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Recently, SAP partnered with the Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS Formula One Team to upshift its IT infrastructure and become future-proof. Together with SAP, the team will tap into cloud solutions, infrastructure, and services that will enable them to thrive on and off the track.

Formula One is a technologically innovative form of motorsport, where each car features over 300 sensors onboard that generates 1.5 terabytes of data in a single race weekend – data that needs to be analyzed to detect potential performance enhancements and reliability and safety concerns.

But until the late 1960s, Formula One cars were designed on traditional drawing boards by engineers using retractable pencils and a set of French curves. This is not dissimilar to the tech industry, where for decades the value cases for investing in technology were architected for customers by busloads of engineers armed with Excel spreadsheets.

Cloud computing changed not only what technology to buy, but also how businesses engage with their vendors when making investment decisions. Enabled by new technologies like mobility and artificial intelligence (AI), customers now expect immediate responses, exponentially faster time-to-value, immersive experiences, and flexible and intuitive engagements powered by robust low-touch and self-service capabilities. Not surprisingly, industry research shows that four out of five B2B customers will want to be engaged digitally by 2025.

SAP executes digital customer engagement via digital hubs located on six continents. The hubs are home to highly collaborative teams of diverse, digitally skilled talent that can deliver comprehensive, virtual customer engagement services. Like an F1 team, digital hubs use cutting-edge technologies to help drive accelerated business outcomes for customers with great customer experience, incredible innovation speed, and optimal levels of productivity achieved through data-driven, surgically precise execution.

Speed of Execution: Embracing Flexibility and Adaptability

Formula One teams operate in a relentless pursuit of speed, continuously refining their strategies to gain a competitive edge. Similarly, the ability to deploy teams to serve SAP customers virtually with the latest digital innovations allows us to reach more businesses faster at precisely the time they need us, no matter where in the world they might be and which stage of their digital transformation journey they are at.

Step into the future with SAP digital hubs, where innovation meets opportunity Learn more

Digital customer engagement can allow us to close the feedback loop across thousands of customers around the globe at velocity, helping to shorten their time to value from years to months and from months to weeks. In 2023, SAP digital hubs supported more than 22,000 digital customer engagements across the globe, setting these customers up for successful digital transformation journeys at unprecedented speed.

Speed matters and the race is on. The ability to recognize what a customer needs to grow and to work with partners that can quickly address these needs has foundationally elevated the need for digital customer engagements.

Precision in Execution: Leveraging Data and Technology for Optimal Performance

In Formula One, every aspect – from car design to the race strategy – hinges on harnessing and analyzing terabytes of data, often in real time. Similarly, in an increasingly competitive business environment, embracing precision through technological innovation allows organizations to balance accelerating their digital transformation decisions and optimizing profitability. The balance can be struck only through an almost unreasonable obsession with measuring and executing on fact-based insights.

At SAP digital hubs, we can track key value metrics across the entire customer journey, be it for demand campaigns, customer value propositions, personalized digital asset performance, the adoption of new productivity-driving tools, and so on. We do this not only to understand what’s most relevant to our customers but also to track the effectiveness of what we do and how we do it in the context of what our customers need.

Customer Experience: Focusing on Value, Personalization, and Great Experiences

In Formula One, success is not solely measured by speed. The sport thrives on delivering a captivating experience tailored to engage multifaceted fans from a multitude of angles, making sure everyone gets value from the event. The same is true in the digital business world.

SAP’s digital hubs virtualize and leverage SAP’s rich heritage of industry best practices and benchmarks to help personalize the customer journey, bringing customer stakeholders in alignment with one another and delivering on SAP’s value promises across geographies, cultures, and industries through immersive and memorable experiences. SAP digital hubs can accomplish this across the entire customer journey with SAP – from the time we create awareness, to customer onboarding, to supporting customers with valuable solution and industry expertise, until we help customers realize the full value of the SAP solutions they adopt.

AI-Powered, Human-Led Approach: Focusing on Digitally Native and Digitally Skilled Talent

In Formula One, decisions pivot on data. But it’s the team that uses their experiences to apply that data and simulate different scenarios to discover new ways to drive superior outcomes. Similarly, while data and AI technologies fuel decisions and actions in SAP digital hubs, it’s human ingenuity that leverages the tech and data and elevates customer outcomes.

Just like the F1 teams, our hubs attract and employ only the best of the best, offering a high-energy working environment that thrives on intricate collaboration. The individuals who join us can gain immediate cross-role and cross-geography exposure, enabling them to become productive members of the team in record time. Continuous learning and pointed diversity, with gender parity in half of our digital hubs today, form the backbone of our digital culture, where everyone is treated with respect, skills are constantly honed, and different roles are seamlessly orchestrated to present a unified customer experience.

The rules change, and we have to as well. Every pit stop and each customer touchpoint is a chance to pivot in real time, refine, and go faster, helping SAP customers and shareholders gain more value at exponential velocity and great volumes. This is the “3V” promise of SAP digital hubs and this is how we win the race!

Sam Masri is global head of Digital Hub, Customer Success at SAP SE.

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For miners to remain profitable and continue their mining operations, the BTC price must rise above $80,000 post-halving.

BTC price gains before the Wall Street open as CPI week appears to set the tone for the incoming Bitcoin halving.

Bitcoin mining has provided a “positive contribution to Paraguay’s trade balance,” and a ban could dent the economy, argues Hashlabs Mining’s co-founder.

A widely used technical analysis indicator suggests that Bitcoin could double its price within three months.

Bitcoin's price volatility for the last 30 days stands around 4% — down from nearly 18% in April 2013. It's starting to look more like a traditional equity.

Bitcoin is "well positioned" for a strong weekly close, but not everyone is trusting of traditionally unreliable weekend BTC price action.

The fee switch will allow governance to control and adjust fee-related policies based on the platform’s needs and objectives.

Coinbase explained that total crypto volumes are slowing down due to the market attempting “to find the next narrative to power it higher.”

Memecoin frenzy makes traders millionaires, Terraform Labs and Do Kwon found liable for fraud, and Argentina’s tighter crypto rules.

Pantera Capital’s Liquid Token Fund reduced exposure to Bitcoin and Ether in the first quarter of 2024 while increasing allocations to DeFi tokens.

The court’s decision hinged significantly on interpreting Coinbase’s user agreements, which evolved over time.

Fantom creator Andre Cronje referred to the Solana network as a victim of success.

The significant Bitcoin purchase comes after Coinbase declared that the majority of the proceeds from the GBTC sell-off would “remain within the crypto ecosystem.”

Jurors took a short time to deliberate on the evidence presented by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and Terraform Labs before reaching a verdict.

BlackRock’s new additions include ABN AMRO, Citadel Securities, Citigroup Global Markets, Goldman Sachs and UBS Securities.

Bitcoin sets up another run at the key $69,000 zone as U.S. banks including Goldman Sachs are revealed as BlackRock ETF “Authorized Participants.”

With the gathering pace of headlines touting artificial intelligence in the business press, one could be forgiven for assuming that all facets of the enterprise stand to benefit equally from its application – everything from the electric stapler to the espresso machine to the ergonomic furniture.

But in reality, some functions are much better suited than others to gain from AI. The deeper the reservoir of data associated with an operational process – and the broader the sharing of that data not only within an organization but among its trading partners as well – the greater the potential for AI to bolster collaborative capabilities, instill operational resilience, and unlock exponential value.

By facilitating the convergence of trading partners’ operational data, cloud-based networks strengthen transparency and foster collaboration across interconnected processes such as procurement, supply chain, logistics, and asset management. The vast troves of data accumulated from these functions – and the insights they reveal – bear significant implications for forecasting demand, planning inventory, sourcing components, procuring labor, maximizing utilization, managing logistics, gauging sustainability, achieving compliance, and securing financing. Yet the sheer volume of such data, sometimes spanning billions or more transactions, can defy human interpretation in the quest to optimize decision-making.

That’s where artificial intelligence comes in.

As the world’s largest B2B collaboration platform, SAP Business Network facilitates hundreds of millions of transactions per year, capturing a unified, end-to-end view of spend. So prodigious is the cloud-based network’s volume – exceeding US$5.3 trillion in commerce annually, greater than the gross domestic product of every nation except the United States and China – that, through innovations in predictive and generative AI technologies, SAP Business Network is transforming procurement, supply chain, logistics, asset management, and related operational processes, with the goal that every business runs as an intelligent, sustainable enterprise.

Connect people, processes, and systems across multiple enterprises to digitalize transactions Check out SAP Business Network

The cloud is uniquely fit for the task of delivering simplicity within a many-to-many network of trading partners. A network’s features, from its search functionality to the matching of buyers with suggested suppliers, must aid the dual goals of transparency and ease of use. Predictive and generative AI capabilities augment businesses’ ability to discover trading partners on the basis of complementary resources, mutual value, and strategic alignment. With every successive use, generative AI sharpens its ability to anticipate operations professionals’ requirements to match supply with demand. Meanwhile, AI helps businesses to automate their most time-consuming procurement and supply chain activities through predictive mechanisms as well, hastening the ability to arrive at better, more informed decisions. When applied to the broadest possible sets of operational data, AI removes the guesswork from business-to-business commerce and replaces it with new leads, renewed confidence, and resilient supply chains.

With these objectives in mind, SAP Business Network is transforming its powerful discovery functionality into a simple chat prompt this year. Also in 2024, generative AI will enable SAP Business Network to create catalog content based on existing data in the network, detect potential errors within invoices, and obtain quote requests from buyers via natural-language, on-screen dialogue with matched suppliers. Integrating AI capabilities into SAP Business Network thus promises to reshape the trading partner experience by enabling buyers to reach far more suppliers with precision for the specific goods and services they produce. Trading partners large and small benefit equally from the increased flow of accurate, detailed, and complete information identifying each other’s offerings and competitive advantages.

As AI technologies take shape and mature, infusing intelligence natively into business processes, digital commerce platforms are certain to introduce many enhanced capabilities. Naturally, with its scale and history of innovation, you can expect SAP Business Network to lead the way. But you’ll know the moment that artificial intelligence has truly transformed enterprise software when its features subtly blend in, almost imperceptibly, to simplify everyday operational processes, making business applications more intuitive and predictive for trading partners. That is our vision for AI at SAP Business Network, where the intelligence may be increasingly artificial but the commitment to customer success is invariably genuine.

For further information on SAP Business Network and how we are equipping enterprises with AI and other digital tools needed to counter disruption, visit sap.com/businessnetwork and sap.com/ai.

Jörn Keller is executive vice president and chief product officer of SAP Business Network.

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The increasing Bitcoin network fees could complement miner revenue post-halving thanks to the emergence of Ordinals inscriptions and BTCFi, according to Acheron Trading’s CEO.

The Solana network appears to be struggling to keep up with a ravenous demand for memecoins, with data showing roughly 75% of transactions on the network currently failing.