Morning, everybody. My name's Adam Wood. I look after software research in Europe for Morgan Stanley. It's a great pleasure to have Dominik Asam with us this morning, the CFO of SAP. Dominik, thank you very much for joining us in Barcelona. No, thanks for having me here. It's a pleasure. Let me get the SAFE Harbor statement out of the way. During this fireside chat, 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 Securities and Exchange Commission, including but not limited to the risk factors of SAP's 2024 annual report on Form 20F. With that out of the way, let's maybe look back a little bit over 2025. There's been, I would say there's been good and less good elements. There was a strong start in the first quarter despite the tariff disruption. I think you gave a pretty confident message at Sapphire back in May. I think then in Q2, we saw some real impact from tariffs, maybe also in Q3, but to a lesser extent. There was a more cautious message later September. At Q3, though, there was a much more confident message from SAP. Could you talk a little bit about framing the year from your point of view? What changed in October with the third quarter and fourth quarter data? Yeah. If you go back to the beginning of the year, on the forward-looking CCB growth, there was a debate about where should we end the year. We never give a precise guidance, but we said that CCB growth should be slightly down at the end of this year, part of which was the effect of the WalkMe acquisition, where the prior year's comparable would come in Q3. You have seen that effect also in our numbers. That was the planning hypothesis. I say that is still reasonably intact at this point in time. Now, where we have seen the variance to our initial thinking was that some deals we wanted to close end of June were actually slipping over the turn. The issue is, of course, when you have slippage at that point in time, you're suddenly confronted with a summer period, which is a little bit slow. Many of these are actually then slipping towards the end of Q3, September. That's exactly what happened. We hoped it wouldn't, but it did happen. The impact on that on CCB growth, end of the year, is, of course, not very dramatic or not there at all. On cloud revenue growth, if you—sorry, on cloud revenue growth, yes, in 2025, if you're not closing a deal by end of June, where we would still have four months of effective revenues from that signature, and you're slipping into end of September, you're suddenly down to one month. On that kind of portion of shift, you do lose a lot of cloud revenues. When I say a lot, what I talk about is saying that rather than hitting the midpoint of the cloud revenues, we are more gravitating towards the low end of it, which is a 0.7% variance. It is not that we talk about huge numbers here. The CCB growth is still what is the important basis to jump off for next year. We always say there is probably around about a percentage point of attrition from transactional revenues and some other effects. The lion's share of the growth of next year is, of course, embarked already in the CCB growth. On that one, we continue to stick to what we said at the outset of the year, that we are seeing probably that kind of slightly down, including that effect from WalkMe. There is a little bit beyond that. That is how I want to frame the discussion. Now, in terms of very tangible outcomes, while in Q2, we have really seen some slippage, in Q3, it was more that it was a back-end-loaded quarter, but we did have a very good closing. You have seen it in a very strong CCB growth, where the only effect actually in terms of sequential decline was the M&A stuff. The underlying was actually zero, which is super good. Now we have to see how Q4 shapes along. Q4 has a lot of material. What makes it a little bit harder to predict this time around is that within that kind of pipeline, there are some extremely large transactions, which might kind of meander around the turn. If you can close them this year, it can boost the CCB growth if they are slipping into next year. While it does not have necessarily a huge impact on cloud revenue growth, it does have an impact on CCB growth. That is the overall situation. There is very specific stuff like our institutional business in the United States. We have—it is not huge, but it is meaningful enough to move a little bit the needle—it was kind of frozen in the first half. Now you have seen that we have signed a deal with IDIQ, the IDIQ deal, which is a framework agreement for procuring up to $1 billion of TCV. We have already filled that with life with one contract with the U.S. Army. That is good for that specific customer, but it is also a strong signal that we can share with other customers about the confidence of the U.S. government in our solutions, even in these times where maybe a German vendor in the United States would be regarded a little bit more critically. I think it shows how strong the product offering is, that we as a foreign vendor are still considered as a prime vendor here by the U.S. government. We look into the fourth quarter, because you've even talked about some deals from 2026 coming potentially into Q4. From a pipeline point of view, very relaxed, but it's about the execution now of closing it. I think it's more about the kind of lack of predictability. Of course, when you have seen that slippage, you get a little bit less confident. You say, "Do I need to extrapolate that slippage also a little bit longer?" Now, when you see it's getting a little bit more robust, then frankly, you have a little bit more confidence that we can kind of close it towards the end of the year. That is what we mean about kind of the meandering around the turn of the year, which is always hard to predict. Our sales force is highly incentivized to make sure as much comes in as possible Q4. That does not mean that then the pipeline was depleted. We always found a strong pipeline and also entering the new year. We have a strong seasonality that is very well known, despite the cloud, where you would think that theoretically it should not be as seasonal as license sales. It is still a bad habit that has been continued in the cloud era versus the software era. If we stay looking back for a second, that slippage from the second quarter, you've obviously made a lot of changes from a restructuring point of view, changes in go-to-market. Are you very comfortable that that was a kind of tariff volatility disruption issue and not because of changes in your go-to-market? Look, it's hard to really isolate these things. Of course, it doesn't make your life easier when you're transforming things, but what's the alternative? I mean, there are so many ways to sell these solutions in a better way. And AI is also playing a role there. I was just over the last couple of days going through all these transformation projects. When you are transforming the company, it's always a little bit more turbulent. Then maybe employees are a little bit less confident. I couldn't completely rule it out. What's the alternative? We are pretty sure that everything we do here is ultimately giving us more performance. Even if there was a little bit of a headwind, it's very worthwhile kind of sustaining that or working against that, because really the only constant is change. We review every function of the company. What we try to do a lot is, because we are a large corporation ourselves, is to drive AI within our own shop. That's the best way to invite customers and say, "Let's do some tire kicking. You come to us. We show you what we do." Given that we have already a pretty clean tech stack in comparison to our customers, they tend to be quite impressed by what we can do already. That is another. We say, "Cloud, I mean, if you want this, here's the RISE or the growth journey you have to embark on to make your own operations more efficient." This transformation, I always use a proverb of Shakespeare, actually, "Too much care kills the cat." You have to take these risks these days, because if the cat is waiting for too long, the mouse is going away or is eaten by the other mouse, other cat. We do not think we have a choice. We have to tackle everything that is not working properly, everything that is not fully optimized yet. This is spinning the flywheel. Yes, when you do that, there is a disruption in the system. I do not see that as something that has to be the new normal. For us and our customers, it is the same. With AI, nothing will stay as it is. Obviously, you alluded to it. There's a very lively discussion on where your CCB ends the year. I want to bring Gen AI into the discussion. If we asked Joule, what will Joule tell us that the CCB is at the end of the fourth quarter? That's a trick question. Joule will probably say, "I'm not allowed to tell you exactly. Very intelligent, Gen AI. We have relevant, reliable, and responsible AI. Responsible means the compliance rules would need to be respected. If Joule is properly trained, it would not volunteer a number. It would regret later. It would be a very smart agent, of course, and a reliable agent. The truth is, if you have these big white elephant deals, some of them can move the needle. That is why the good news is the cloud revenue growth next year, in case you were to close something in January, is not a huge impact yet. It is only an impact, as we have seen, when the slippage is longer, like we have seen now in the summer period. That slippage, I mean, think about U.S. government. It was just there were some negotiations around this IDIQ, which took a long time. In a normal environment, that negotiation would not even exist. By the way, I think they do a good job there, because they are really consolidating demand. They are bringing some procurement rigor into things. I understand. I am not criticizing them. They do exactly what I would do if I ran such a complex procurement organization. Think about these manufacturers where all the supply chains are getting screwed up. I mean, they are not having 100% of their bandwidth now on the next digital transformation, but are just firefighting and figuring out, I mean, do I still, do I now launch a factory in another place because the U.S. is getting more difficult with tariffs and so forth? That is a lot of distraction. I am actually, if I then see that we are still hitting our cloud revenue band guidance, I mean, I am not too worried, honestly. If we move from the backlog onto the revenue growth, I think the low end of your guide, as you've talked about for cloud revenue, implies maybe around 24% for the fourth quarter. I think there's a little bit of nervousness with investors that for next year, again, on our maps, you probably need around 24% to be guaranteed the acceleration in top line. Could you just help us why you're comfortable with potentially ending the year there, but then keeping that revenue through next year? I mean, any single quarter in cloud revenues can have some noise in it. For instance, it is also true by the maintenance, by the way, the year-on-year growth numbers. If you had some special effects in the prior years, think of Q4 last year, one special effect I remember, and I think we communicated that back then, was that we had one relatively sizable customer that came out of financial distress, where we did not book the revenues for a while. Because even when you are paid because of the financial distress situation, we have a very conservative way of looking at that. Say the insolvency administrator might say that money was not properly given to SAP. There was a big refinancing package, so we could get some catch-up on the revenues. That gave us a little bit of a boost. That is now, of course, making our comms more difficult for Q4. I would always encourage you to look at the more kind of 12-month sliding averages. The CCB growth in some way is such a sliding average, because it integrates the layers of bookings. I'd say the CCB growth is the more meaningful number to jump off. We should see, I see very, very roughly a percentage point or so from transactional dilution. There are some quarters which are strong on cloud revenues. There's a little bit of noise around the trend line. The most important number I would look at is really the CCB growth exiting Q4. Perfect. That's really helpful. Thanks so much. We've called SAP the cloud conversion engine. One of the really important inputs that goes into calculations there is how much of the base has moved. I think when we were speaking last year, if I did the maths around what you're saying, I was getting maybe as low as 15% of the base by value as fully shifted. But then we've heard numbers around 30%, 40% are on the journey. Could you just help us a little bit with how much of the base is moving and deadlines? I mean, the way I look at it is that I look at the maintenance base we have. Then I look at who of these customers in our maintenance base are already on the horizon paying already some form of cloud revenues. These are basically the customers on the journey. What I do not see in that anymore is the people who have already completely migrated. Honestly, that is not a huge amount yet, because many of the customers have long journeys, especially the large enterprises, which are more meaningful in our revenue mix. That number, so that kind of hybrid number, is about 40% right now of the maintenance in ERP. You see the full maintenance base. You strip out what is a high triple-digit million for some other stuff, which is not ERP related. There is about $10 billion of ERP maintenance. Roughly 40% of that is already on the RISE journey. The remaining to do of that is 60%. The good news is that if you look at the software maintenance numbers and you then say, "Who of these guys is already subscribed to S/4?" it's the lion's share of them. This is why our confidence that these guys will ultimately end up in our shop is high, because they have already chosen SAP as the future vendor with S/4. The remaining to do is actually very significant. You're right, that kind of 40% of hybrid customers, they have not fully materialized their revenue opportunity in cloud yet. This is why we probably come to this 15% plus whatever. Of course, the share is increasing, but the remaining to do is still very significant. Now, if you think about that $10 billion maintenance revenue base in 2025, roundabouts, in ERP, you can say that more than half of that is ECC and older technologies. There will be not so many people who go into kind of customer-specific maintenance, because it is quite expensive. We have to assume that that half will be pretty much gone. You have to assume that there is a slight deceleration of the decline in maintenance revenues. That is also good for the conversion story, because these then will be converted to 2-3x in that kind of ballpark. That puts us on the journey to be able to cross and upsell that kind of new cloud customer base from the installed base. There is a lot of gas in the tank, as we say, for the conversion story. I want to emphasize that we've spent quite some time in Sapphire to highlight net new opportunity in growth and then the upsell and the cross-sell. We are going as far as saying that kind of 2-3x can actually double over a, say, five-year migration period, because we are driving the suite. We are driving the upsell from new functionality and the best-of-suite approach. Yes, we bring AI to bear. Either we monetize it directly with tokens, or we gradually increase prices to reflect the higher value added of the software. All these things are then kind of boosting that initial move to the cloud to something more meaningful over time. I can see that in the numbers every day. My confidence in that story is very high. It's not a one-trick wonder. We have several aces up our sleeves. I always say these three really new opportunities, we have very little revenues to start with, but it can become very meaningful. It's the AI story. It's the whole data story, where it's not only BDC with Databricks now. It's also with Snowflake now. It's with BigQuery. You can monetize that kind of data platform. There is the move to tackle the smaller customers. I have a high confidence that each of these opportunities in isolation would give us a billion-plus revenue pie. Now when exactly that kind of billion-plus can be crossed on each of them, not 100% clear yet, but it will happen within the five-year forecast planning horizon. If you add that's a $3 billion incremental revenue minimum, and then you compare that to whatever revenue base we will have at that point in time, you see it's actually a very sizable increment in terms of revenues, which then can kind of take the relay, so to speak, when the cloud migration story in 2030 is maybe kind of going down and is constrained to then only the S/4 conversions. We still have then the S/4 customers being converted. Also there, we try to convert them as quickly as possible, because any S/4 customer on-prem cannot use our AI. The gap, and by the way, it's also interesting for the migration, sorry, when I dwell with that, it's very important. With AI, it's getting so different that before you could tell the customer, "Well, I go to first step S/4 on-prem, and then I go on cloud, and then I do all the AI stuff." That is getting more difficult now. Why? Because the AI makes the process in the cloud even more different. The blueprinting of the processes is already different. There is a significant incremental cost to do the detour over on-prem to the cloud. Most of the customers are now moving straight from ECC to S/4 cloud and not go over the kind of on-prem detour. That brings me really nicely into the next question. I mean, when we speak to partners and to customers, the feedback we get is, "We love the vision. We love the Gen AI." That is not the problem. The problem is we're on an ECC, heavily modified system, and the journey is challenging. Can you talk a little bit about what you're doing to try to make that journey easier for the customers? I mean, it's true that the product shift to S/4 is a pretty radical shift. So basically, it's a new process on everything. It means you have to reinvent the company, so to speak. But it's also a big opportunity to get the complexity out of the system and reap significant benefits. But it's a more complicated journey. The lift and shift to the cloud is not the big issue, actually. So that is something people have to do. It's like any platform investment. When the base in your house needs to be renovated, that's painful. It's hard to do, but you have to do it sooner or later. And then the question is, is there a better solution for them? So they would run away from SAP. And luckily, as I said, most of these guys have already subscribed to S/4. But it is a journey. Now, there are, of course, new tools which make the journey less risky, cheaper. That is all about AI in the transformation journey. If you have to refactor old ABAP code to ABAP Cloud to do your extensions in a clean, core-compliant way, you can automate that to a large degree today. There is this tool for consultant tool, where basically all the experience of the best consultants on the planet is at the fingertip of every consultant who uses it. I think we have recently announced that Deloitte is also now subscribing to it. There is our Business Transformation Suite. You recall that these M&A projects were all in that area. It's about making the process analysis very surgical, facts and figures driven, and really measuring the performance of the process today versus what the target stage is and how much money you can save if you go down that journey. It's about the complication of identifying submarine software in the company, doing the enterprise architecture management, and seeing what solutions are out there. Then it's the adoption. I mean, we are all creatures of habit. We find it hard to change tools and change the way we work. WalkMe is a perfect tool to do that. By the way, LeanIX is really a blockbuster. We have quintupled customer count last year on that product. CIOs love it, because it's like a radar you put on your enterprise architecture, and you can see everything that's happening. If somebody builds a small AI bot, suddenly you will find it. You can figure out, can we use it elsewhere, or should I bid it? Because it is a dangerous thing that is kind of easy to attack or whatever, is not compliant with our security requirements. I venture to say, by far the most powerful tool suite to do exactly what you say, to drive down the cost of these journeys and to also reduce the risk that the outcome will not be exactly what customers think it is. It is super important, because we still have a lot of wounds from some SIs having worked on projects and something went wrong. Of course, the reputational damage is not necessarily with the SI, but in many cases with us. It's super important to make it safer, so to speak, and more predictable. Can we talk about cloud multipliers again? You've talked about the support to subscription journey being a 2-3x multiplier. Maybe first of all, why are we at the low end? What gets us to the high end? At Sapphire, Christian talked about even 4-5x. How do we go from 2-3 to 4-5? Yeah. I mean, the question is really on the initial signature of a deal. To what degree are we already able to convince customers to embark more content than just the bare minimum of S/4 into that journey? Are they also adding already a procurement solution there or some consolidation software on finance? That drives that kind of 2-3x. Now, the upsell is really, we had a nice slide in Sapphire where we showed the different sources for that kind of doubling on top of that. It is simply the growth. I mean, contrary to what some people think, it is not that the prime driver of our growth or of metering is like the seats. It is oftentimes also just stuff like revenues, which are growing. Then it is, of course, the cross-sell to add more applications. We are very aggressive commercially to say, "Look, guys, if you consolidate more on our platform, you can do that." There is the value add with AI, which is coming in. Also, when you move from the old version of SAP to the new version, that new version has more functionality, and the customer is also willing to pay more for that. It is not a huge challenge to double that over, say, a five-year horizon, because if you break it down in the kind of net renewal rate over these five years, if you compound that at a kind of reasonable rate, that is where you are. Yeah, this is quite well secured and is the other big pillar besides the pure conversion that has been giving us nice uptick on growth in the cloud. That's helpful. Thank you. I think the other surprise for me at Sapphire was the scale of the net new business that you talked about, $2 billion, with cohorts growing at 20%. Could you just talk a little bit about what's changed in the mid-market from a product go-to-market and the opportunity there? I mean, it's all about the maturity and the go-to-market engine for a product that has not been really existing before, which is a product where you can start kind of, if you want to spend $40,000-$50,000 per annum, that's the entry ticket to buy, Grow with SAP, and then to make it easy to implement for young growing companies or smaller companies. Then also build an indirect sales channel, which was not our forte in the past, and that is still in the making. I think the best is still to come on that front. We only have these ducks in a row now. Now you see the inflection, actually, that now the public cloud is actually, in terms of growth rates, gathering momentum. On the bookings, the growth is actually higher on the public cloud now than private. It's really kicking into gear. One big advantage we enjoy with this tool is that we don't have like a small company solution anymore and a large company solution. We can go to customers and say, "Even if you are now a smaller tech company, you don't need to replatform, because we can run from small companies like a Mistral on AI or something like that all the way to a giant company like Schneider Electric with manufacturing." That was a huge development effort, because we have basically matured and developed ECC over decades. Now we have to do a full kind of native. Now it's about the maturity of the product. Really, one shoe after the other is dropping that we can suddenly go for higher-hanging fruit and have a more complex product that is also fulfilling the needs. Once you have that in that scalable multi-tenant deployment form, you can also bolt on small customers easily. It was a start from scratch, basically. Before, we had a tiny different tool, but it was not the focus of SAP. Now we have that, and it is the focus of SAP. Also, the large customers, we want to mature the solution so high that with the clean-core journey from Rise, over time, we can also migrate these people to Grow, because that will then be the brave new world where all the upgrades we are doing with AI and new functionality, the customer does not even notice anymore that there is some work. We all do that for them. On the Rise journey, there is still some deployment work for upgrades, so they do it probably once a year. On Grow, we can do it really quarterly. That means we have a velocity of innovation, and we finally shed that impediment of showing our innovation to the customer later than others. That is the flywheel we are really excited about. You've talked a lot of the drivers: cloud conversion, business data cloud, Grow. We've got a whole list. When we think about CCB growth in the midterm rather than just this year, could you help us? How should we think about, is it still a deceleration? How should we think about that momentum? If you look at the PaaS and SaaS layer in our segments, I've seen some stats, and I think they're right from the research houses that SAP has been printing on latest 12 months like 29% US dollar-based growth there. Our competitors, the market is like mid-teens in that bucket. You can look at our direct competitors, Workday, Oracle, and ERP. We're growing probably about twice as fast. The question boils down to, how long, Dominik, do you think you can sustain kind of growing twice as fast as the market? We have to be a little bit humble on that and say, "Look, at some point in time, the air will get thinner, and you might gravitate more towards a normal X% plus market than double." I do see, actually, that this can gradually decelerate. It's not a problem, because we have that mixed effect, which is propelling our total revenue growth. I always do the math. No matter whether you look at 2024 growth rates in each of these buckets: cloud ERP suite, extension suite, and the maintenance, and the software, and the services. You use the same growth rates for each of these buckets in 2024 or first half 2025, you get to the same conclusion that where we are able to sustain these growth rates for the next three years, we would see a 3 percentage point acceleration in total revenues every year. It means I can actually afford quite some deceleration and still accelerate the top line. I mean, I'm not expecting compounding 3% growth for the next three years. That would bring us into high teens type of total revenue growth. That is not in the cards, to be very blunt. By the way, the overall market, if you look at the sum of software services and cloud, is of course not at the growth rate either. It is much lower than that. The truth is somewhere in the middle, and it is all about mitigating that slight decline to the lowest possible number. You have to continue to expect that kind of slight decline. We have been peaking. I mean, so far it was an acceleration. I think indeed we have been peaking now. We still have that fuel in the tank from the conversion, which I mentioned. This is why, contrary to my habit of not giving long-term guidance, I am willing to say that total revenue growth should accelerate in 2026 and 2027 every year. Now, in January, we have to then see what we can say for 2026 specifically and how much it will be. I would also go one step further, saying, "Look, there is no logical reason why there should suddenly be a cliff and something should end at that point in time." The fundamental drivers of the growth story are very intact. Yes, at the end of the decade, there might be a slower conversion story. By then, these three new opportunities should have really, really meaningful size and can kind of more than offset, hopefully, that kind of conversion normalization, I'd say. Maybe moving from top line onto profitability. You've talked about the aspiration to be a Rule of 40 company, being pretty hard on yourself by using a free cash flow margin. Could you talk a little bit around the levers you still have on profitability? What year would you expect to be a Rule of 40 company, Dominik? I'm a fundamentalist. For me, discounted cash flow, the way I learned it at business school, is still important. When I was walking over the hallways there, and I have seen 25 years Morgan Stanley conference, I was thinking back 25 years ago. That was 2000. At that point in time, people started to say cash flow does not matter too. And then infrastructure. It did, right? Infrastructure was everything. I was an investment banker at that point in time, and I was able to get more money out of an IPO of a fiber optics company than the enterprise value was two years later. Fees higher than the enterprise value two years later. I'm confessing fundamentalist. I care about free cash flow and the growth thereof. Of course, we have to I also say that growth in our business is more important than just the margin. I don't want to take mortgages on the future. We have decided for us that we really want to shine on the past SaaS layer. I gave you the market share gain numbers we had. Infrastructure, we will do selectively on the sovereign side. There are more and more customers who are nervous about a kill switch in the system. They might not want to put their stuff in U.S. hyperscalers anymore, which is a pity, because our U.S. hyperscaler partners have great products, and they are super cost competitive. The fundamental model in terms of margin expansion and cash conversion should not change. We are still seeing that 80%-90% total expense growth versus the revenue growth. We need to activate a lot of AI scenarios to really get there. The cash conversion, we will not change massively. There might be some opportunities to bring customers to the cloud that previously were stuck on-prem because of legal constraints. I mean, look at Germany. We are just in the last innings of getting certification by the BSI to move defense customers to the cloud, stuff that we have done in the U.S. for seven, eight years already. That is where we are going to invest. If there are other local partners that can do the infrastructure business for us at lower cost, we're happy to also embark them on our platform. It is not our differentiator. We think that from that perspective, while it is not the flavor of the month in certain stakeholder groups these days, we still continue to stick to our guns there and do what we have done in the past. Does it make sense? Absolutely. Would you give us a year, or is that too much? A year for. The Rule of 40. No, no, no. Sorry, you were coming from the Rule of 40. So I was just spending time why the cash flow is so important to me and the growth of it. Look, I do not want to speculate on when exactly it is happening. I think we are on the right trajectory. I think you can do your own math with the kind of framework I gave you in terms of the margin expansion, the acceleration of the growth. I mean, it is then about, I mean, it is not so easy to hit it in 2027 if you do the math. When exactly, we do not want to be more specific. We should see 2027 revenue growth higher than what we see in 2026 and higher than what we see in 2025. The margin will expand with the 80%-90% rule, and the cash conversion will be operating profit, non-FS operating profit minus 30% tax plus $1 billion for stock-based comp, which is non-cash. That's helpful. Thank you. That's it. And then you can really. We can build our model. Maybe moving away from the financials, it's amazing this year that we've had this kind of flip in August. Up until that point, it was all about how positive is GenAI going to be for you? How do you monetize it? How do you get benefit internally? To how disruptive is it going to be for your business? Could you talk a little bit about how you think about this? Is this more of an opportunity or more of a threat to SAP? I think it's more of an opportunity, the reason being that if you think about what is really needed for AI, what are the key ingredients is good data, reliable, relevant data. Where is that data generated? Actually, sorry to say, it's in the app. The question is, once you have used that data and turned it into insights, our app is not there to write a report. Our app is there to trigger transactions in companies. You have to go back to the app. The starting point is the app. The endpoint is the app. Of course, there is a lot of data management and a lot of AI in between these days. We have the whole position that the endpoint and the start plan is in our system. We have now created a flywheel ecosystem that fills the middle. We have embarked on our platform, now data platforms, data engineering platforms like Databricks, like Snowflake, like BigQuery, which means there is a monetization opportunity for us. When When people start using these, the meter is spinning. That is actually some incremental revenue too, because before, frankly, for lack of alternatives, we did not monetize it at all. If you think about software, on-prem software, you sell a software. All these connectors are simply programmed by the customer. They just change the code and do the APIs they need. We did some APIs ourselves. As we did not have a monetizable offering, we were allowing people to really make us a patient, stupid data donor. Now we have a tool that at least we can monetize it. That is one thing. It's also a big benefit for the customer, not only because they use it, but also they can avoid SI cost, because it's plug and play. The money, the waste we drive out by creating that pre-configured integration with these vendors can be shared between our customers and the two vendors who are integrating. There is a value pool we can tap, and then the meter is spinning. On top of that, what many people forget is the initial idea of SAP was there is a guy, the founders, they looked over the shoulder of the customer and were just seeing the same customers are doing the same thing. Why don't we do a standard software for that? We were limited in that approach in the past to our own data in the SAP system. Now, with BDC and the other things, we have the connector to the unstructured data. I always bring the example of a bottling company. You need weather forecasts, which is not in the SAP system for that. Now, you can still speculate, should every bottling company on the planet do its own kind of forecasting software to decide how much bottles they need to order and when stuff needs to be where? Is there an off-the-shelf SAP app which does that? We see that a lot of customers would like to just activate something that's out of the box, because there's always risks when you code yourself. There's uncertainty about cost. There's uncertainty of whether it works. The fundamental story of SAP simply looking over the shoulder of the customer and trying to do it better than what they could do on their own and using the economies of scale, that's fully intact. We have 25 years of domain expertise in these 25, sorry, 50 plus years in 25 verticals we are catering to. We have that functional expertise in accounting, in controlling, in procurement, in travel. That's the unfair advantage we can use on top of this platform. Let's assume this platform were to some degree democratized. It's actually not, because there are still some features we keep to ourselves, like the RapidOne foundation model or the Knowledge Graph that is really proprietary to SAP to build even better AI than others. Let's even assume that would not exist, and it's all democratized. I mean, we're also in the pole position to develop these apps, and we have the biggest customer base doing exactly that. Why should I have any inferiority complex that I'm not able to also be very strong in everything that's in between with everything we have today? This is why it's more an opportunity to come back to your initial question than a threat. It is also true we have to be very quick on our feet. It's all about speed, execution. That's what currently is our key concern to make sure that we are really rapidly grabbing these opportunities. This is also, while some don't like it, we employ a lot of people very rapidly. We have shed about 10,000 people last year. You've seen that the headcount is going up. We've hired more than that again. These are exactly the new skills we need to win that race. I do believe we have an edge on recruiting there. Why? Because these people, the people who are interested for enterprise applications, they can either work off some of these generic platform providers, which have very little clue about what's happening in the customer, or they can work at specialized startups, which are currently eating alive. If you would build a small, niche SaaS index in the Nasdaq, you would see the performance is not very great. These people have a lot of stock-based compensation. This is also the reason why we did not acquire any of them, because only five years back, we said you are too expensive. Then we reconvened three years later, and we say you are too expensive. That was at half the price compared to two years ago. The niche guys are under pressure. The other opportunity is you do the own development in a company. If you are developing that stuff in one enterprise, you're doing it for one enterprise. If you join SAP, that's the pitch to the people who join SAP. Think about you doing a super thing for procurement, and you don't do it for one customer. You do it for tens of thousands of customers. Isn't that much more interesting? We are pretty strong. I'd say one of our advantages vis-à-vis our customers is that we probably find it easier to hire, because also some of the industries of our customers are under pressure. We are still a nice house in a nice neighborhood in digital, where there's also some opportunity on stock-based compensation for these people. It's not always going through the roof, of course, but over the cycles, SAP has been a decent story there. I think we are well positioned. Of course, it has to ultimately be executed. That's the key focus. The good news is it's in our hands. It's not that we need some magical thing from outside to happen. If we think about the dual copilot and the dual agents that you're putting in, could you maybe just talk a little bit about the functionality that you're delivering to customers and maybe also the monetization path there? Yeah. I mean, take my specialty, which is, of course, finance, and the adjacent functionalities like procurement and so forth, where I'm also in charge of SAP to do that. Every customer, including ourselves, is currently building these agents to get stuff done on consolidation. I mean, very tedious work where. I'll give you another easy example, cash collection. If you compare our accounts receivable days outstanding, you will figure out they are too long in comparison to our competitors. There are some things you can change about that. AI is a good example. I mean, you can dumb people to death with AI. If you are fighting against a bot, customers tend to have always good excuses why they don't pay. One classical one is, I can't recognize that invoice because the purchase order I have is a different one. I investigated that as an example, as an agent, and said, why do we have these many wrong purchase orders? The truth is, when we sign a contract, these contracts are complex. They have hundreds of pages. The customer puts it in a purchase order, and they make almost every purchase order has some mistake. When we receive the purchase order from a customer, we do not even look at it today, or we did not even look at it to date. Why? Think about this tedious work. Who wants to kind of screen the contract and compare it to the purchase order, hundreds of pages? No human being in the shared service center will do it. They do not have to. Why? It is not a transaction. That is the kind of just FYI document. We do not do anything with FYI documents. Now, I can build that bot that's doing nothing but comparing literally millions of these purchase orders against the initial contract. The second we get a wrong purchase order, sending it back to the customer. When I send the invoice next time, I have no dispute. If I get $100 million, $200 million, $300 million out of this because I can accelerate the DSO and you apply the cost of capital of that, that's a much higher amount of money I can save. I can give you, I just yesterday was presenting to my colleagues the myriad of agents we are now activating over the next three years with SAP. The way we do it is we do that in our own shop. We then bring customers to us and look at it and say, look, this is what we do. This is part of the story where we can decouple the total expenses from the top line, despite the fact that most of our expenses are personal expenses, which are inflated every year by merit hikes. It is very broad. We should make a big effort at Sapphire to show you more of these things. Please, everyone is cordially invited to join us there. It is really in the makings. We are at that kind of tipping point where it is coming from PowerPoint to real products, and where then with the forward-deployed engineering, which we do not only with customers, but also with our own groups internally, we are debugging these things all the time and make them better and better. This is how we then commit to very hairy productivity goals. I mean, think about finance. We are growing the top line more than 10%. We are going down market with smaller customers. We have a regulatory thing. Oh, yesterday you have seen the EU has ruled the omnibus, but big customers are not affected. We have to do all the regulatory burden of the EU. Basically, EU said, we understand it's a kind of bureaucratic monster. This is why we give relief to small customers. The big ones, they do not care. They can pay it anyhow. There is a regulatory onslaught. I always say our workload in my department is probably increasing high teens every year. I want to keep the costs at. I need massive productivity gains. In other industries, it's a different problem. The margin is eroding. The top line is stalling. They need to drive productivity. That's amazing that you can use your company as a showcase to customers. Of course. I mean, we've done that also with the standardization S/4 before. They came to our shared service center in Prague. This tire kicking is super important for customers to get confidence. Can I ask you, maybe just finish off on capital allocation? There's been some speculation about bigger M&A deals for SAP. Could you just talk a little bit about what the strategy is on the M&A side? I mean, the fact is that we have not done much except for the Transformation Suite. And we did SmartRecruiters, which is an application there. The topic was that, honestly, it is one of the rare cases where our own organic investment was not very successful, where basically, for whatever reasons, we had a lot of people and a lot of money for something, and there was little output. So we had to plug that tiny hole on recruiting by buying that application and really making sure that our customers get the best of breed in everything on HR. But that should stay the exception. I would much rather develop stuff ourselves internally as long as we can. And with the new tools, I think it is even harder to argue to pay a lofty price for these niche applications if also we can develop faster, not only our customers. We can use these copilots or tool for consultant, tool for developer. We can also use GitHub Copilot or Cursor to code fast. The truth on the larger applications, and you have seen some rumors. I know exactly what you're alluding to. I want to put it in a very generic way. I alluded to it before. These SaaS specialized vendors, they have not been performing so well over the last years. Maybe three, four years back, we would have been even more motivated to talk to them. We did talk to most of them that are relevant for us, because it's actually a great story to embark them in SAP, to drive the synergies in the go-to-market, to take some overhead out. It's a pretty easy game for us. Now, the problem is there was always a bit of spread because the sell side wanted to have more money than what we were willing to offer. My philosophy is I compare to buying our own shares back. You talked about capital allocation. I know my plan pretty well. I have a high degree of confidence around it, whereas M&A is a little bit of a cat in the bag. Why not just kind of repurchasing my own shares rather than doing M&A if I do not need to do it? The good news is if we had not then re-engaged a couple of years, three years later with many of them, it is still the same problem. They always think next year everything will be better. We think, no, this will be a death by 1,000 cuts. It will be worth less and less. This is why the gap is always the same. This is why you have not seen us doing big transactions. Perfect. We are bumping up against time. I've got lots more we can go through. I really appreciate it, Dominik. Thank you for joining us. Thanks for your.