Bob Evans of Cloud Wars and I recorded a Burning Platform episode about Agentic AI just prior to SAP Sapphire in Orlando a week ago. I have embedded the video below and I am updating here with some thoughts from the Orlando event
Bob and I talked about the war of words between software CEOs even as AI agents released so far are fairly narrow in their reach. Bob commented it’s time for vendors to not just nitpick at each other but to lift us up, and talk more about the impact they can have for their customers. Bob also wants the sector to become more ambitious in its agentic definitions and said “All my life, I've had this idea that all limitations are self-imposed. We choose to say, I can't do this, I can't do that, I'm too big. I'm not fat. You know, whatever, we can always make excuses.”
I added “To me, the excitement about agents is you can closely tie them to enterprise value. If you can mirror agents to individual occupations and roles, and you can have a junior employee punch above her weight using an agent, or if an agent can allow humans to massively scale outcomes, you can far easily quantify productivity payback.”
I also made the point we need to go beyond Agentic AI to what Jensen Huang of NVIDIA terms Physical AI to include robotics, UAVs etc. That would allow them to assist in industrial, farming, construction and other physical world settings.
SAP did fine at Orlando. None of their executives, at least publicly, took jabs at the competition. ServiceNow only showed up in one of their demos (and unless I missed it, without any snarky comments). One of their partners wrote in a blog about the competition “SAP doesn’t need to tear down a sales tower, a workflow company, or an HCM+Fin vendor to prove its place.” Fairly harmless. And SAP showed off a Neura cognitive humanoid robot in one of its demos.
To its credit, SAP also announced several what I would call agents differentiated from competition which leverage its broad portfolio of applications. They include Quote Creation, Maintenance Planning, Catalog Optimization and Field Service Dispatching among others along with others in Finance and HR areas.
The key word for now is announcements. SAP threw out promises of 30% to 70% improvements in various presentations. We need to see customers talk about their experience with these agents and validate the payback.
However, when it comes to really putting a distance from its competitors, SAP could have done a lot better and focused on agents in several verticals it is strong in.
Look at the total addressable market. The Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks over 800+ occupations and for each it identifies skills that can be mapped to human faculties. And, btw, the BLS only updates its SOC table every decade or so – the last time it did so was in 2018. Many more new occupations since.
As I pointed out to Bob, today in 2025, there is already a vendor offering a much broader range of such agents. In our latest book, The AI Analyst, there is an SV automation vendor called Polestar which has an expansive definition of its verticals as each of the occupations the BLS tracks. Their solutions automate limbs, eyesight and other human faculties, not just cognitive skills. Polestar has a slick video which show its products on shop floors, hospitals, labs, delivery trucks, and warehouses. One of its most successful marketing channels is its relationship with Hollywood studios – many of its bots and agents show up in movies and TV series.
Polestar’s CEO, Barry Roman became convinced about a focus on micro-verticals when he asked his team to bring in his father, a retired fireman, as an adviser while working with a fire and rescue customer. His father commented “Barry, all they have bought from you is some crew scheduling software. Give me a team for a week and I will show them technology a modern fireman can use and you could be selling in addition” That opened their eyes to wearable sensors, augmented reality, thermal vision glasses to allow firemen to see through smoke and fire, drones with sonic fire extinguishers to create acoustic boundaries to prevent wildfires from spreading, using AI to monitor imaging feeds from fires and so much more.
Barry never fails to point out to his sales team how easy he had made it for retailers to contract their warehouse bots. “Not everyone is an Amazon and needs large distribution centers. We saw a growth in smaller warehouses located close to customer demand. I told Swanson (the CFO) to offer our bots as-a-service, and deliver as few as five as a start. Then seasonally we would deliver five or 10 or 15 more bots, as their customer demand spiked. Customers loved this flexibility, and it was one of our most successful product introductions.”
Our book has many more agents, copilots and other automation. It is a fiction mystery where, an Industry Analyst, Patrick Brennan, who used to work for Polestar and helped its explosive vertical growth, works with the FBI in the search and investigation in the disappearance of Barry.
Even in the non-fiction, real world. customers are being similarly ambitious. Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase was recently quoted (thanks to Larry Dignan of Constellation for the pointer) as saying they will have nearly 800 AI use cases by the end of the year including those that support hedging and equity trading floors. He says “it will affect every job, every application, every database and it will make people highly more efficient”
We are in the early innings of agentic rollout. And if enterprise vendor CEOs just nitpick on each other and not starting thinking more ambitiously, they are leaving the market open to Jensen and Elon Musk with his robotaxis, Starlink satellites and Optimus humanoid robots), to CEOs like Jamie and yes even the budding Barry Romans.
And, us analysts need to become more like Patrick Brennan and encourage vendors to think more ambitiously. There will be room for billions of agents across thousands of categories. Time to open our aperture much wider.
