SAP’s Mark Niemiec on how AI is turning CX into a revenue engine

Companies are investing heavily in AI, but investment alone doesn’t create value. The grace period is ending. Across industries, CIOs are facing pressure from boards to prove what their AI investments have produced.

In the third episode of The Agentic Wave, host and Parloa CMO Latané Conant talks with Mark Niemiec, CRO of SAP Customer Experience and new partner to Parloa, about moving beyond AI experimentation to measurable business outcomes. They explore why customer experience offers one of the clearest paths to business value, how agentic AI is challenging seat-based software economics, and what enterprises need—from data and governance to redesigned business processes—to scale AI beyond the demo.

From AI experimentation to measurable outcomes

For the past few years, many companies have treated AI as an open-ended experiment. Latané describes the approach to deploying AI as “sort of like letting flowers grow…and hoping that something comes of it.”

She imagines the reckoning that follows: “We consumed all these tokens. What do we have to show for it? Nothing.”

That era is ending. CIOs are under increasing pressure to show how AI improves the performance of the business. Leaders don’t just want more AI. They want more efficient teams, stronger customer relationships, and profitable growth.

CX makes those outcomes unusually tangible. AI agents can help customers get answers faster, reduce the effort required to resolve problems, and create opportunities for more relevant conversations that, when done right, show up as new revenue in the books.

Why are companies paying to avoid their customers?

Latané points to a contradiction hiding inside many organizations.

Marketing and sales teams spend heavily to start customer conversations. Once someone becomes a customer, however, many service organizations are measured primarily on how quickly and cheaply they can end those conversations.

Agentic AI creates an opportunity to bring those two sides of the business together. Customer service can become more efficient without making customers work harder to get help. At the same time, better conversations can strengthen retention, uncover unmet needs, and create opportunities for growth.

That makes CX relevant far beyond the contact center.

CIOs need an AI business case. CX gives them one.

CX is creating a new point of alignment between technology and business leaders.

CIOs bring responsibility for enterprise data, architecture, governance, and security. CX leaders understand where customers struggle and which experiences need to change. Agentic AI gives both groups a practical business problem to solve together.

Mark sees customer experience as a way for CIOs to turn their AI investments into something the business can measure. In the episode, he points to the SAPxParloa partnership as one example of how that can work in practice.

“When we bring these two capabilities together from SAP and Parloa, they can unlock those AI opportunities really quickly,” he says. “So it’s made CX much more CIO-relevant. It’s also made the CIO much more business-relevant.”

Instead of treating AI as a technology initiative in search of a use case, CIOs and CX leaders can now work together on customer problems with clear business value.

Smoke or Fire: Is a SaaS apocalypse coming?

Mark’s verdict: It’s a transition, not necessarily an apocalypse. But software companies built around seat-based licensing face real pressure.

As AI agents take on work previously performed by human software users, companies may need fewer seats. That creates a difficult incentive problem for vendors whose revenue depends on selling as many seats as possible.

The issue, according to Mark, is whether these companies and their investors “have the stomach” to disrupt their existing business models. A vendor may be technically capable of guiding customers into the agentic future while remaining financially motivated to protect the past.

For buyers, that adds a new dimension to vendor evaluation. Alongside technology, security, and scale, leaders should consider whether a potential partner’s commercial incentives align with the outcomes they want to achieve.

An impressive demo can't run your business

Enterprise AI applications can be created quickly, demo beautifully, and still fail to deliver lasting value.

Mark argues that “keeping [AI applications] maintained, secure, and scaling is really where the magic happens.” AI needs to be governed, monitored, and embedded in the business processes where the work is.

Organizations must also decide how humans and non-human teams will work together. That requires more than adding separate AI tools to sales, service, marketing, and finance. Mark sees companies moving toward something broader: a horizontal business operating system capable of working across functions and drawing on complete business context.

“They want AI that runs their business,” he says.

Choose partners prepared for the transition

The agentic future will require companies to rethink how they measure value, how customer conversations contribute to growth, and how work is divided between people and AI agents.

Watch the full episode of The Agentic Wave to hear Mark and Latané discuss CX as a revenue engine, the future of seat-based software, and what it takes to turn agentic AI into measurable business value.