Case Study #22: SAP AI Lead Joins Homebase Community: Exclusive Insights on SAP's AI Strategy

Key Highlights:

If you only have a few minutes to spare, here's what leaders and founders should know about Benjamin Smokovich's insights on AI in an enterprise:

• Benjamin is working on building an AI platform at SAP for enterprise use cases across sales, pre-sales, and marketing.
• The tech industry is experiencing a shift, with traditionally competitive companies now partnering on AI initiatives. SAP's collaborations with IBM, Amazon, Google, and OpenAI exemplify this trend.
• 'Agent swarms' are predicted to cause significant market disruption, and businesses are urged to understand this concept.
• The AI market is compared to the dot-com era, with a predicted cycle of rapid growth followed by a market correction. Many companies are rushing into AI, but not all will survive the eventual shakeout.
• Many startups are struggling to monetize AI, often replicating similar use cases with slight variations.
• The best opportunities lie in companies creating their own small, purpose-driven AI models rather than relying on general-purpose ones.
• AI implementation is expected to lead to a reshuffling of the workforce rather than massive layoffs, with people potentially being rehired into new roles.
  

Can you tell us about your role and what you're currently working on?

Currently, I'm working in SAP, building an AI platform for enterprise use cases, and that is across sales, pre-sales, and marketing. And right now SAP is doing a lot. It's hard to keep up, right?

SAP is partnering with a lot of the big players like IBM on Watson, and we're partnering with Amazon, they just signed a deal. They inked a deal with Clot and Anthropic. We're helping a lot of these big companies, Google and open AI for that matter. We're helping them with their models. We're helping them on how they go to market. We're helping them build AI software into their software. And we're doing it for ourselves. So I'm busy. I'm also building an internal tool for reps to use to use AI in their day-to-day lives, help them sell better, sell quicker, close more deals, and more revenue for the giant SAP. So yeah, that's what we're doing. And I lead a team of talented individuals from back-end developers to data engineers, data scientists. So we're doing it all. I got my hands full.

You've been interviewing a lot of AI startups. What trends are you seeing in how they're approaching AI integration?

Everybody's been racing to try to integrate it into their software and they don't know how to make money from it. Still, when we're interviewing these startups, it's a lot of replication of the same use case and they might have a little twist on it, right? But altogether it's a lot of the same kind of cell cycles that's going on. So there's a lot of different use cases we're seeing, but a lot of it's the same. Going back to those, I would say open AI and large language models. Other models are in the mix, but yeah. What's interesting though is we're starting to see more startups that focus on agents, the use case of agents.

Are there any standout opportunities in AI?

I think everybody is asking themselves that same question, right? You're also asking yourself, how do I make money from AI? And I think a lot of people are in a race to that, but I think the best use cases are gonna come from like big companies or small companies starting to create their own small models, their own personalized model. don't need all the world's data. They just need very specific data where they're training on that data. And then also once again, they need LLM coupled with automation, coupled with kind of a, call it the fourth brain. And I think if you get there, there's this thing called the tree of thought. So I think every company wants to know how can I reduce my head count and still have the same job, and the same quality delivered to my customers. So I think the only way we can achieve that is by, like I said, coupling these things like automation tools. And then having the ability to use LLM, but in your kind of workflow, let's say it was a marketing department, in your workflow, you replace different roles with agents. And I think that is going to be a game changer when you get to that place, right? And especially on these tasks where like they're just repetitive tasks that people do. I think those will be really what AI replaces, but I think there's a whole kind of onslaught of new roles that come about. So I think that's where people are gonna make their ROI. And I think in 2025, you'll start seeing a lot of startups kind of exploding there.

You've mentioned 'agent swarms'. Can you explain why they're important?

I think agent swarms will cause massive disruption in the market. And you better get ready for it. And you better start understanding what an agent swarm is. It may mean you hire more people and it may mean that the people that you have now stay with you longer term. It may mean that you make more revenue and you shift those people into other roles. Maybe now you're going to be making agents and you're making those agents run optimally instead of going to go out and looking for the best talent.

How do you see the AI market evolving?

To me, this looks exactly like the dot com bubble in terms of economically where we're at. I think there's going to be a boom. We've seen the boom. I think there's going to be a big bust. And I think when that bust happens, all the little leeches are going to go away to where they belong. All the little fakers in this AI game are going to go away. And the ones that persist with this, they're going to run away from the market exponentially. Those are going to be, you know, your next Fortune Five companies. I think in the next 10 years, you're going to see the first billion-dollar single-person company, a one-person, solopreneur billion dollars.

What challenges do you see in AI adoption for businesses?

The challenge in the marketplace is there's not that many people that are working on their models, which needs to happen. I mean, only the big companies can do that. But I think a lot of these smaller companies like guys like you should be training your own models on your own server. It doesn't take that much money to do it. It should be purpose-driven for your company and then as you need external data, you bring that in, you vectorize it and like a, vectorized DB, you embed it. And so you can use rag techniques to call data.

What advice would you give to smaller companies looking to leverage AI?

If I were a small company, the challenge is that there's so much information out there right now. Like, you see, this is an AI mouse. That's how people are marketing these days. Why is it AI? You know, this is an AI pen. Unless the pen writes for me on my own without my, it's not an AI pen. So everybody's mark using this as a marketing scheme. And I think people that aren't in AI that don't use AI in their day-to-day life, they're making mistakes. And it's not going to do what is advertised to do. And so like, really getting in there and testing it out, understanding a little bit AI is going to be a big deal for startups and enterprise companies alike and then be able to make the right decisions with who you partner with and where you're going with this.

How do you see AI impacting workforce and business costs?

The cost of the LLM and running LLM across our APIs is not anywhere nearly equated to human capital, cost of human capital. That is, but any company that has the largest overhead cost that they have hands down, and I'm not saying that it's going to cause massive layoffs. I'm just saying at first there's going to be a lot of reshuffling of the deck. And I think a lot of those people go back into the workplace and get rehired and other tasks.

How would you characterize the current state of AI development in the business world?

I think it's a weird period. I think that the world's still experimenting. It's like a massive experiment going on right now across companies. And a lot of companies that traditionally went to war and had their IP and was very like, we're going to stay on our own ecosystem. They're partnering with each other. And that's kind of strange for me. know, see SAP partnering with Google, Microsoft, you know.

Interview with
Benjamin Smokovich
Global Director Innovation and Tech Digital Modalities @ SAP