If SAP SE is going to become the dominant player in the customer relationship management market, as its chief executive officer declared the company would at its annual Sapphire conference, it will first have to move into the rarefied air of mass global brand recognition. That will not be easy, particularly since the current CRM leader — Salesforce.com Inc. — has more than double SAP’s market share. But the company is banking on its sizable customer base and partner ecosystem to make greater brand awareness become reality.

“SAP is the cash register of the world,” said Keith Townsend (@CTOAdvisor), guest host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during SAP Sapphire Now in Orlando, Florida. “Seventy percent of the world’s transactions go through SAP, but most of us don’t see it. It’s a bold statement to say you’re going to go from that to a household name.”

Townsend was joined at the conference by co-host Lisa Martin (@LuccaZara), and they discussed the company’s moves to expand artificial intelligence capabilities and customer interest in SAP’s business suite. (* Disclosure below.)

Expanding conversational AI

One of the key factors in SAP’s ambitious strategy involves broader integration of AI into its platform. Among the many announcements from Sapphire was the news that SAP would expand the capabilities of its Leonardo machine learning toolkit and boost the use of conversational AI to develop intelligent chatbots.

SAP executives were careful to position the growing use of AI as an opportunity to re-skill and upskill the workforce, a form of augmentation rather than replacement. “I liked augmented intelligence to augment humanity,” Martin said. “It’s this connection of humans and intelligence working together.”

SAP is also clearly focused on working closely with its customers as well. One of the messages emerging from Orlando revolved around what enterprises desire for running production on hyperconverged infrastructure, or HCI, with SAP’s S/4Hana business suite.

“I’ve talked to customers after customers who say that S/4Hana on HCI is what they want,” Townsend said. “[SAP] is moving to certify the platform for HCI, so I thought that was a good example of them listening to customers and continuing to transform over the years.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the SAP Sapphire Now event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for NetApp Inc. Neither NetApp Inc., the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SAP Media