Okay, good morning, everybody. Thank you for joining us today. Delighted to have SAP's CEO, Christian Klein, with me. Before we start on the fireside chat, just a quick SAFE Harbor statement to read through. During this conversation, SAP will make forward-looking statements which are predictions, projections, or other statements about future events. These statements are based on current expectations, forecasts, and assumptions that are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results and outcomes to materially differ. Additional information regarding these risks and uncertainties may be found in SAP's filings with the SEC, including but not limited to the risk factor section of SAP's 2024 annual report on Form 20-F. With that out of the way, Christian, welcome to Phoenix today. I want to start with a look back. It's just over five years, actually, since you announced Rise. A lot of analysts and investors, myself included, saw it as a brave move with quite a lot of risks around it, but I think it's clearly been very successful. Casting your mind back to your expectations in November 2020, what do you think has been the biggest single factor that's gone in your favor or you've executed perhaps the most well upon? Thanks a lot, first of all, Michael, for having me. Being in Phoenix at that time of the year is actually not a bad thing, I have to say. Look, five years back and now sitting here with some more gray hairs, definitely it was a ride. I would say indeed it was a very successful ride. The biggest achievement, you probably are not surprised, is technology-wise it was pretty clear. The product strategy was pretty clear. The co-CEO model broke back then, but I was super clear that SAP can't compete only with these many, many best-of-breed competitors. When we are running businesses end-to-end, that we are smarter than others to understand how to connect an omnichannel sales to the warehouses, the inventories, the commercial modules of our customers. That was pretty clear. I would say that the biggest achievement was around the people and the cultural side. To turn such a company around who was damn successful for 50 years in coding a very successful ERP, you have to communicate a lot. Not only the investors were a bit skeptical back then, but of course, also people. They needed the belief. When you have to start and Share Price is not doing that well, obviously there was skepticism back then. We turned it around. The good piece is there is no debate anymore about cloud. Think about our customers. I just had this morning a customer, and he thanked me three times that I forced him to the cloud because now he gets all the AI, the last-mile delivery capabilities of our supply chain in the cloud on the latest release. At the end, I would say the cultural change was definitely the biggest achievement we actually had at SAP. If we think back to the financial targets you communicated around then, I think $22 billion in the cloud. That included Qualtrics. If we take that out, actually you're heading a little bit ahead of that. Implicitly, maintenance or support was somewhere below $9 billion, and it's maybe 20%, 30% above that today, which is quite an achievement. Intuitively, that would suggest you've been more successful in cross-sell and upsell, but the migrations have gone more slowly. Maybe you can elaborate. For sure. There were some lessons learned. First of all, it's great to see my former CFO, Luka Mucic, still tells me, "Christian, look at five years and how close we really or even nailed all the targets we have set ourselves. This is HANA, this is our analytics." Kidding aside, I would say there are two factors to it. While we are also seeing still this sticky support revenue, it's first, the world has changed. You see the war in Ukraine, the cybersecurity attacks. There's a lot of new regulations coming, and our customers understand really well to get support from SAP is a high asset. There was actually the churn is the lowest ever. There is hardly no churn. They really appreciate when a company says, "Hey, in over 100 countries in the world, we're going to make sure that you are running a compliant business." Second, clearly on the cloud side, the BTP was a lonely island back then, a platform without any apps. Imagine that happens at SAP, that tells you something. Now there is actually a large developer community and not only an ABAP community. Also, the next generation is now joining, building. We come, I guess, to that in a second. Also now AI agents on the platform. Also the multiple, what we gain out of Rise was way higher because we see better upsell, better cross-sell, first of all, in the platform business. Then second of all, of course, now we are seeing when the customers are on the Rise journey, two or three years, they definitely expand now the SAP footprint. I said it before, an ECC on-premise customer for SAP, despite having an ERP, did not necessarily use all of the modules in an ERP on-prem. Now we are expanding from finance. Oftentimes we landed, went into HR. Payroll is anyway SAP, even if you buy your stuff from Workday, guess what, there is an SAP payroll behind. We are going into EC, and now we are going into the supply chain. When you then think about AI agents who need to collaborate cross-company because this is only how you really extract high value out of that, that is of course now another lever in the Rise journey to really bet more on SAP line of business solutions than probably going with a best-of-breed vendor here in some areas. I talked about sort of a five-year look back. We're not quite there yet. In the last earnings call, you sounded very excited about the health of the pipeline for Q4 and beyond, and you would be disappointed, was your words, if you only exited the year at 25% CCB growth. Obviously, a few weeks left, but can you give us an update on how your conversations are going with customers and thinking beyond Q4? I think an important question, given the imminency of the Rise completion, do you ever believe that current cloud backlog can accelerate again? Yes, indeed. It's actually good timing that you're asking that question when after my gym session in the morning, there was the forecast call worldwide. I got the latest. You see I'm smiling. Yes, indeed. I was confident, and I'm confident about the quarter. We know usually when we see the pipeline, when we have the material that we can execute now, of course, Q4, there's always a big swing. There are three, four mega transactions which we never had before, deal size. Also proving the value of AI because these customers would never, ever now sign up for such a large end-to-end transaction on Rise if we would not have our AI and data strategy, our X together. Now, of course, is this quarter nailed? No. That is why also, I guess, Dominik rightfully said, "Hey, there's still a swing in the number." Now, I said 25% would be a disappointment, and I stick to that clearly. We are going to want to make this quarter work. We have the material. There was also some commentary around, "Oh, yeah, I said we pulled some deals forward." That does not signal that we are then running out of pipeline next year with a $10 billion maintenance revenue. There is obviously enough pipeline. I would say the growth trajectory then after Q4 and the guidance, what we're going to pull out has a lot to do with data and AI because we need to see that we are not building, that customers are not building an agentic AI layer on top, but they really use our agents, that they use our software to have agent orchestration, to have really agents serving end-to-end business processes. That is, I guess, the most important factor. SAP will for sure not run out of pipeline next year. That's for sure. Just look at the installed base, what we are having. The last piece, also this quarter, I'm here just touring through the U.S. Last week, I was in MENA. There are a lot of new startups, also mid-size customers who are now leaning towards SAP. They want to expand their global footprint, and also the net new customer business is actually running pretty well. The focus we put, gave the team to our partners, to the ecosystem to build out more capacity to hunt more net new mid-market customers via the channel, not via our semi-expensive salespeople. It was definitely the right choice. We are also seeing there is good growth there. We are just getting started. For me, the mid-market is also a big growth engine also in the years to come. Q4, yes, I am still confident. Let us work the last few weeks, and then at earnings, we will know more about it. As you look forward to sort of 2027, 2030, does that catalyze a re-acceleration potentially, or is the business too large now to sort of sustain that? Acceleration of total revenue, as I said, definitely. We will deliver that the total revenue will accelerate through 2027, and I would even say beyond. That will clearly be the case. Now, on the CCB side, it is really about now the magic thing what now we need to prove. In my eyes, we will prove it. I see the AI use cases now that we not only tell our customers to transform with SAP on process automation, on efficiency, but also go into the data platform. I guess you have Ali here as well. Ask him. The pipeline is phenomenal because I have not seen one AI use case in the B2B sector who delivers high value only with a large language model. You always need somehow without data, there would be no AI at SAP, and I would not have data without software. This discussion I'm somehow not getting because I feel we are in a super strong position, and we are building now AI use cases, and we are committing to someone now in Q4 where we are saying, "Hey, we actually will be much better in predicting your volatile demand in a semiconductor company in the future. This agent on sales forecast projection will talk natively out of the box to your inventory to see do you have the right products, the right chips at the right place, at the right warehouse. Should we ship it that way? Should we ship it that way?" It then talks to the procurement agent to tell the procurement agent, "Hey, I'm running out of stock. You better now go and negotiate the next order with this and that supplier." These are the use cases. If we build that use cases, I definitely have no worry that also the CCB will deliver strong growth rates, but the numbers are also getting bigger. It is fair to say what we always said is that there will be a slight deceleration, but I guess a lot will now really depend on data and AI. I think you've almost answered the question I'm going to come in with, but just to see if there's any more you want to add. A theme over the last few months has been this death of software, death of SaaS at the hands of AI. What do you think investors are misunderstanding if they subscribe to that? Looking at what happened at the stock markets in the last three months, obviously, as a CEO, you would not do your job if you wouldn't ask yourself, "What is happening there on the infrastructure? And is there not a way to get back into it?" I can answer that question clearly, no, no, no. We will not go back to the infrastructure business because our strategy was really successful in the last years. We are convinced that over the time, let's see how long this will continue, this flywheel of infrastructure chips, building data centers. We are convinced that all of our customers are looking at SAP and say, "Hey, give me the best, the smartest agent for manufacturing automation. Give me the best agent for demand and supply chain inventory optimization." These are the cash flow optimization. We have many. That is, I guess, what we have to focus on. With that, and with our software, we have the business context. There is no way I can see it. I just had H&M with me last week, and we showed them the future of retail in our experience center. We literally said, "Okay, you can shop online. You can go into the store." We built a store. Not demo, real life. The agent came and said, "In commerce, do you have this dress? Is this the right size for you? Yes or no? Click buy." "Oh, sorry, it is not available in the store next door, but we can ship it to you, maybe to this store, or we deliver it to you in two days." That was really the sales agent sitting in our commerce. This sales agent needs to understand the material workflow into the inventory. That is what the software does. The software gives me the data, and the software gives me the business process context and the workflow. No LLM, no other AI will sit on top of SAP having this understanding of our business, of the business processes of the customers. Lately, obviously, you also need to make sure when we then showed them how we can even solve some of the challenges in the supply chain functions, in the fulfillment functions of the company, we talked about how do we deliver it standard. We're going to train it. We're going to optimize these agents going forward. What we are also doing, making sure that the identity and the authorization rights also is managed because somehow not everyone in H&M should see every piece of every financial data or customer data. That is actually why I'm a big believer that our software and our data, what we are having, gives us a huge advantage when it comes to Business AI. I could not see B usiness AI without software and data. I just can't. It's very persuasive. I think a lot of investors would sort of agree with me there. There's a maturity issue here, perhaps. I think the financial ambition that Dominik's communicated is around $1 billion of AI-related revenue from three to four years. Given what you've just described and the size of the business, that feels potentially cautious. What could make you more ambitious in your expectations? The AI units and how much will be consumed. It's going well, by the way, especially in the last three months with now with Perplexity being GA, we see a good uptick in tool usage. Is it now a $1 billion? Is it $ 1.5 billion? Is it $2 billion? Is it three? At the end, I'm going to win against Workday if my HR agents are the best. I'm going to win against Coupa inside out if our procurement agent is well integrated and orchestrated with the financial agent and with the supply chain agent. For me, when we are doing next week our portfolio round with Muhammad and Philip, I'm rather going to look at, "Okay, what do my chief revenue officers telling me what they need on AI to beat all of these competitors?" For me, I would actually say I'm totally fine if it's $2 billion and not $3 billion as long as I'm winning market share in the apps. The apps will become more and more an agentic AI layer for our customers. For me, this really comes together. On the monetization, it's a good question. We rather also follow the strategy, by the way, that I'm saying infuse these AI units in every deal, make it work, show them the use cases, the customers, make them adopt. I'm sure the next HR bill will come to us anyway so that we land and expand. I'm rather not saying let's just overprice it like hell because everyone believes AI is the next big thing. Just rather land and make us win in the whole category. That actually works. In every customer, when we delivered a successful agentic AI user, I would say, "I want more. Let's go and look into from HR core, we go into learning. Let's go into recruiting with our latest acquisition. Let's put on the recruiting agent." That is for me, I guess, Michael, at the end, much more important. When I then look at the financial plan of SAP, I look at CCB. I look at how the LOBs are performing, how is the platform performing. I want to see how is AI contributing literally to every deal. I do not get the deals anymore through the door if AI is not changing the game on commerce for H&M, if it is not changing the game for supply chain for the U.S. Army. That is, I guess, more important than now discussing will it be $1 billion, $2 billion. I believe it could be more, but at the end, I want to win in all of these categories with AI. I mean, turning sort of lens inwards, I think the margin improvement over the last 18 months has been pretty phenomenal. Can you talk about how AI has contributed to that and what are the still largest opportunities internally in leveraging AI? First, it would not be true to say now to Citi and say it's all AI. I see some statements out there where I sometimes wonder. Anyway, to give you the truth, I would say when you look at the margin progression of SAP, I would say there are 40,000 developers using code agents. They become 20% more productive. We would have loved to see that at 30%. Let's see, tool for developer, GitHub, Windsurf, a few others. We are just getting there. I am seeing you are going to see more productivity gains on quoting, pricing, deal approval, heavy usage. This is a no deal in Q4 will not be touched by any AI. It will be touched by every AI use case we are having in our quote-to-cash process. That helps a lot to accelerate also the handling, the managing of this huge volume what we are having in Q4. Overall, I definitely see that we have what we always said, a triple-digit million amount of efficiencies already through AI. Next year, you're going to see it in the guidance. Obviously, we have high ambitions on margin and cash flow. This is where we definitely also now just infuse further AI use cases across SAP. All of our managers have now the task, tell us which AI use case you are implementing next year. Don't ask, first of all, for headcount. Don't ask headcount, ask AI. IT and our product owners will help you to drive more efficiencies. That is actually pretty promising. We are finalizing this now in the month of December. You can definitely expect that some of the good performance you have seen because of AI will further accelerate. I would say the other half of the good progress of SAP is just discipline. As you know, we removed a lot of overhead functions inside the company. We reduced hierarchies, the decision-making. I ask for a bit more entrepreneurship to take further risk and not having 10 people around you who tell you what you shouldn't do, but rather take decisions and move forward as the industry is moving fast. That will continue as well. I will not allow the company now to get lazy on efficiencies also without AI. I just want to see that we are driving as a company also further efficiencies, for example, expanding our sales channel via partners. I want to see in development that we are not going crazy in five new categories. Let's also see what can we co-innovate. We have great SIs. We have Databricks. We have Snowflake. We can build data products together. That is something what I really would also want to see out of the product organization that we keep this discipline, focusing on the core where we are good at, and then also expanding our portfolio via very smart partnerships. These are big efficiency levels as well. Yeah. Coming onto that, you recently added both Microsoft Fabric and Snowflake as partners on BDC. How is that affecting conversations with customers? It's, I guess, nine months since you announced the sort of launch. What's the uptake of that been and maybe the impact on the rest of the business? For me, BDC really moved the needle. It becomes pretty evident that in every AI use case we are building and we are then deploying with our customers, BDC is actually a prerequisite. BDC not only for SAP data. There is oftentimes, of course, in many of the AI agent agentic scenarios, what we are then deploying at the customers, you also need non-SAP data. BDC is the common nominator now for not only doing zero copy, which we also already did with Datasphere, but really to harmonize the semantics of data. It is a good sign then when I was sitting here two years ago talking about Databricks that immediately Snowflake, Microsoft, Google, they all reached out and said, "We want to be part of that." I want to underscore BDC, and Hasso always told me that, "Christian, the biggest crown jewel of SAP is our data." You see, also, by the way, with a few lawsuits which I do not understand, but anyway, that we are sitting on a crown jewel, and that is our data. With BDC, we are not just exposing our data everywhere. We are keeping the semantics within BDC. When you are not under BDC and when you are not signing a contract with SAP, you do not have access to the semantics. That is super important to also protect our IP, to also protect our unique differentiation. That is the mission-critical business data which we are having in our apps. That is why software will not go away. Without software, I do not have data. Without data, I do not have AI. I repeat this now in every session, Michael. Okay. That's a good quote there. I'll try and remember that one. Just moving back to the installed base, you mentioned at the beginning how AI is helping the conversation around Rise. There's a fairly large cohort there who went to S4 on-premise. I know you have a transformation and incentive program to help them on the journey to the cloud. Can you give us an update on how those customers are evolving? Yeah. Actually, the journey actually is very promising. You know some customers who joined us really early in the game, to mention some large brands, BMW, Exxon. They are now a heavy also customer of BTP. They are now really progressing on clean core. Companies like that, which we can almost run like a SaaS landscape, is actually huge. There are no upgrades anymore. These are updates. That is huge for them. Now it is, of course, on us to infuse our agentic AI scenarios, which is much easier when the landscape is clean. We can just blast the AI agents in and almost play without doing a lot of groundwork on the customer side. Now, what is, of course, what the customers are asking us, and I guess this will be a big market for us. I guess this is not so much seen in the public yet is they're all telling us, "Christian, these migrations are much more expensive than the software itself." I said, "Yeah, that's a problem. Yeah, we should change that equation." They are now asking for AI tooling for data cleansing, for data migration, for system configuration, et cetera. We are investing heavily in this AI tooling for the IT migration of a legacy ERP into our modular public cloud ERP because we understand the data modules on both sides. We can clean and we can migrate with AI tooling. We can give this intelligence to AI. Also on system configuration, we know our system configuration tools pretty well. That is something what we are investing in and what we also want to monetize because it's real money. At the end, it's a win-win-win for the customer. They can go faster to the cloud and into the future with us. We actually win because we have those tools and we can accelerate the Rise journey. We hopefully get higher multiples on the Rise journey because customers don't need to spend so much money on SI and services. Last but not least, I would assume also the ecosystem is actually a winner because they now also are with us in building this AI agent and these agentic AI tools to accelerate the customer's journey. Their business model will change also quite drastically in the next years, for sure. Okay. Just a reminder, if you want to ask a question, I have an iPad up here and you can submit through the conference app. We're almost up on time. Just on M&A, we obviously discussed at the beginning or earlier around sort of SaaS is dead. How does that influence your M&A strategy? Are you looking at SmartRecruiters, obviously sort of AI-first business? Is that where investors should expect activity to come? Yeah. SmartRecruiters, you can say, "Oh, why they are still buying software." I have 8,000 recruiting customers sitting on a legacy platform. Before they go to Workday, there was no way that we can catch them if we are not having a modern platform. SmartRecruiters, by the way, had already also pretty good AI. We are now harmonizing their AI platform with us. This was, for me, also a tactical move to give our existing SuccessFactors a path to the cloud or to a modern cloud platform. The second is, of course, it opens up now cross-sell opportunities. Going forward, when we will do M&A, needless to say, we are focusing a lot on data and AI. We have this narrative that in the future, you are going to work with our software. There are agents supporting you along your business processes. You can press a button and you can build your own agent. There must be a native agent builder built into the software where you see the business process logic. You say, "Why do I need to put so much work into this business process?" Here you can build your own agent. We need to further leverage what we can see on the data layer with the business data cloud platform. We had a good start. Everything that helps SAP to accelerate our roadmap on agentic AI and on the data platform could be a potential acquisition target. Nothing that we have to do, again, out of acquiring quotes. Nothing that we have to do right away because we believe organically we will not get there. Acceleration in such a fast-moving market could be a reason to go for the one or the other M&A. You mentioned the context of the data that you have, the consistency across the whole platform is important. What is the future for standalone solution extension partners? Obviously, one of them has been mentioned in the press or in news wires recently. You partner with these companies historically. They fill a niche need, but they're not exclusive to SAP. They have their own management teams, their own strategies. Do you need to fill these gaps now organically? How do you ensure full control of that data end-to-end? Good point. We are working with all of our partners now also how to connect them to tool. That works now better and better. Also there, we have a strong API layer. They actually get some pieces of our AI foundation built into their products. We're actually asking them that to do. That is not any more optional. They are really connecting to our agentic AI layer, to our AI foundation. Second, no, the partnership will not change dramatically. We are relying on these Solex partnerships. I actually love those because, again, we cannot code every piece of software by our own as long as they are integrating natively into our stack. In the future, they need to natively integrate also into our agentic AI layer so that there is clear differentiation against some of the competitors when customers really want to run an end-to-end business processes with one of those partners. Okay. I think we've got time for one last one. You mentioned BTP earlier as one of the drivers of the sort of success of your 2025 plan. I think a couple of years ago at Sapphire, you highlighted the ambition to take that to maybe a quarter or a third of the business from maybe 15% today. I know you're not going to give numbers, but can you give a sense of progress on that ambition? Yeah. No, it progressed really well. Today, actually, the BTP is a native part of our stack. When you're going to sell, we completely replatformed Ariba. We completely replatformed our CX portfolio. BTP is, of course, the platform now which runs these businesses. What you get is out-of-the-box integration, out-of-the-box extensibility. You're going to see that in the number. BTP is getting now a natural boost just by being the underlying platform, native platform of those apps. You're going to see that also going forward that now with agentic AI, we want to build these native AI agents into the solutions. Actually, our AI foundation is actually sitting on BTP. BTP will see, in my eyes, also in the years to come, accelerated growth, also based on the fact that everything what we do around building AI agents and also then deploying it standard into the solutions is coming via BTP. Okay. We're up on time. It's a full agenda today. Christian, thank you very much for your insights and investors for your attention. Good luck with the last three, four weeks of the quarter. Yeah. Thanks for having me. Thank you. Thank you.