Saphila: Individuals claim the tools of scale

When thinking of enterprise technology, expensive rollouts and complex processes often come to mind. But, as SAP global innovation evangelist Timo Elliott said in a keynote at the Saphila 2025 conference at Sun City, the future lies just as much with the individual as with the enterprise.

Saphila is a biennial conference for the SAP user group community, hosted by the African SAP User Group (AFSUG) in partnership with SAP, a global tech giant specialising in enterprise software.

Elliott pointed to a quiet revolution in which small organisations and everyday users are taking innovation into their own hands, often without the need for formal IT departments. He said that SAP Build, a unified low-code and pro-code application development platform, can play a key role in this shift by enabling users to create business apps, automate processes, and build digital workspaces with the help of AI and pre-built components.

“This is not just for big companies and big problems,” he said. “SAP Build is a fusion environment. Here’s a lovely example from the SAP Innovation awards for 2024: a not-for-profit organisation in Switzerland called Essen für Alle (Food for All). It was founded during the COVID era by a Syrian refugee in Switzerland. He noticed that restaurants were all closed and having this excess food while other people were going hungry.”

Elliott said the organisation now distributes 18 tons of food every weekend to those in need. Using SAP Build Apps, the team was able to quickly create a small application in a no-code, low-code drag-and-drop environment to handle tasks like volunteer scheduling.

The app created by the company includes document automation, making it easy to scan IDs for both volunteers and recipients. He said that these technologies help organisations move faster, especially when it comes to integration – often one of the biggest hurdles in transformation projects. The SAP Integration Suite allows users to link systems with minimal effort, handling most of the complexity automatically.

In an exclusive interview, Elliott told Gadget: “I’m really interested in innovation that is much closer to the individual business person. Companies have always done innovation, but for individuals it’s harder to innovate – or has been. Now, with the latest technologies, you can vibe code yourself even if you know nothing about coding. All of that adds up to a new opportunity.”

That shift is being powered by a new wave of accessible tools – cloud services and embedded AI assistants – that allow non-technical users to build and deploy solutions quickly. Elliott said this as one of the most important developments shaping enterprise technology today.

“Essen für Alle has gone forward. It’s just a handful of people, lots of volunteers, but they needed a little bit of application, a little bit of technology to help them.”

This kind of solution has become a tangible reality. As barriers to entry continue to fall, even small, volunteer-led organisations are building tools that make a real operational difference.

“It was so much easier and quicker and more available to a tiny organisation that it just would have been done by hand, and nobody would ever thought about trying to use technology to do it.”

Elliott said this marks a new phase in digital transformation, driven by individuals who know their needs and now have the means to build what they require.

“It’s an organisation like that where every cent otherwise goes to helping people. This is a micro example of something that I believe that individuals everywhere will be able to vastly accelerate innovation because individual people who know the business, and know what’s possible, will be able to innovate – without IT and technology being a bottleneck.”

Elliott said that innovation was no longer a sporadic initiative or the domain of a select few within an organisation. Instead, it is becoming a structured, repeatable discipline with defined methodologies, measurable outcomes, and continuous refinement built into how companies function. This was much like finance or operations.

“The end result is that innovation and digital transformation should be a business process itself that increasingly can be optimised.”

What makes this feasible now is a shift in how business systems work. Rather than requiring manual analysis and lengthy decision-making cycles, systems are becoming more proactive, intelligent, and suggestive.

He said SAP’s approach to driving innovation can be broken down into four key steps: assessing where a business stands today, identifying the most impactful areas for improvement, defining a future state using best practices, and implementing those changes with the help of intelligent tools – all while supporting the human side of transformation through training and adoption. This leads into best practices, implementation via the cloud, and finally, the crucial phase of change management.

“Technology is never enough, so you need to actually do something in the business to take advantage of that – there’s all of the technology adoption side, and the people side of things.”

SAP has recently invested in WalkMe, a tool designed to help employees understand and effectively use new systems in their daily work. By providing guidance and support, WalkMe facilitates smoother adoption of technology, ensuring that staff can confidently navigate and utilise the tools necessary for their roles.

Yet, Elliott said that tools alone weren’t enough. This is where AI can make a significant difference in the human side of transformation. He pointed to studies showing AI outperforming humans in emotional intelligence tests, and highlighted a practical benefit: the ability to scale personalised communication and reassurance during times of change.

“The essence of transformation is helping people understand how they fit in the strategy and help them feel like they’re being part of the transformation and excited about it, rather than resisting it because they’re worried about their jobs and functions. At scale, it’s really hard to go to every single person that’s affected and sit down with them and spend all of the time to understand any questions and reassure them, whereas with AI you can actually do that at scale.”

He said this brings the process full circle, with innovation and digital transformation becoming structured business functions that can be continuously refined and improved.

“My favourite quote is from Picasso: ‘Computers are useless. They can only answer questions.’ Thankfully, asking the right questions, having the context to understand what’s going on and what is possible, is something that remains very human.”

To cultivate that creativity, business leaders must rethink how they support employees in using new tools. Elliott suggests a three-part model: leadership, a dedicated lab team to experiment and track best practices, and a decentralised crowd of early adopters.

Looking ahead, Elliott said SAP’s boldest move had already been made: committing fully to the cloud. The real challenge now was bringing customers along – even when it demanded difficult conversations. Empowering organisations remained central to the strategy, but individuals shaping outcomes on the ground may drive the next wave of enterprise innovation.

*Jason Bannier is a data analyst at World Wide Worx and writer for Gadget.co.za. Follow him on Bluesky at @jas2bann.