SAP's Sean Kask: software firms must become AI companies or perish
SAP chief AI strategy officer Sean Kask said at Wave by Vento in Turin that established software companies must rebuild their products around AI rather than adding it as another feature. He highlighted SAP's July acquisition of German tabular foundation model startup Prior Labs, with a commitment of more than €1bn over four years to grow it into a frontier AI lab, alongside SAP's in-house SAP-RPT-1 tabular model already in production. Kask said SAP does not build its own large language model, instead testing more than 100 models from providers including Google, OpenAI, Anthropic and Mistral and picking the best per use case, and argued Europe should not enter the LLM "red ocean".
Tables hold a minority of enterprise data but much of its value, so dedicated tabular foundation models could be a distinct route in enterprise AI.