Resilient Edge: A Business Vitality Podcast from Deloitte

00:00:11 Nishita Henry: Welcome to this special episode of Resilient Edge, a Business Vitality podcast, paid and presented by Deloitte. We're recording from AWS re: Invent. I'm your host for this session, Nishita Henry. I'm the Global Chief Commercial Officer for the Amazon AWS Alliance at Deloitte. Today, we're exploring how three global leaders, Deloitte, AWS and SAP, are redefining the way enterprises modernize.

Right now, organizations are under pressure. Regulatory demands, digital disruption and legacy systems have become barriers to growth, but forward-thinking leaders see this as a chance to reset, to rethink how they create value through data, AI and the cloud. That's exactly where Deloitte, AWS, and SAP comes in, three engines moving together instead of in silos. Deloitte drives strategy and transformation, AWS brings AI-ready infrastructure and scale. SAP provides a digital backbone through SAP RISE and S/4HANA. Together, they help organizations move faster, operate smarter, and drive greater advantage. And with SAP's ECC-6.0 support ending in 2027, this isn't just a migration moment. It's an inflection point, a chance to build truly intelligent enterprises. 

Joining me are Jerry Hoberman and Sara Alligood. Jerry leads Deloitte's SAP practice in the US. He has over 20 years of experience guiding leading companies through SAP transformations, including large-scale migrations to AWS. Sara Alligood is AWS's Global Head of SAP. She's helped thousands of enterprises move mission-critical workloads to the cloud, and unlocked AI value they didn't know was possible. Let's dive right in. 

Hi, there. Nice to have both of you with us. Appreciate Jerry and Sara spending their time with us.

00:02:03 Jerry Hoberman: Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

00:02:05 Sara Alligood: Hi, happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

00:02:07 Nishita Henry: So we're excited to have this conversation. Jerry, I'm going to start with you with the first question. When you think about big transformations you've helped lead, what's one breakthrough moment that changed how your clients think about modernization?

00:02:19 Jerry Hoberman: So what I love about those breakthrough moments is they come at a flash, and often, it's that pivot point when organizations realize that they are needing to actually build to evolve versus what the... The old ERPs were built to last. They were monoliths, they were hard to change, and that breakthrough moment is when you see the modernization of current agentic ERP platforms, using tools like AWS's capabilities so that our platforms can actually evolve to solve business problems as well as solve problems of the IT organization.

00:02:53 Nishita Henry: Yeah, it's about agility and about continual change

00:02:56 Jerry Hoberman: And about anticipating what's the unknown. It's the known unknowns, and being ready for the future.

00:03:02 Nishita Henry: Yep, and we have a lot of those these days, so it's good that we can have the capability to address that. Sara, how about you?

00:03:07 Sara Alligood: Yeah, I like what you said. That build to evolve and seeing around corners is an expression we use internally a lot, and that's what we're trying to do with these. So I think for me, it's when customers have that moment that it's not about modernization just to modernize, just because I have to do something. It's that moment to pause and set that bigger vision. Right, and so we talk about that a lot, having your tech stack empower your vision, and having your vision not be limited by where your technology is sitting. And so being in a state that you've got the right data strategy, you've got the right cloud provider, your next options are endless, and when we see customers go on that journey with us and realize that that's now the trajectory we're on, that's an exciting breakthrough moment.

00:03:54 Jerry Hoberman: What excites me when we have these breakthrough moments is that this stuff doesn't happen by accident. The triad of AWS, of Deloitte, of SAP, being able to understand the value proposition that people seek, being able to architect that to be efficient to get there, and then actually to define a roadmap to progressively achieve the goal really is what makes these successful.

00:04:17 Nishita Henry: Yeah. And we started with the exciting part, which was the breakthrough, but getting to that breakthrough can be hard. People are often really wedded to their legacy systems, right? Change is difficult for a lot of organizations, whether it's cultural or whether it's leadership-wise. Can you talk about what you've seen as the hardest change and maybe how you've helped overcome that with one of our clients? And maybe Sara, I'll start with you on this one.

00:04:39 Sara Alligood: I think the cultural piece is always the hardest, because it's the stickiest, because it's humans, and so getting your humans to change the way they're interacting with their technology, the way that they're following the processes, or just that they're reinventing altogether and we're going to completely throw something out is very challenging. And so having those breakthroughs, I think when we do some of those experience-based initiatives together in the room, and when you see it all start to work and you see the newer way of working start to flow, and you see friction reducing from the system, so when you're living it and we see that reality, I think that's really when we can all make it real together and when real acceleration now can come out of that. But knowing that you've got the right partners, that you're working on the right objectives. So even in an acceleration-based experience, you need to know that you're focusing on the right tasks, so I think that that also is where our partnerships have been so strong together, is that we know how to do that. We know how to stitch that together for our customer.

00:05:51 Jerry Hoberman: Yeah, I'm also a big believer in show me versus tell me. It used to be that you had to wait 10 months, 12 months, 18 months before you could actually see and feel the capabilities here because of the limitations of the technology, the way that we implemented, and the Show Me of today actually supports what Sara's talking about, which is engaging users in an experience from day one, being able to scale up an AWS environment, being able on day one of a kickoff to see the potential of the capabilities of the future. And then as we iterate through designs and capabilities, map that to the capabilities not only that are needed for the business, but also for the technology organizations to understand what their roles of the future will need to be to be successful, to achieve their goals.

00:06:39 Nishita Henry: I think what you both said is start with small ways to prove that you're seeing success, and success builds on success, which is great and you can see the longer vision. And we talked about the breakthrough, we talked about setting that longer vision. We talked about how do they set a long-term goal for themselves? What have you found the most effective at just getting people to start, even take the first step at a small experiment, for instance?

00:07:04 Jerry Hoberman: I have a belief, and my teams hear this from me every day, what gets measured gets done. People need to understand the role that they play to achieve the goal, to achieve the vision, and then the roadmap and the architects that will actually help to get through them through that journey. And that's the first step, knowing what your role is, knowing what the full objective is, and then the cascade of events. I also believe that having effective governance is really important. These agentic ERPs are really hard to achieve without the knowledge of where you're going, but they're also hard to accomplish on your own. It's the adage of one plus one needs to equal three. It only happens with effective governance, of knowing what your role is, how to escalate, how to make hard decisions, and then frankly, even talking to those who are a part of the future, whether it's your customers or internally or externally, whether it's your partners, whether it's SAP, AWS, Deloitte, to actually get a variety of perspectives so that you make choices quickly and iterate that through that to be able to measure the progress through the steps of the journey.

00:08:11 Nishita Henry: Super helpful. Sara, anything to add?

00:08:12 Sara Alligood: I think that really getting the time to value, that's where we're harnessed on, and so having a partner like Deloitte in who understands the landscape and understands the pain points, that we can do a quick proof of concept or proof of value with something real and tangible. So one of the things with SAP specifically is those SOPs. So standard operating processes can be incredibly long, and so there's a really easy agentic fix for this, so having an agent running with this and capturing what they're doing and being able to just roll those out and keep them evergreen. And so something is just as trivial in the greater scheme of things, but so tangible for somebody's day in and day out, those quick wins I think show me, right? That really helps the business understand just the art of the possible with us, and we can build off of those so rapidly.

00:09:14 Nishita Henry: I think that's great. Super great. So we've got metrics, we've got governance, we've got quick wins, all leading up to creating that vision and long term-

00:09:20 Jerry Hoberman: Yeah, the North Star of value.

00:09:22 Nishita Henry: Perfect, North Star of value. Love it, Jerry. I love it. All right. Well speaking of value, let's go on to a finance transformation case. Our example involves a global healthcare company that built a unified SAP central financial backbone capable of handling hundreds of millions of financial documents annually with near-perfect replication accuracy, demonstrating what strong alignment across teams can unlock.

00:09:45 Jerry Hoberman: So this organization grew up over decades through acquisition and through the evolution of the healthcare life science industry, with pharma capabilities, with consumer capabilities, with diagnostic capabilities, around the world. And they were managing multiple, if not dozens of ledgers around the world. They all had their data bundles that they would actually have to consolidate through a black box. And so what was amazing about the outcome here, they started out with what is the vision? The vision was to have a common view of their enterprise, to serve their customer and their customer's customer better. And to get there, they started out with a common vision of that North Star that we referenced to define the data model. They engage users from around the world. The business was heavily involved in the roles to evolve the solution, and then jointly, we architected the capabilities that would be required to get there. 

What's also important is the definition of success wasn't only the business metric of being able to book ledger entries and then close the books. It was also the speed and velocity of being able to make decisions, and it was also a capability to set the stage for the future of healthcare and life sciences. And as a result, even looking at how they architected AWS with regions around the world using hubs in Asia and Europe and in the US, it served the purpose to give confidence to the business that they could achieve their results, do it in a resilient way with speed and effectiveness. And the outcome is they've been able to weather the storms that have happened over the years, and they're set and poised to evolve their business to the next generation.

00:11:32 Nishita Henry: Yeah, which is cool. It starts with the conversation of the tactical winds of getting faster, right? Then, hey, how do I use that? Getting faster to make better decisions, and then how do I make better decisions to grow? It all builds on each other, which is enormously helpful from a long-term potential perspective.

00:11:48 Jerry Hoberman: Exactly.

00:11:49 Nishita Henry: So what changed for the finance team?

00:11:51 Jerry Hoberman: Confidence. One of our biggest challenges when we implement agentic ERP is the confidence of an organization of will the new generation actually work? And the confidence actually of having that perfect land of the ledger actually bred more confidence to seek people who wanted to move faster, and people who were asking the question of why can't I do more? Self-discovery of things that they could do that they hadn't been able to do before, more time spent on analyzing capabilities for a better performance of the business versus reconciling the history of the past. And that's really important. If you think about the time commitment of individuals that they put into their jobs every single day, regardless of the role, many people are trying to farm the past of data to actually make sense of it versus plan for the capabilities of the future to achieve possibilities that they actually have never imagined.

00:12:46 Nishita Henry: And what was the before state?

00:12:48 Jerry Hoberman: They were spending weeks on reconciliation, ticking and tying. Looking at variances, being able to communicate through email and multiple sources. There was no standard. At the enterprise level, they would actually be able to report to the street for a common view of their financials, but at the operating level, they were siloed. The other thing that they found themselves constrained is evolving their business. The ledgers of the past supported the businesses of the past versus the evolution of where life sciences and healthcare is going, where there's been a convergence of capabilities across enterprises to achieve the expectations of their customers.

00:13:34 Nishita Henry: Yeah, it's amazing what you can free up in terms of human potential and capability when you can help to automate or to provide AI services to improve the processing.

00:13:45 Jerry Hoberman: Right. We found that people were asking the question of why not, versus historically, they were asking the question of why.

00:13:49 Nishita Henry: Love it?

00:13:49 Jerry Hoberman: The question of why versus the why not of reaching for the potential of the future.

00:13:55 Nishita Henry: Let's go do the next thing. So Sara, I'm going to bring you in now. They're not going to stop there. As we talked about, now it's why not as opposed to why. So next up is Gen AI automation through SAP, Joule and AWS. What does the future look like for this alliance and tri-party play?

00:14:11 Sara Alligood: Yeah, it's super exciting, and I think one of the points I do like to anchor on stories like this is because this customer did all the hard work, so because they made the investment in their migrations and they came up with a good data strategy, now they're able to do all this new and agentic. They have all the right foundational elements, and so that's really key. And so working with them in this environment, now being able to leverage Joule and being able to leverage tools like Amazon, Bedrock and Quick Suite, really, they're going to be able to continue to innovate and move as fast as they need to when they redesign whatever processes that they need to explore next. So finance is obviously one that a lot of organizations go after first, but when you think about different industries, there are so many applications, it's actually limitless where we can go. So figuring out that approach with them, where they're going to go next and where they're going to explore next, and then as we build out more capabilities with Joule as well, what SAP is going to be able to enable, both within their environments and then both wrapping around SAP with agents. And we're seeing a lot of customers also go down that route and explore that avenue too.

00:15:28 Nishita Henry: Super interesting. And our next example, Covestro, a global materials company headquartered in Germany, has worked with Deloitte for the Circular Economy project. It's now undertaking a new project with Deloitte using RISE with AWS and SAP. So Jerry, can you talk to us a little bit about Covestro, what they do, what their industry's like, and why they're undertaking this new move to SAP on AWS?

00:15:50 Jerry Hoberman: Yeah, great question. So SAP serves so many industries, but one of the industries they serve is around materials and chemicals. It's an industry that's been going through a lot of change, and what Covestro, to their credit, realized is they need to actually have a foundational core to actually meet the needs of today, but also more importantly, evolve to the needs of their customers of the future. They used SAP as that platform, and it's been able to support a couple of things. Number one is allowing Covestro to actually focus on the needs of their customers and the materials that they produce. And so they've been using RISE, which is SAP and it runs on AWS, so it's hardened, it's resilient, and it actually scales, which is important for their global business. In terms of the work that we've done with them, we actually focused on value generation, looking at ways that we can actually take the commodity capabilities and build it into the core of SAP for effective and simplified capabilities, but then actually scale and focus on the value of differentiation, both markets as well as being able to evolve their R& D capabilities to bring more stuff to market, to be more relevant to their customers.

00:17:12 Nishita Henry: So what we talked about at the beginning, it's how do they prepare for the future? How do they make sure they have the right solutions and services for their customers, and how do they improve their R& D game?

00:17:21 Jerry Hoberman: It goes back to building to evolve versus building the last.

00:17:24 Nishita Henry: And so let's talk a little bit about ROI, because at the end of the day, that's the reason we all do this, right? So when a CFO asks, how can I see my ROI? What's the first thing you talk to them about? And both of you, I'd love both answers, from both an AWS perspective and a Deloitte perspective.

00:17:39 Sara Alligood: So I think probably the first place we like to go is that vision, right? So when we're thinking about, "What do we want to accomplish? What does good look like?" We start there, and we can very easily then work our way back into what makes sense from an ROI standpoint. So if your vision is across the 10-year horizon, your ROI and your speed to return is going to be different than if your vision is across a one or two year horizon, so setting those parameters up and helping us all understand what we're working backwards from and what good looks like. I think once we can do that, then we can really help a CFO understand what the journey is going to look like and what the expectations are. Especially with agentic, there's going to be quick pops like we've talked about, and some of those will lead to tangible ROI. Some companies have metrics that they can wrapper around this, but they're squishier. And then there's some proof of concepts and some proof of value that we can do around a supply chain, like if you have a self-healing supply chain, then we can get really tangible. We can talk about dollars per hour, per day, and that becomes an easier conversation to have. But again, it's knowing what the vision is and where we're going to conquer first, and then backing into it.

00:18:56 Nishita Henry: Got it. And qualitative and quantitative-

00:18:58 Sara Alligood: Exactly.

00:18:58 Nishita Henry: ... metrics of ROI. Jerry, how about you?

00:19:01 Jerry Hoberman: Yeah, I'll often ask the question of how do you choose your priorities as an organization? If you're a public company, it would be earnings per share. And then what are the elements that actually feed into that? Whether it's your revenue cycle, whether it's your utilization of assets, return on assets, or whether some of the soft items around capabilities and satisfaction of employees and your customer base, you can actually quantify each one of those areas and drill down into the organization. It comes back to this point around purpose and having those in the organization understand what their purpose is, how to actually measure that purpose, and then how the agentic ERP is able to achieve that purpose through the implementation and through the capabilities of AI.

00:19:45 Nishita Henry: Sara, as we think about AI use cases in the materials industry, can you give us some examples of how they may be using it to create this evolution to the future?

00:19:55 Sara Alligood: A lot of times, what we're finding is that we're working with the LOBs to figure out what the industry use case means for this customer specifically. In a perfect world, these use cases will be applicable across multiple customers, but sometimes, it's just a good conversation opener as well for us as we're engaging industries to show them what is capable. And so when we think about... Obviously with SAP, there's really natural synergies with supply chain. Fortunately for us with this relationship as well, we happen to be part of an organization that knows a thing or two about supply chains, so we're able to tap into a lot of that knowledge base, and we've been working with SAP to really build out how we look at and analyze supply chains together in an agentic approach.

00:20:43 Nishita Henry: Perfect. And I love that you brought up the Amazon ecosystem itself, and I think that's a great amplifier to this conversation. Let's talk about scaled SAP implementations in the government public sector. We've seen how SAP RISE implemented by Deloitte on AWS can create shared operating models for HR, finance and procurement across large government organizations. When you're working with government agencies on these large scale transformations, what's different about making a long-term public-private sector arrangement feel agile and responsive?

00:21:13 Jerry Hoberman: One of the more important things about specifically public sector is that level of trust and security is at a level that's at a higher level than what we see in other organizations. And the AWS infrastructure allows for that, scalable with the NS-II platform, to actually be able to achieve those results. We also find that it's hard to actually bring constituents together. The constituents within the public sector, the organizations and the people that they serve, that level of trust is at a higher level. And so being able to use the stack of AWS, SAP, Deloitte, to actually define that value imperative, to serve the end constituent, is taken to another level.

00:22:01 Nishita Henry: Trust, reliability, authenticity, all of those things you talked about are so important. Sara, anything to add around our government public sector and how we think about this in a tri-party alliance?

00:22:12 Sara Alligood: Yeah, I think it's been a really natural synergy for us. SAP has had obviously a lot of focus on security, and we think about some of the global discussions around this when we think about topics like Sovereign Cloud has really been forward-leading with that conversation. And then for AWS, security has always been job zero, and so it's something we consider above everything else. And so combined with Deloitte, we've been able to do a good job of continuing to make sure customers understand that that doesn't shift in any agentic environment, and that is really key.

00:22:47 Jerry Hoberman: And there's another element which is cost to serve. Being able to manage the cost to serve in a predictable, reliable way is something that our alliance with SAP and AWS actually brings us.

00:22:59 Nishita Henry: Yeah, that's a great point. Cost to serve is super important, the security piece is super important, and just being a trustworthy system. To know that the data, the information is being used responsibly, it's being used to serve the constituent in the best way possible. So Sara, I want to go back to a comment you made before around sovereign cloud capability. How does AWS's sovereign cloud capability, including NS-2, change the conversation with CIOs? What doors do you think that opens?

00:23:25 Sara Alligood: I think it just evolves the conversation in a way that it's needed to. Industry has been ahead of government in this space. Governments are finally, or not finally, but are now starting to catch up and legislate. And within the US government, how the external factors will impact the US government is also, as those sands are shifting, everybody's trying to figure that landscape out. So we've launched our European sovereign cloud with SAP as a launch partner and we're doing some work collectively around this space together, but I think there's still going to be a lot more to come because the legislation is still rolling out.

So understanding it, understanding the implications back into the US, but then also just understanding... I feel like customers, some of the conversations I'm having, they're still completing a sovereign cloud with data residency, which is different, and there's price points that are different in this conversation because it's a completely different structure and setup. And then I met with a customer recently in the Middle East who had a completely different approach to data sovereignty and was talking more about an embassy approach to a data center. There's so much more as these conversations evolve, and so in a way, this is where I think especially Deloitte comes in with such strength, to be able to coach, provide that context, provide that thought leadership, and help governments really chart the path, because the path is still unfolding.

00:25:11 Nishita Henry: It's still unfolding. If you think about sovereignty, you said there's data sovereignty, there's operational sovereignty, there's governing sovereignty, and a client doesn't always know which of those or all of those do they need versus do they want? And what is the trade-off with cost, and what's the trade-off with security? And so really helping them understand that is the power of what we can, I think, bring to them. What are you seeing, Jerry, in terms of what our clients are looking for from a security compliance perspective that we together help achieve?

00:25:40 Jerry Hoberman: So number one is they're looking for a book of record, but they're looking for the agility and flexibility to have scalability. Some organizations are looking to have federated models, others are looking to centralize. And third, there's a hybrid. More often than not, there's a hybrid. Depending on the data that is being managed, they might choose different paths. And it used to be that it was hard to have these hybrid capabilities because it just meant more workforce and more labor and more infrastructure that was required, but now with the elasticity of capabilities of infrastructure, hardware, software, we have more possibilities to tailor the specific capability to the needs of the business to generate the right value.

00:26:25 Nishita Henry: These organizations manage workforces of tens to hundreds of thousands of people. What's one process, whether it's HR or finance or procurement, that transforms most dramatically when you move legacy systems to this integrated SAP environment?

00:26:40 Jerry Hoberman: I have a view that you need to focus on those organizations that have the highest degree of change. Oftentimes, they're in the distribution logistics areas where you may have had legacy capabilities that were highly manual, and you're taking people to a next generation, so you're skipping multiple generations. Bringing them to the next generation actually is through this view of show me, not tell me. One of the amazing things about the agentic capabilities of SAP using AWS is the commodity capabilities and steps, whether they're workflows or actions, can be addressed through the technology and through AI capabilities, so that people can actually focus on decision making and support where there's uniqueness to the capabilities and the value proposition that a workforce actually needs to take.

00:27:27 Nishita Henry: And so as I think about these three areas, I think there are areas where we can help make big improvements. As procurement organizations, we serve them, and wanting to do things fast but also responsibly.

00:27:40 Jerry Hoberman: What I love about the current version of agentic ERP is it actually helps people understand what their purpose is within the organization, whether it's to serve the citizen, whether it's to serve the end patient in healthcare. Any one of these is a defining moment in our time, to find a better way to actually serve a purpose as an employee of an organization.

00:28:04 Nishita Henry: I love the purpose point. And Sara, I know from a values perspective, AWS talks about purpose a lot. How does that connect here?

00:28:12 Sara Alligood: The beauty of this is the work is more, like you said, more forward-looking, and so just as a human doing your job day in and day out, you can find more purpose and more value in what you're doing and more freedom in how you're able to contribute if you're not stuck heads down in a pivot table all day, every day. And so just the human experience changes in such a dramatic way. And so that, I think, is one of the components of this evolution that is going to be so exciting, with the human potential. And then when you slip that back into a government sector and you think about government as the space that invented the internet and the space program, the art of the possible just becomes so boundless.

00:28:58 Nishita Henry: So let's take a step back and look at the bigger picture, the strategic and technical elements that make these transformations possible, and why the Deloitte ecosystem and Alliance model matters. What role does AI play in helping enterprises move beyond modernization to continuous innovation? And I'll start with you, Sara.

00:29:14 Sara Alligood: It's just going to be that speed factor. So now, you don't have the limitations of, “I don't have enough people to do this.” You are able to scale through technology in such an easier way. And then when you start putting in tools, and I'm not a deeply technical person at AWS, but I use some of our tools like Quick Suite, and they are so easy. So you start in tools that are just so humanly intuitive, and organizations, once they have those guardrails, which this is where the partnership parts comes up, so once you've got the guardrails that your partners can help you put in place, that you can implement these broadly across your organization and you can let your organization move with speed, but in a safe way, you're able to just force multiply-

00:30:04 Nishita Henry: Even more.

00:30:04 Sara Alligood: ... even more.

00:30:04 Nishita Henry: I equate it to in telecom where you had to usually lie cable to have phone calls, and then you went to wireless communications and instantaneously, everyone could communicate, right?

00:30:14 Sara Alligood: Right.

00:30:15 Nishita Henry: It's similar in this AI situation. And so from a Deloitte perspective, what's the value of bringing AWS and SAP together versus managing these relationships separately? What does orchestration together unlock?

00:30:26 Jerry Hoberman: Yeah, the orchestration actually does a couple of things. Number one, it brings the best of organizations together. Number two, it actually focuses on the architecting effectively and efficiently. Number three, it actually brings together a long-term journey partner, versus historically, we had individual vendors that were serving transactions as opposed to journey partners who are actually achieving results together.

00:30:52 Nishita Henry: How do you view this triparty play and the benefits of AWS and SAP for our clients?

00:30:57 Jerry Hoberman: What it actually achieves is a solid infrastructure, a foundation using AWS where you don't have to worry about whether the performance will actually be there when you need it. Working with SAP, the software is hardened, and it's a matter of Deloitte bringing the value proposition, modeling and working with our clients to achieve their North Stars so that we can choose the right pathways to achieve results. And there's two ways that we look at the pathways. One is how we implement more effectively, and then there's the second pathway which is the solutions that our clients and their customers actually use to achieve results, and it requires all three layers of the ecosystem.

00:31:42 Nishita Henry: Yeah, fantastic. So great progress from taking a chaotic situation, helping to free up human potential, helping to move from why to why not, and then taking it even beyond with gen AI and the capabilities of the triparty system to say what's actually best for moving them forward.

00:31:57 Jerry Hoberman: Right. AI becomes the multiplier. It used to be you were constrained by the resources at hand. Resources could have been the technologies and the human potential. This is the third leg of the stool, to actually reach higher in terms of the exponential capabilities of resource management.

00:32:12 Nishita Henry: Let's look five years out, and if you think about the world five years out and our relationship at that point in time, what enterprise capability does this power of three relationship unlock in that period of time? Sara?

00:32:24 Sara Alligood: When I look around SAP specifically, if we could have a way to do a somewhat riskless, seamless, super, super fast migration, transformation for customers into that space, and then using agents to just constantly leverage the data. Extract it, repurpose it in the organization, point it in the right direction, troubleshoot. You think about what you could do with an enterprise if you just had their own data, or different data sources hydrating and replicating to be able to solve their business challenges, to be able to predict what a business challenge would be and solve it before it even happens. Could you have a frictionless, no problem enterprise? Is that a thing? Could we even dream of such a thing? You can see the stepping stones to get there.

00:33:21 Nishita Henry: Jerry, what's your prediction?

00:33:23 Jerry Hoberman: I have a couple perspectives. One is I believe that the winners, we're going to be those who actually embrace the change and who leverage the journey partner capabilities that we all bring to the table, and those who fall behind are those are going to think that this is a transaction. And as we've seen from the past, generations continue to evolve. We had mainframes that turned into client servers that turned into e-com platforms that turned into the cloud generation, and now we're in the AI generation. So this is an evolution and there will be a next stage. The other thing I know will happen because we're seeing it already is convergence, and the convergence of both industries, business capabilities, where we'll see new capabilities that we haven't even imagined. And that'll only be enabled through AI to allow us to move from the historians of trying to keep the ledger of what has happened of the past, to be able to imagine the capabilities, possibilities with the aid of AI to actually prompt us with, “Have you thought of,” and imagine the future.

00:34:29 Nishita Henry: Perfect. Perfect. I love it. And I think from a power of three perspective, it's really bringing the best of our organizations to bear for our client's futures, and knowing that we will work together for the benefit of our client is really where they benefit, and understanding how to do that together is why we are a partnership.

00:34:45 Jerry Hoberman: Yeah.

00:34:46 Sara Alligood: Absolutely.

00:34:46 Nishita Henry: Fantastic. One last question. One word for 2026 that encapsulates your excitement, what would it be? Jerry?

00:34:53 Sara Alligood: AI.

00:34:55 Nishita Henry: Okay. Sara,

00:34:56 Sara Alligood: Boundless.

00:34:57 Nishita Henry: Boundless, and AI. Love it. Thank you both for being here with us today. It was a great conversation. Hope you enjoy the rest of your time.

00:35:04 Jerry Hoberman: It's been a pleasure.

00:35:05 Sara Alligood: Thank you so much.

00:35:06 Nishita Henry: That's been a fascinating conversation. From strategic drivers behind enterprise transformation to the collective advantage, Deloitte, AWS and SAP bring through their migration expertise, cloud-native innovation and ongoing optimization. The takeaway is clear. When strategy, technology, and talent work in sync, modernization isn't just an IT upgrade, it's a competitive advantage. 

00:35:29 Nishita Henry: I'm Nishita Henry, and this has been Resilient Edge, a Business Vitality podcast, paid and presented by Deloitte and for Deloitte by BBC StoryWorks Commercial Productions. Thanks for tuning in, and if you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a review and share it with your network. Until next time.