Transformation Every Day
00:00:59 · Alexander Greb
[00:00:59] S2: Here's a number that should make every SAP consultant shudder. Seven to one. That's the famous ratio between what companies spend implementing SAP and what they spend on the software itself. My guest today has seen even 10 to one. His name is Louis Schmidlin, founder of Qorelo, an AI startup out of Berlin. And before you roll your eyes at yet another AI startup promising to fix SAP projects, Luis was an SAP consultant. He sat in the workshops. He mapped the scope items. And at some point, he asked the question most of us stopped asking years ago. Why are we still doing it like this? Because the product moved. The method didn't. We sell public cloud as the most modern thing you can buy and then we'd walk customers through scope items in Excel for days. Today we talk about what happens when AI takes over the groundwork from discovery all the way to cut over. Why so many companies call themselves brownfield because of a painful r three project twenty years ago. Why every new hire at Qorelo starts by reading 450 pages of SAP Activate, what happens the day SAP builds this stuff itself, and what all of this means for a 25 year old consultant wondering if there's still a career here. Spoiler, there is. It's just a little bit different. My name is Alexander Greb, and this is Transformation Every Day. TechEd, because I'm not part of TechEd this year, which is unfortunate. But you are there because, yeah, it's probably just just the streets down the road, yeah, where you have to go in Berlin. Tell me what what did you take with you on TechEd this year?
00:02:47 · Louis Schmidlin
[00:02:47] S0: Yeah. I think the the good thing is that we're based in Berlin and so many kind of SAP events are here. Transformation Days was here two weeks ago. Now TechEd as well. And what I always particularly like about TechEd that is less about marketing and more about actual technical achievements and kind of innovation coming out of the space. We of course see on one side SAP progressing with their own kind of agent tool chain, how they are trying to push this new framework of Agentify building on top of it when they were standing there on stage with Nestle together and speaking about how well it's already working. But then in the real conversation, you still see this difference between the actual adoption of what SAP is presenting on the slide and the reality of the customer, where still many are still stuck on ECC with complete different problems than building a new autonomous agent on top of their system. But we already see people being much more comfortable with the topic of AI. I think last year SAPPHIRE is is a great kind of comparison where everything was AI, but for everyone is like, what is now an autonomous agent really doing To now, this concept is is quite clear. It's just now about when is it really being adopted. And and that was kind of my my my real takeaway that the whole community moved much further from a year ago and is much more comfortable now talking about AI, agentic, etc, and can't really keep up the conversation when it comes about that, and it's not just question
00:04:28 · Alexander Greb, Louis Schmidlin
[00:04:28] S2: marks. And you're completely right. The speed in which these things are happening and are changing and things becoming normal is is is absolutely scary. Yeah. You cannot really compare to the... A little bit more... The the bumpy wheel. No, it was the flywheel conversation that we had a year ago in contrast to what's happening now. It's a completely different world. Yeah, absolutely. [00:04:56] S0: But I think there is always, you know, when we talked about the first cloud transformation, it needed so long till the customer starting to adapt. First, you need to bring over a concept, people need to understand it, need to talk about it, need to criticize it. And then the first kind of first mover are making these kind of, first tries, something works, something don't on the slide, it always looks better than on the reality. But it's always the right step in the right direction. And soon enough, the whole kind of community and also in the end, the clients are following. And that, I think, happens much more faster than in other concepts before now with AI, because you cannot just think AI outside of our society. It's such a present topic. Maybe that's also my own bubble in AI, but in general, it's such a present topic. Now I think people start adopting much faster, to get in this wider adoption across enterprises, that will need events like TechEd to to really push the top... Topics forward. Yeah.
00:04:56 · Louis Schmidlin, Alexander Greb
[00:04:56] S0: But I think there is always, you know, when we talked about the first cloud transformation, it needed so long till the customer starting to adapt. First, you need to bring over a concept, people need to understand it, need to talk about it, need to criticize it. And then the first kind of first mover are making these kind of, first tries, something works, something don't on the slide, it always looks better than on the reality. But it's always the right step in the right direction. And soon enough, the whole kind of community and also in the end, the clients are following. And that, I think, happens much more faster than in other concepts before now with AI, because you cannot just think AI outside of our society. It's such a present topic. Maybe that's also my own bubble in AI, but in general, it's such a present topic. Now I think people start adopting much faster, to get in this wider adoption across enterprises, that will need events like TechEd to to really push the top... Topics forward. Yeah. [00:05:59] S2: Absolutely. And, yeah, talking about your bubble, we are recording, which is a good thing because, I'm absolutely stoked to have you here. We have Louis Schmidlin. I hope I am... I pronounced your name correctly. Absolutely. Perfect. That's the source. Wonderful. But the the more different word, to spell correctly or to say correctly is the name of your company. With Qorelo I'm correct too, I guess. [00:06:26] S0: Yeah, that's absolutely right. [00:06:28] S2: What does it mean?
00:06:28 · Alexander Greb, Louis Schmidlin
[00:06:28] S2: What does it mean? [00:06:31] S0: I think it was firstly about the three keywords that we wanted to build in the SAP ecosystem, which was core on one side, which is all about the clean core, which was kind of the first keyword we wanted to push forwards. Our E stands for relevance, which we wanted to build with AI such a relevant kind of new way of thinking about clean core. And the last one is is about logic. And when you put these these three keywords together, you come out as Qorelo, which is also like the sound of it. And in the end, that that's how the the word kind of started. But but, yeah, it's it's not always the easiest, and you don't write it with a u. So we we heard all sorts of pronunciation. I'm I'm fine with it, but I think the the name is quite sticky when when people have a once understood. Absolutely. Because I was always thinking in in Amsterdam when when you talk like, you [00:07:27] S2: know, Qorelo, Qorelo, what what could that mean and so on? And I absolutely... Well, that's my stupidity. I absolutely did not get the connection, but you're completely right. And probably, once once explained, you absolutely cannot unhear that. Yeah. Yeah. Which is interesting. [00:07:42] S0: And that's why, like, Qore, like that you you get the word forward and it's one of the the main keywords we wanna stand for, so we we wanted to have it as part of our name. [00:07:51] S2: Perfect. And now, of course, the second question which follows after that: What is Qorelo actually doing?
00:07:51 · Alexander Greb, Louis Schmidlin
[00:07:51] S2: Perfect. And now, of course, the second question which follows after that: What is Qorelo actually doing? [00:08:01] S0: I think Qorelo, in its essence, is all about how can AI delivery really work. So how can you move customer much more efficiently through SAP transformation programs? And how can you build up much cleaner, clean core kind of system architectures. And that all is about how consultants currently go about their own transformation journeys. And after that, we wanted to enhance every single activities of them with the help of AI and with their services and our product, achieve faster, more efficient and in the end cleaner system transformation. And that is mostly of course for the big topic ECC to S/4, but also if you're already on S/4 and you want to build a cleaner architecture, you wanna optimize your system, you wanna modernize your system, and that all with the help of AI.