from applying AI to proprietary business data, process knowledge, industry context, and governance. Greta Buschhaus introduced Thomas Saueressig, Chief Customer Officer and Executive Board member at SAP, as someone who has sat on both sides of the CIO conversation. Saueressig opened with a personal example: he uses AI agents each morning to scan the web for news about SAP and himself, summarize coverage, analyze sentiment, and correlate weekly sentiment with the stock price. His point was practical rather than futuristic: agents already remove repetitive information-gathering work and create more immediate insight.
Industrial AI as Europe’s Unfair Advantage
The panel’s core message was that Europe, and especially Germany, may have a real industrial AI advantage because it combines proprietary industrial data, engineering expertise, process know-how, and operational experience that are not publicly available. Moderator Anne Decker opened by questioning whether this is already an “unfair advantage” or merely potential. Latifa Yakhloufi-Konstroffer argued clearly that Siemens Energy and similar European industrial companies do have a major advantage through sensors, machines, and non-public operational data, provided they can scale its use. Jan Philipp Haas agreed that Europe has IP and knowledge advantages, but said they are not yet “productized in an AI first way.” Thomas Saueressig pushed back against the idea that the AI race is already over, noting how quickly perceived leaders have changed since the ChatGPT moment at the end of 2022, from OpenAI to Gemini/Google to Anthropic, and argued Europe should adopt a more offensive, positive mindset.