Jan Philipp Haas
Co-Founder & CEO
Sessions (2)
Sessions featuring Jan Philipp Haas at Bits & Pretzels 2026 | Founders Festival in Munich
Next-Gen Enterprise & ERP
The core message of the available session transcript is that ERP is not merely back-office accounting software, but the operating system through which enterprises run production, finance, supply chain, fulfillment, and cross-company coordination. The panel brought together three different angles on this shift: JP from Conduct, building an AI platform for enterprise IT teams that operate and customize ERP layers; Maex from Causa Prima, building a B2B agent network for mundane intercompany workflows such as sending and receiving invoices; and Domenico from Xentral, building an ERP layer for fast-growing SMBs that reduces operational complexity across sales orchestration, fulfillment, warehousing, and related workflows. The moderator framed the discussion around what is broken in ERP, how enterprise software is evolving, and what founders can learn about selling into enterprise and SMB markets. JP’s central argument was that the biggest issue in large-enterprise ERP is not that the underlying systems are inherently bad. He argued that systems such as SAP are deeply embedded and fit for purpose, powering more than 85% of global commerce, but that the friction comes from how slowly enterprises can operate, modify, and extend them. He illustrated this with a Palantir-era example involving a defense company near Munich that needed to ramp up tank production for Ukraine. The company’s inability to quickly reflect new production lines, conveyor belts, and supply-chain configurations in its SAP/MES software stack meant production growth could be delayed by the complexity of changing the system. Conduct’s stated value proposition is to accelerate enterprise IT teams and consultants so new ERP-related features can reach production faster and transformation can happen at a pace closer to business needs. Maex agreed that legacy ERP systems are difficult to collaborate with, especially when building applications on top of them, but emphasized that incumbents such as SAP also occupy a powerful distribution position because so many transactions and Fortune 500 companies touch SAP systems. For Causa Prima, which wants to finance invoices after automating the noisy work between companies, the invoice’s presence inside SAP is exactly where value can be unlocked. His main open question was whether SAP will become open enough for agentic partnerships and external solutions, comparing this to Salesforce’s stated openness around agentic partnerships. He also suggested similar issues exist across other major platforms, briefly referencing Workday as a company “somewhere in the middle.” Domenico described the ERP problem from the SMB and operator perspective. He said Xentral emerged because ERP implementations historically took years, cost millions of euros, and often failed to deliver on sales-process promises. For smaller companies with ten, twenty, or fifty employees, he argued the issue is less about heavy customization and more about the time wasted translating business intentions into forms, masks, manual data entry, and actionable system inputs. He also criticized ERP as a silo product and argued that more intelligence will come from tapping information across ERP, inventory management, support, CRM, and other systems. The available transcript ends as Maex connects that integrative data layer to the coming agentic wave, stressing that agents need context from ERP, Slack, Teams, warehouse systems, and other sources to be useful.
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.