SAP’s Jan Bungert on how business AI and data cloud are powering India’s Techade

AI adoption in India is moving from experimentation to measurable impact, transforming operations at a fraction of the cost and effort. In an exclusive interaction with DataQuest, Jan Bungert, Chief Revenue Officer – SAP Business AI, explains how SAP is embedding trustworthy AI into core business applications, enabling enterprises to harmonize data with SAP Business Data Cloud, and helping Indian companies like Parle and Mahindra turn insights into real business outcomes.

AI adoption in India is seeing a breakthrough – how is SAP driving this transformation through its business offerings?

 AI is powering India’s ‘Techade’, assisting in achieving a multitude of operations at nearly one-fourth the cost and effort. Organizations today have realized the potential of AI and are accelerating adoption across sectors, driving operational efficiency and transforming societies. At SAP, AI adoption is anchored in setting the global standard for trustworthy business AI.

Our mission is to enable scalable, relevant, and responsible AI adoption that delivers real business value. Centered around application-embedded AI, intelligence is built directly into SAP’s core business applications to provide end-to-end automation and insights for smarter decision-making.

Beyond embedding AI, SAP also provides a trusted data foundation through SAP Business Data Cloud. There’s an unprecedented amount of data being generated from every corner of the business, which must be harnessed effectively for AI use cases to create real value.  By harmonizing data across ecosystems, we close the trust gap that often limits AI success.

In a global survey of 1,200 business and technology leaders, 55% cited poor data quality as their biggest challenge, and nearly half struggle to harmonize data across multiple ecosystems. SAP aims to close that trust gap with SAP Business Data Cloud, which delivers a harmonized data layer of high-quality data. AI can be built upon that data foundation and made available to customers within the apps they use every day.

Could you unpack what SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC) offers, and how it’s enabling organizations in India and Southeast Asia to unlock the full value of their data with AI at the core?

 SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC) is a fully managed SaaS solution that unifies and governs all SAP data and seamlessly connects with third-party data. It gives business leaders context to make even more impactful decisions, while keeping the data’s business context and data semantics intact.

SAP BDC combines SAP’s pre-existing data and analytics solutions, including SAP Analytics Cloud, SAP Datasphere, SAP planning solutions, and SAP Business Warehouse, enriched with innovations like:

• SAP Business Data Cloud Intelligent Applications (formerly named SAP BDC Insight Apps) are a portfolio of applications that help line-of-business leaders solve specific business problems. For example, SAP introduced People Intelligence at SAP Sapphire. Intelligent applications are adaptive and self-learning. They use enterprise data and usage patterns to automate routine tasks, increasing businesses’ efficiency.
• Data products, which are is a curated data set containing information taken from SAP line-of-business applications. These data products are created, delivered, and managed by SAP and are the foundation for SAP BDC intelligent applications.
• SAP Databricks is a product based on the partnership with SAP Databricks. It’s available as a natively integrated component within SAP BDC and unifies data from SAP applications with industry-leading AI/ML, data science, and data engineering capabilities. SAP Databricks helps connect all SAP and third-party data and foster more reliable AI.

Together, these offerings help enterprises to transform raw data into trusted intelligence, unlocking agility and competitive advantage.

Can you share a few impactful customer use cases from India or Southeast Asia?

 Southeast Asia, with India at its core, is central to our commitment to empowering global ecosystem of intelligent enterprises. Some of our exemplary customers in the region are . Parle Products Pvt. Ltd, a leading packaged food, beverages, and confectionery company, leveraging SAP BDC (primarily via SAP Datasphere) to deliver immeasurable value via business insight across sales data with other data sources. This integrated, unified view enables the leadership to evaluate market nuances and take data-driven decisions quickly. The insight provided by SAP BDC helps Parle Products to stay agile and quickly respond to business conditions.

Another impactful use case is that of Mahindra & Mahindra, one of the most eminent conglomerates in India. The company and its marquee company, Mahindra Auto, utilize SAP BDC components for data integration, analytics, and business insights. This has helped Mahindra Auto to drive efficiency in finance, sales, and operations, and led to a top- and bottom-line impact of multi-millions in revenue, cost optimization, and profitability. These examples highlight how SAP BDC is not just about managing data but about turning insights into outcomes.

How is the competitive landscape for enterprise AI solutions evolving globally and in India?

Globally, the competitive AI landscape is driven by hyperscale players like OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, Google, and Meta, who are scaling models, ecosystems, and infrastructure at unprecedented speed. At the same time, smaller but fast-growing challengers like Cohere, Alibaba, and Unitree are carving specialized niches, while industries such as retail are deploying AI agents at scale, and retailers like Walmart are integrating AI agents at scale. The competition is no longer only about model sophistication but also about infrastructure dominance, ecosystem lock-in, and the speed at which AI can be monetized.

In India, the momentum is equally strong. The country is emerging as a testbed for enterprise AI at scale, balancing adoption speed with measurable business impact. As per a report, GenAI could boost productivity in the IT services sector by up to 45%, fundamentally reshaping traditional outsourcing models. Complementing this, according to a Financial Times report, 86% of enterprises already have a GenAI strategy, and 66% already in active implementation. Global players are reinforcing this trend with large-scale investments such as AWS’s $12.7B commitment through 2030 to expand AI and cloud infrastructure. The same report highlights that India is taking a leadership role in ROI realization, with 23% of Indian firms already seeing measurable AI returns vs 12% global average.