SAP Spend Connect Live: Q&A with Vish Baliga

Vish Baliga, Chief Product Officer, SAP Fieldglass, has been in the role since the company's inception in 2000.

Vish is part of the founding team and has witnessed its evolution first-hand over the years. Currently Vish runs product and engineering within SAP for Fieldglass.

Procurement Magazine caught up with Vish on the floor at Spend Connect Live during the event's second day.

Could you summarise the key innovations unveiled here at Spend Connect Live, with particular focus on Fieldglass?

"This year is a lot about Gen AI and using Joule (SAP's AI copilot). A lot of the innovations we talk about here are about those topics. We're talking about how to improve productivity, how to improve bringing data just-in-time to the user so they can benefit from it and make key business decisions from it. But that's not to say we aren't doing other things. For example, we are standardising how we interact on service POs, delivering new capability on service procurement and how to do end-to-end services in SAP through an integrated, seamless standardised process."

How will the innovations announced yesterday help in the context of today's procurement landscape?

"The announcements we made streamline procurement services. We're looking at how we can best get customers to adopt with the least resistance so that they can get their work done without too many jumps between different systems and validation in different systems. We produce these validations in the workflow to streamline the end-to-end process and reduce the power needed to use each application by standardising. If one system has already done it, the second system should let it be a pass-through rather than trying to revalidate. These are some of the things we're doing to streamline, improve efficiencies and improve process timing."

How do you ensure SAP is constantly creating new innovations and trends rather than chasing them?

"What we do is look at the data now with all the things that we have. We need to be critical about ourselves and say what we can change in our product to improve things and not worry about looking at a competitor or somebody else who comes out with innovation and try to match that. Instead, we need to be at the cutting edge of things. We have the data, we have the volume of data, we have so many customers which we should put to use and then use those to identify things that we can do to improve our customers' experience."

From Scope 3 to risk management, there's so much for procurement teams to consider these days. How exciting is it to create solutions to help tackle these challenges? 

"I was meeting with some media folks and analysts yesterday and some interesting things are coming up regarding the upskilling workforce. When you think of an upskilling workforce, the folks in procurement really have several years of experience and they're getting older. The younger generation apparently isn't that excited about coming into procurement. It's not seen as a very exciting department.

So how do you marry the two? How do you keep this going? I think that's something very cool for us—getting the knowledge of the seniors, putting that into the product in terms of process guidelines or guardrails for management. And then bringing in new talent who are more tech-savvy to apply AI, ML and use the benefit of existing experience and marry it with large language models and digital experience.

So that's exciting to see. It's a new way of delivering things rather than the old way of somebody with the knowledge coming in and configuring things. It's auto-configuring and learning and doing things to improve the process."

What's been your biggest takeaway or highlight from Spend Connect Live?

"It's been the amount of interest in the products and the amount of interest in AI, ML. There's some scepticism too, with people asking if this will solve all problems. But at the same time, they're asking how we identify the ones that will give you the best bang for your buck. You have to also give people assurance that you're not replacing their jobs, but rather showing how they can leverage AI to improve their existence or improve their day-to-day life.

I love this quote from someone—I don't know who quoted it — but it says, 'You shouldn't be afraid of losing your job to AI, but you should be afraid of losing your job to someone who knows how to use AI.' I think that's very telling, which means people need to adopt and learn to use AI, not fear being replaced, but leverage it to their benefit."

How do you anticipate SAP and SAP Fieldglass will evolve in the next 12 months?

"I think there'll be a lot more releases of AI and Joule-based use cases. I think that does two things: it improves productivity and simplifies user experience and hopefully that will give us more weight in trying to sell to customers by showing we can get them value out of the system in much quicker time."

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