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Welcome to Tech Driven Business brought to you by Innovative Solutions Partners.

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I'm honored to have Jeff Scott, CEO of ASUG, joining me to discuss what is required for businesses to be successful with Gen AI as they prepare for the future.

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He'll also share valuable insights on how ASUG is supporting the SAP ecosystem on the Gen AI journey.

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welcome to Tech Driven Business, Geoff. How are you? I'm wonderful.

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How are you today? I'm doing great.

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Thank you. Thank you for joining our show.

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Pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me. Or I should say you can make that decision after we're done today.

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Alright, sounds like a plan. You know, hey, it's always good to have you, Geoff.

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You know, especially meeting in person every year through ASUG.

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Either in the volunteer meeting or at Sapphire or Yeah.

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It's always fun to have that conversation with you.

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So glad to have you on our show. What a pleasure to be here.

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And I want to thank you for your connection and commitment to ASUG, your commitment to the Michigan chapter, one of our most wonderful places to be in all of the United States.

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I have close ties to Michigan, so it's always wonderful to hear go green.

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For those who are Michiganders my Alma mater.

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And I, you know, I think that Being part of ASUG and being part of this SAP community is a really tremendous thing.

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I've been doing the CEO job at ASUG for 10 years.

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And every year, as you mentioned, we get all 300 volunteers together to kind of plan the year and celebrate our successes and talk about our challenges.

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And it's a tremendous thing. So I encourage everyone to be part of ASUG.

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If you are an SAP professional and you want to be at the top of your game of SAP, there's no better place to be than.

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Being an active part of ASUG, which you are.

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And I want to thank you for that. I second that.

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Thank you. So today, you know, today we will be talking about how digital transformation and AI changing the business landscape.

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How does that sound to you? I think that sounds like a tremendous conversation.

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It is absolutely is, and it's going to be fun.

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So let's start with the basics.

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You know, Geoff, you have been around for a long time, not, not counting your, Original dinosaur.

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Hey, hey, it's all good, you know, but your extensive background with SAP, you know you share with our listeners a brief overview of your career journey? That's Well, I would love to, as, as we just spoke about 10 years as the CEO of ASUG.

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And I don't love the CEO title. I like to think of myself as the chief community champion.

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My job is to rally us as a community around this SAP software and make sure all of us are getting the most value from it.

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The people that, you know, the organizations that are purchasing the software, we as all professionals in investing our careers into this amazing ecosystem.

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It's very important that we feel like we can make forward progress.

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We feel that this is a place where we can learn, connect and grow, which are three of our very important pillars.

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And so that's been a tremendous journey for me for the last 10 years.

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I didn't come into this intentionally prior to that.

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I was the CIO, I was it Tom shoes in Los Angeles prior to that, that at a beef company, small beef company, only a third largest in the world in Greeley, Colorado where we were also an SAP shop.

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And I, that was where I cut my teeth on being a full time SAP advocate.

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And then prior to that in your, in your neck of the woods, in your backyard in Dearborn, Michigan doesn't take a lot to figure out what's in Dearborn these days.

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So I was there for almost 10 years doing lots of different it work and then obviously prior to that consulting and college and being a teenager and things like that.

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So a wonderful background, it's okay.

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you know, I, I think the best part about this is being in your role, the role that you're playing at ASUG, your background or your history really brings that tremendous amount of, knowledge and, and technology know how, which really is what a lot of ASA customers or in general SAP folks who are dealing with technology on a daily basis can, can utilize your, your, your know how and your, your in depth knowledge of what's going on in the industry versus, you know someone with a background in business, you don't really have that kind of depth in terms of what you bring to the table.

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So. You're very kind. that. You're very kind.

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And in my career, I started off when I was going to college just a little bit West from where you are.

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Again, go green. Then that's the last I'm going to say that.

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Yep. Today, maybe my degrees in accounting and I chose that field.

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Because I really wanted to understand how business worked.

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And I figured the best way to figure out how business would work is to understand how the money moves around.

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And accounting was actually a fallback for me.

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I started off in finance and then this will date me tremendously.

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And then the stock market collapsed back in the late eighties.

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And I went, Oh, wait a minute. Yeah, I don't know. I want to be on wall street anymore.

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And I grew up in the suburbs of New York city.

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So I had this, you know, Delusion. I would go back into New York and be on wall street.

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And I said, I don't think that's going to work so well. So I went to, I went to accounting and I found I liked it better, a little bit more pragmatic, right? Finance can be fairly esoteric.

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So I came into consulting and it, because I always thought about it as a way in which businesses can be more efficient.

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And I was always intrigued by how we could use technology to drive business outcomes.

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And that has served me throughout my career. So I, I really think about business outcomes first and technology.

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Absolutely. And I think that's what really counts, right? How business drives technology.

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And that kind of takes me to my next discussion point.

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You know, AI. AI took the business world by storm last Yeah.

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know that. are ASUG and SAP supporting their clients with navigating AI and Gen AI in particular, right? I mean, everybody's about Gen AI.

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So I'd like to hear your thoughts on that. I think, Yeah.

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I think that AI generative AI and all the things related to AI, right? Nothing new to that.

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We've been around in the SAP ecosystem.

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AI has been around for a long time, right? What was new in November of 2022 when chat GPT first came onto the market.

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Was this thing of generative AI, right? Well, that was different, right? But you know, most SAP practitioners, the people you and I are talking to today would say, Hey, you know, we've been filling around AI for a long time.

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You know, understanding PDF documents, understanding pictures, converting, you know, pictures to text, scanning documents, scanning invoices, making sure we can convert all that, that none of that is terribly new.

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I think generative AI made it mainstream.

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And what was kind of back office technology that was used to achieve business outcomes all of a sudden became available to the masses.

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And it became available to the masses in a very simple way.

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I can sit down, I can write a sentence into a computer and it will produce paragraphs of very eloquent text.

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We can have a whole conversation about how accurate it is, but I could finally get this star tracky type of thing where I could type a sentence in and I would get this back and I could do cute things, you know, Tell me, you know, tell me how to bake a cake in Shakespearean English and it would do it right.

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Or, you know, so I think it became a, a piece of technology that everybody could connect to and that everybody includes the board of directors, the CEO, the rest of your business peers who can now say, I get it, I understand how this works and I want that for my business.

7:28

We can make this work for all of us. and I think it's a very interesting point.

7:32

You mentioned Geoff talk about c-suite, right? And, and you know, you always, you know that in the, in, in I'm one of them.

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Yeah, exactly right. So you know, I still get involved with a lot of implementations and, you know, put some ground, and I know that a lot of these.

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technology implementations, have this gap between the C suite and the, and folks who are actually Hmm.

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in, in the technology day to day, right? Do you think Gen AI is going to close that gap? Or what is your take on that perspective? Like bringing these two worlds together? I think generative AI is going to be an incredibly interesting diversion or, or departure for all of us in the sense that we've talked about for a long time, the importance of some things in the SAP ecosystem that are near and dear to our heart, master data, accuracy of data.

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Archiving, right? Things that, you know, warm our hearts that make the business run for cover.

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You want to watch paint dry, have a conversation about archiving, right? And.

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absolutely. challenge with all of that is if we really want to get the most value from a generative AI solution, whether it be SAP's Jewel or ChatGPT or everything in between, our enterprise data has to be lined up correctly.

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And I think this is where we're going to see A tremendous amount of energy and effort to understand how this enterprise data will form these models and make them work.

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There was a article in the New York Times, I think two weeks ago, and this is topical because last week I was in Las Vegas for a few days at Google Next.

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And I always go to Google next and I, you know, and I also like to try to make it, you know, to AWS and Microsoft's events as well, because it refreshes me and it makes me think about how to tackle these problems from different perspectives.

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And that coupled with the New York times article was very interesting to me in that it appears we're running out of trainable data for these models that our models.

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now are demanding so much data that we just, we can't fill them.

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Right. And so there was an interesting topic in, in Las Vegas about synthetic data, which I'm still wrapping my head around and what that means.

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And I'm trying to understand how we get to the levels of data.

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We do know one thing that these generative AI models require a lot of data in order to give Effective answers.

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And even when they have a lot of data, they can still hallucinate.

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I mean, there's no greater data source than the English language over the last 300 years, right? And the cool thing about it is it hasn't really changed all that much.

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You know, I can take all of that stuff and I can pour it in and yeah, there's different dialects, but the English language or pick a language, French, whatever, it hasn't moved all that much.

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So the data is fairly stable. Is that true when we think about our enterprise data and the problem that I see coming is if we have lots of historical data, what does it really mean? How accurate is it? And then the second big question is how relevant is it? And if both of those are not at the top of their game, you run a huge risk that your model is being trained.

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On data that isn't accurate, it isn't relevant.

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And then you expect it to give you amazing results.

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The, the thing that makes me chuckle is the notion of saying to a model running on top of your SAP data, Hey, what's the best product I should sell? And it spits back a product that you made 15 years ago, because it might've been at the time, the most profitable based in parts that you don't even have access to anymore, and the model doesn't know that I think there's another really important part of this whole equation, and that is something that I call gray data.

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And gray data is the data that's in our heads, in our minds, which is what we use to make decisions that the AI models have zero knowledge of.

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And the only way, long term, an AI model will be able to replicate what you do, what I do, what anyone listening today does, is it has exactly what's up in your head.

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And it's not going to. We still know today in, in, in, you know, you're involved in SAP implementations all the time.

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It takes someone interpreting that data.

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Oftentimes to understand what it's saying and what cues it's giving.

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AI doesn't understand that because it's missing all the stuff that's in your gray space.

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And if that's the case, and how much, how much of the data that you use to run your enterprise is gray data versus bits and bytes.

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And if the answer is greater than 50%, 60%, 70%, wow, we got a lot of missing data and the model's not going to be that effective.

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For sure. For sure. I think it's an interesting point you mentioned about historical data and the quality of data.

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And that kind of leads me into this next conversation about.

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know, I'm, I'm an analytics person and data focus and, and, you know, it's all about good information will produce good results, right? So from that perspective, I'm curious, what are you seeing with ASOC members as it applies to their approach, you know, especially to real time data and analytics? And also the move to the cloud, because a lot of things are happening in the cloud.

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So what is your take on this whole space? It's Well, certainly I believe that if you are going to want to participate, play in a generative AI, AI space, and you say, and probably before you make that conclusion, you have to ask a question, which is where do you and your organization want to be on the innovation curve? Do you want to be on the very front of it? Do you want to be in the middle of it? You want to be, you know, where do you want to be now? If you want to be on the very, very back end of the innovation curve, continue doing what you're doing today.

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If you want to be to the middle of the innovation curve or the front end, and I think about it as a bell curve.

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If you want to be to the middle to the front end of that curve, and most people don't want to be at the front, that's a, that, you know, you got, you need a lot of courage and a lot of strength to be at.

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That's the scary place, but there are organizations that are there, right? Let's say you want to be safely in the middle.

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I don't want to lead the pack. I don't want to, I don't want to trail the pack right in the middle.

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It necessitates three things. I firmly believe Number one, you have to be in the cloud.

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Number two, You have to really think about your software investments as software as a service.

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Right? So you're moving the, the requirement to, for changes and updates to the software vendor in this, in this world, SAP, and number three, as little customization as possible.

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If you can do those three things and you can do them well, you have the greatest likelihood that you will be able to take all this innovation, absorb it and go, which to your question is when you talk about analytics, when you talk about predictive analytics, that's what you're going to need.

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For many, many SAP customers, that is a tectonic shift in perspective.

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And there's certainly the longer you have been.

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SAP customer and the more customizations you have made, for whatever reason, your business process doesn't line up with SAPs.

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SAP didn't have a solution for you at the time.

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We talk about this thing of technical debt and where I quibble with some of the, the leading thought people is we tend to say and infer the technical debt is bad.

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Well, I don't think any of us as SAP practitioners wake up in the morning and say, today is the day I'm gonna build a lot of technical debt.

15:13

There are some good reasons for it. There might be some bad reasons for it too.

15:16

I don't know how to do something. So I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna code it.

15:20

I get it. Right. But I don't necessarily believe that with a technical debt is something that we all strive for.

15:25

You know, motherhood and apple pie, as few customizations as possible.

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The problem now is the stakes are way up because we've learned that you have to be in cloud, you have to be in SAS and you have to be almost no customization in order to adopt fast.

15:38

And that means, right, that we have to be super careful about customization.

15:43

That creates another problem inside most organizations, and that is how do you handle change control and how do you handle organizational change management? So the IT folks say, Hey, this is good for me.

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No customization. I'm good to go. And the business says, well, wait a minute here.

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I have to retrain thousands of people across 16 time zones in 32 different geographies.

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And that's hard. And it is.

16:06

And it is. So how do we find that necessary balance? And I think if you've been on SAP a long time, that transition is not going to happen overnight.

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It's going to be multiple years, maybe even a decade, dare I say.

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And if you haven't started your S4 migration yet, You are fast running out of time.

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And so there's no time like the present to start working on that because absent that you were going to be perpetually behind.

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And I don't want to be cavalier here who stands there because what I just described is an Epic undertaking.

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Yes, If you get there, predictive analytics is super interesting, right? We have got to figure out a way to take our technology professionals and find ways for them to have more time.

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Because if we really want to do predictive analytics, it requires us to jump into data sets.

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It requires us to look at data, plant floor data, log data, all these other things where we haven't traditionally looked for things in order to find those patterns and those indications and those clues that help us sell more, get more efficient, do other things, right? And that requires time.

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And in order to get that time, we have to be more efficient.

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So if we're going to spend all of our time working on customizations of SAP, we are not going to be doing predictive analytics.

17:20

for sure. And I think, I think that's one of the key, key points you mentioned about that, right? Stop spending time on doing things that are not adding any value, especially in this fast pace.

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Changing constantly on a daily basis and you put AI in the middle of all this, a sudden, you know your stakes are different.

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Your, your challenges are different.

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And at the same time, the time to make those decisions is shrinking for you.

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So for organizations to be nimble and be able to act quickly, all the things you just mentioned, I think they, Go hand in hand, especially a lot of times folks think about analytics as a, as a byproduct, right? It's after the fact.

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And then what we're thinking, or what are you talking here at this point is, Put analytics in front because that will drive that, that, that whole behavior of change of exactly what is important to me, you know, predictive is one part of it, you know, so many different aspects of information, which you can put your right brains and your geeks, right? I mean, has got geeks in the organization, right? I mean, you want to put those folks to good use.

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And the best way you can do it is get ahead of the curve, right? Don't wait.

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Okay. Basically, that's A hundred, a hundred percent.

18:31

And I'm excited about the potential of AI to help us migrate systems faster.

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I'd like to see us use AI to help understand quality in data, to help us understand how we lift and shift business processes out of legacy systems into new systems.

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I'd like to understand how we use AI to drive business test cases, quality assurance.

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I, I, I believe. We are at a massive inflection point where the upgrading of these systems.

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If you asked a question earlier about digital transformation.

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Right. We have to move to the next generation of SAP software.

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I believe that unlocks the gateway to everything we're talking about today.

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That cannot be a five year project. We have got to figure out as technology professionals, how to automate it, how to make it faster, how to do it faster, and how to make sure we can get an unlock value faster is my biggest ask of SAP and in conversations that I have with their CEO and their leadership team, please stop making new SKUs.

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For new software licenses.

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I, I, I implore you to make your software easier to migrate and uplift and move to the next generation.

19:50

And can we use some of these AI ML tools to achieve that? It's essential.

19:56

For sure. No, for sure. No.

19:58

And I think about all this technology and SAP, I mean, let's come back to our conversation ASOC.

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ASOC is Hey, so fantastic.

20:06

start in 2024, right? I mean, personally, I know we had over 150 people at our Michigan chapter meeting back in February.

20:14

And, and yeah, that is absolutely is, is amazing, right? And so what can ASEC members expect this year from their membership? Can you, can you delve into that? 100%.

20:23

First and foremost, I think you said the most important thing where we're seeing the most interest.

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The most excitement is in our 39 chapters.

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So if you are an SAP professional and you want to be at the top of your game and you want to learn, connect and grow, you don't have to jump on an airplane.

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Of course, we're welcome you to do that. You don't have to spend hotel room nights, go to your local ASAP chapter and become involved.

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You will meet people like you who want to get ahead and understand how to solve problems using SAP.

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And I, you know, your, You're in the middle of the, of the Michigan, you know, SCP scene.

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It's amazing. So go spend time there, which is a huge pitch for what you do and why you volunteer is because you want to be part of, you know, what's happening on the ground, real time in geography.

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And that is what the chapter organization is here to do. And I would really like to see that over the next.

21:18

Three to five years grow to epic proportions.

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I have a challenge. I want to see your Michigan meeting, not be just 150 people.

21:26

I want it to be 350 people.

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That to me is exciting, which is a very different change of, of perspective from us, but I think in a post pandemic world, what a great opportunity to get out from behind your laptop and whether you're back in the office or still working remotely, go spend time with your friends in a, in an ASIC chapter event in Michigan or in California or in Florida, pick, pick a place and just go and have fun and meet, meet your peers.

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It'll be so wonderful for you. If that's not good enough.

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Then enjoy some of the other events that we do get online and do some research and education there.

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We'll be, we have you know, ASUG annual conference and SAP Sapphire coming up in June in the, in the fall, we have SAP for utilities.

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We have ASUG best practices, which is a whole source of, of industry based events, and then we cap off the year.

22:15

This is my most exciting event.

22:17

We cap off the year in West Palm beach, Florida, November 12th through 14th with ASUG TechConnect.

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It used to be called TechEd, but we've kind of reconfigured TechEd with SAP.

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So TechEd is a virtual program, but in North America, it's ASUG TechConnect.

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So if you want to wrap up 2023, sorry, 2024, getting my years all confused and get ready for an amazing 2025, ASUG TechConnect is the place to be.

22:41

And I think those are fine. What else can you do? First five newsletter comes out every Monday morning.

22:46

It is an amazing place to just get a recap of the top five articles that happened in the SAP ecosystem over the last week.

22:53

Podcasts. You and I are in a podcast today. Everyone's doing podcast.

22:56

ASUG does podcasts, man.

22:58

Be there. Let's get together at Campus Connect, right? Citadel University University of Texas at Dallas, Fayetteville State University and then my favorite Michigan State University.

23:10

There's my last plug for go green are all very much in the Campus Connect program.

23:14

What a great way to have this next generation of talent, get excited about the careers that we've been so fortunate to have in the SAP ecosystem.

23:23

No, for sure. I think there is a lot to learn and it's the best thing about it.

23:27

Like you said, there's so many mediums, like, you know, you pick what makes You bet.

23:31

know what, what really floats your boat, especially after the pandemic.

23:35

A lot of folks are open to coming out and meeting others and kind of getting to know what's coming.

23:42

Excited. No, it this way.

23:44

You know, excitement is one thing you get to meet people.

23:47

And Just meet people. either it's in person or you're traveling somewhere else.

23:52

Or I you mentioned, June and June, big event. A lot of new things are being shared and you understand and know exactly where SAP is going, where ASIC wants to take you in your journey.

24:04

And as an organization, you want to learn from your peers, right? And that's the best so.

24:10

And one thing I like about your, your, your plug for the you know, the, the November event, cannot go wrong with it.

24:17

No, It's like you, you end your year on something that you really want to take into next year.

24:22

And that kind of sets your basis for exactly what you want to do.

24:24

So a lot of opportunities. I really love the whole platform that you kind of explained so well.

24:29

thank you. And if you, there is a lot going on inside the SAP ecosystem, it is a wonderful place for professionals like you, me, and everyone else, 130, 000 of us in North America to make our home, to learn, connect, grow, to thrive.

24:44

And all you got to do is just, you know, raise your hand and go to a chapter meeting, you know, meet with people outside of your, your, Your standard core team that you might be working on SCP for, and the whole world will be unlocked for you.

24:58

And it'll make you feel like what you're doing has value.

25:01

You know, that the things you're learning can have a place in this broader ecosystem.

25:05

We are going to need a lot more talent who stands there in the next 10 years than we have today.

25:12

It frightens me about how much change is happening. And I believe we are all find very rewarding careers inside of SAP.

25:20

Now, I think the future is really bright and, and I know we can, we can talk for hours, Geoff.

25:24

I We could, your knowledge, your. Your, your passion so kind.

25:29

and SAP I'd like to leave with this one question for you, as far as topics and discussions you covered, what is the one key takeaway that you want our listeners to, to leave with? I believe the key takeaway today is generative AI is real and the faster you get in and start contemplating what it can and can't do, we are trying inside of ASUG lots of different technologies and we're fiddling and we have this kind of, you know, experimental culture.

25:54

Let's go try some stuff. It's good.

25:57

And I think, you know, we are, we're doing a lot with text, you know, video to text recaps.

26:03

Things like that. I think there's a ton of upside to all of this.

26:07

Go get yourself immense in AI. I think that's, great advice.

26:13

And it seems like a lot of folks who are still on on the edges, you know, it's time for them to kind of move on on this bandwagon because this, this train has started rolling and there's no stopping, at least I don't see it in the near future, Today is the worst day AI ever will be.

26:28

It will get better from here and it's going to be on an exponential scale.

26:31

So don't wait another three, four weeks or months or years.

26:34

Get in now. great advice.

26:37

Thank you. Thank you. an Thank you.

26:41

I really enjoyed the talk. And I would love to get you back, you know in the Whenever you need, more feedback on how things have settled down, once we traverse through the 2024.

26:51

we are here for you and we, I appreciate greatly everything you do for the community, for the SAP community, for ASUG and everything you do in Michigan.

26:59

Thank you. Thank you so much. Thanks for listening to Tech Driven Business, brought to you by Innovative Solution Partners.

27:10

Geoff delved deep into the transformative power of gen ai.

27:15

He shared valuable insights on how organizations can transform business with generative ai.

27:22

His main takeaway, generative AI is real.

27:26

Go get yourself immersed in AI as today as.

27:28

today is the worst day AI will ever be.

27:32

We'd love to hear from you. Continue the conversation by connecting with me on LinkedIn or Twitter.

27:37

Learn more about Innovative Solution Partners and schedule a free consultation by visiting isolutionpartners.

27:44

com. Never miss a podcast by subscribing to our YouTube channel.

27:49

Information is in the show notes.