Smart Digitalization, New AI Journey | Acloudear’s Nanjing Customer Exchange: SAP AI Adoption and China’s Global Expansion

On October 20, Acloudear successfully hosted the “Smart Digitalization · A New AI Journey — SAP AI Adoption and Enterprise Digital Upgrade Customer Exchange” in Nanjing. The event focused on two themes: the enterprise-grade AI architecture behind SAP’s Autonomous Enterprise, and deployment strategies and AI practices for Chinese companies expanding overseas.

Representatives and decision-makers from manufacturing, new energy, semiconductors and other industries attended, engaging in in-depth discussions on cutting-edge SAP AI technologies, real-world applications and digitalization practices for global expansion — exploring new paths to intelligent upgrade and global operations together.

In the keynote session, Liu Kan, Client Advisory Director at SAP China, delivered “The Autonomous Enterprise: A Brief Analysis of the New-Generation AI Architecture and Building Approach,” examining the critical prerequisites for enterprise-level AI adoption.

“AI applications are blooming everywhere, but few are truly running — 74% of organizations remain stuck at the pilot stage, and 42% of enterprises are held back by data access and quality issues.”

He explained that large language models face challenges in business operations — lacking business context, facing high demands on data precision, and navigating complex permission governance. ERP systems, with over 50 years of accumulated business best practices and data semantics, are the critical infrastructure for AI to understand and act on the business. When a company’s process standardization reaches 70–80 out of 100, AI accuracy and efficiency improve rapidly; beyond 85, AI can even begin to optimize itself.

On this foundation, Liu Kan introduced SAP’s four-layer intelligent architecture:

• Joule serves as the unified interaction entry point, able to pull data across systems and execute actual operations such as posting financial entries and raising purchase orders;
• Below it sit 55 AI assistants and 245 AI Agents capable of executing work end to end, covering high-frequency scenarios such as financial clearing, reconciliation and offsetting, and journal entry;
• Underpinning everything is the SAP Knowledge Graph, built since 2019, linking over a million related fields to ensure precise and efficient data retrieval by AI.
• Business users can also describe their needs in natural language through Joule Studio, which automatically completes development, testing and release within an hour.

SAP Cloud ERP provides the core foundation for AI applications — the system ships with localized versions in 34 languages covering 60 countries; its application layer is now live in data centers in mainland China and is progressively integrating the Qwen large language model, with security and compliance aligned to China’s MPS Level III (MLPS Level 3) requirements.

Next, Weslin, COO of Acloudear, presented “Chinese Companies Going Global with AI: From ‘Going Out’ to ‘Growing In,'” sharing deployment strategies and AI application experience for overseas digitalization, illustrated with real-world cases.

As Chinese companies’ global expansion enters deep water, they face three layers of localization challenges: language and culture, tax and financial compliance, and data privacy. On tax and finance, a single set of international standards is not enough — local financial and employment requirements must be met. On data, European GDPR, China’s PIPL and ASEAN data standards force companies to re-evaluate their IT strategy between globally unified deployment and regionally independent deployment, among other considerations.

Against these challenges, he proposed the deployment strategy of “stable HQ, agile overseas, unified front end”: the headquarters maintains a high degree of process and data uniformity, while overseas branches prioritize speed of rollout and business flexibility; front-end systems such as CRM adopt unified standards to project a consistent global brand image, and material coding is unified across the entire group.

Finally, he shared two concrete Acloudear customer cases: a world-leading clean energy technology company deployed systems across 10 overseas countries within six months on the strength of standardized processes, then deepened localization step by step; while a developer of high-performance CMOS image sensors covered three countries and four sites with a single public cloud system, supporting its move from single-country operations to multi-country collaboration.

As Weslin noted, the two companies took different paths, but shared one thing in common: solidify the standardized foundation first, then layer AI capabilities on top.

In the one-on-one Q&A and requirements-matching session, attendees discussed topics relevant to their own businesses — the differences between SAP AI and general-purpose AI platforms, overseas financial compliance, long-lead-time material planning, data security and deployment options — and received targeted answers from the experts. After the event, both sides will continue discussions around the relevant solutions.

The event drew to a successful close amid lively discussion. Going forward, Acloudear will continue working with SAP and more growth-stage and high-tech companies, turning frontier technology into productivity that truly works in day-to-day business — and opening a new chapter of intelligent development together.

In one sentence: for enterprise AI adoption, lay the standardized foundation of ERP, processes and data first, then layer AI on top; for going global, follow the strategy of “stable HQ, agile overseas, unified front end” — a path the companies gathered in Nanjing are already walking, and one already proven across Acloudear’s 300+ customers worldwide.

About Acloudear

As an SAP Platinum Partner, 2020 Pinnacle Award Winner, and UNITED VARS member, Acloudear specializes in SAP Cloud ERP solutions. Powered by the twin engines of “AI + Globalization,” we deliver one-stop cloud solutions—from process reconstruction to AI innovation—for over 300 customers across industries like Automotive, High-Tech, and Life Sciences. Acloudear is a pioneer in China’s cloud-native services. By combining SAP Best Practices with our unique “1+X” innovation matrix, we reshape corporate digital DNA and empower enterprises to unlock the full potential of the cloud. Our commitment to excellence has earned us multiple recognitions as the SAP Best Cloud Partner.

This article "Smart Digitalization, New AI Journey | Acloudear’s Nanjing Customer Exchange: SAP AI Adoption and China’s Global Expansion" by AcloudEAR. We focus on business applications such as cloud ERP.

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