Your SAP, your way

AI NOW

Our first edition is behind us.
See you in 2027.

Continuing the conversation about AI, business and the future of SAP. Explore the highlights of our first event.

Explore the 2026 topics

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Highlights from our first edition6 OCT 2026 / SOPOT
AI NOW · Your SAP, your wayExplore our first edition

First edition / Sopot, 6 October 2026

What did
we discuss?

On 6 October 2026 in Sopot, we explored AI through the lens of business, technology and everyday work with SAP.

From architecture choices and data protection to live demos and companies’ own experiences. These were the topics of our first edition.

AI NOW organiser

Westernacher

2026 partners

BielikUiPathSiemensSoftwareOne

2026 media patron

Puls Biznesu
01 / STRATEGY

New possibilities for your existing SAP

How can you get more from your current on-premises system? We discussed an alternative architecture powered by AI and ways to tackle technical debt.

02 / BUSINESS VALUE

Where does AI really pay off?

Next Best Action in retail and predictive maintenance in industry opened a discussion about AI’s value. The “A Million Small Decisions” session connected data at scale, industry knowledge and everyday business decisions.

03 / ARCHITECTURE AND COSTS

Cloud tokens or your own servers?

We compared the costs of in-house hardware with variable cloud token prices. The focus was on the total cost of implementing AI, hybrid and on-premises architectures, and data sovereignty.

04 / SECURITY

Where does the data you share with AI go?

Integrating language models raises specific questions about information protection. We explored the legal and practical aspects of data security when using LLMs in the cloud.

05 / AGENTS AND AUTOMATION

From individual tasks to entire processes

How can people and digital agents work together to extend existing SAP and non-SAP systems? We discussed orchestration, shared working context and the “wrap and automate” strategy for existing architectures.

06 / SUPPORT AND DEVELOPMENT

SAP support that anticipates your needs

We discussed a vision for proactive customer support after implementation. At its heart was the future of AMS: moving from standard ticket handling to automated support and system development.

07 / LIVE DEMO

Google ABAP SDK vs. SAP Joule

A technology showdown in a test environment. We watched code generation, analysis and automation live, under the hood of SAP.

08 / COMPANY EXPERIENCES

Customers in action: AI at work

Aquael, PRESS GLASS and IONWAY brought the perspective of companies using AI. They discussed their experiences, approaches and challenges in putting artificial intelligence into practice.

09 / LOCAL MODELS

Bielik in your own server room

How can sovereign language models be deployed directly within a customer’s architecture? Using Bielik as an example, we discussed local LLMs, data security and cost independence.

10 / IMPLEMENTATION PROJECTS

AI in the SAP Activate methodology

We explored how AI can shorten SAP projects. Examples included automated data cleansing, test scenario generation and speech-to-config.

Panel discussion / First edition, 2026

Technical debt –
taking stock, morning to evening

Different perspectives. One conversation.

The evening panel returned to a question from the morning keynote: what stood up in practice, and how can AI expand the capabilities of an existing SAP system?

A space to challenge opinions and revisit the day’s topics from different perspectives.

The question we kept coming back to

How does AI change what existing SAP systems can do?

Moderated byPuls Biznesu
Mirosław Konkel

Mirosław Konkel

Journalist at Puls Biznesu

Speakers and hosts / First edition, 2026

Knowledge has many perspectives.

The experts, practitioners and company representatives who shaped the first AI NOW. Select a person to read their biography.

Dr.-Ing. Karol DoerfferPresident of the Management Board, WesternacherBiography

A graduate in electronics from Gdańsk University of Technology and computer science from Paul Sabatier University in Toulouse. He earned his doctorate in engineering with distinction at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). He has been associated with the Westernacher Group for over 30 years. He founded its Polish subsidiary, LST Sp. z o.o., which has developed its partnership with SAP in Poland for three decades.

Aleksander PopończykERP Global Practice Lead, WesternacherBiography

He has worked in management and IT consulting since 1993, specialising in leading information management system implementations and designing IT and business solutions, including AI-based solutions. His expertise covers supply chain optimisation and advanced planning systems.

Adam PięteraAI Business Development Lead, WesternacherBiography

An experienced SAP advisor with international experience, an author of industry publications and an expert in L2C, S2P and AI. For the past six years at Westernacher Consulting, he has been responsible for the global SAP Procurement and Sales strategy.

Maciej AdamczykLawyer, WesternacherBiography

An attorney with extensive experience in the legal aspects of SAP implementation and support projects. He specialises in technology and intellectual property law. He has taught copyright law at the University of Gdańsk and the Polish-Japanese Academy of Information Technology. He lives in Gdynia.

Sylwester KozakOrganization Management, WesternacherBiography

At Westernacher, he is responsible for the partnership with SAP and the information security management system under ISO 27001. His work combines a business perspective with a practical approach to compliance, security and risk management.

Menno OdijkField CTO, Mendix (Siemens)Biography

Drives the Agentic Enterprise. He advocates for agentic orchestration: a future where humans and AI agents work with shared context and built-in governance.

Marta CzapulakHead of AMS-SAP, WesternacherBiography

A certified manager with more than a decade of experience. She specialises in SAP development and optimisation, team management and migrations to S/4HANA.

Leszek StrumiłowskiWesternacherBiography

A technology specialist working at the intersection of SAP, cloud infrastructure and artificial intelligence. His experience covers SAP Basis, enterprise systems architecture, Linux/Unix administration and AI/LLM integration.

Przemek SobieszczukPresales Consultant Data & AI CEE, SoftwareOneBiography

With 20 years in IT and 13 years working with advanced analytics use cases, Przemek draws on experience across many industries and project scopes. He has spent several years in technical sales roles involving technologies from SAS Institute, Oracle and Microsoft. He currently provides sales engineering support at SoftwareOne, working on opportunities across Central and Eastern Europe.

Maciej ŚmigielskiPresales Consultant SAP & Applications, SoftwareOneBiography

For several decades, he has supported enterprise customers in digital transformation and the implementation of SAP solutions and business applications, combining business, technology and delivery perspectives. His experience includes roles as a consultant, solution architect, delivery manager and customer relationship manager. He specialises in process automation, data and AI, and practical implementation scenarios. As a Presales Consultant for SAP & Applications at SoftwareOne, he supports sales and advisory initiatives, helping customers turn cloud, data and AI into measurable business results.

Piotr ZającAgentic Systems Architect, UiPathBiography

He has contributed to enterprise AI implementations in both the private sector and public administration. A graduate in Automation and Robotics from Warsaw University of Technology, he is a cloud solutions architect with experience in Oracle, SAP, SAS and Microsoft. He is a member of the curriculum council at AGH University’s Faculty of Computer Science and a lecturer at SGH Warsaw School of Economics.

Dr Katarzyna JasińskaHead of AI & Automation Competence CenterBiography

An IT expert with a doctorate in engineering and over 20 years of experience in digital transformation, business process optimisation and automation. She specialises in AI and RPA solutions, including UiPath technologies, and the integration of business systems.

Piotr KaczmarekIT Director, AquaelBiography

He has worked with SAP technologies for over 25 years, progressing from specialist roles through IT team management to responsibility for the entire technology function of an organisation.

He has served as IT Director since 2016. Previously, as IT Manager at Hydrobudowa 6, he was responsible for areas including the SAP environment and the development of systems supporting business processes.

He has been with the Aquael Group since 2008, overseeing IT and the development of its SAP S/4HANA On-Premise environment. He focuses on practical uses of technology in business: process automation, systems integration, digitalisation, and the use of AI and AI agents in real business processes.

His main interest in technology is not simply what is possible, but what makes business sense and delivers measurable results.

Igor GercAI Architect, AquaelBiography

An econometrician working in process automation, software development and practical business applications of AI. At Aquael, he combines programming, data analysis and systems integration to find simple solutions to complex problems. He prioritises collaboration across departments and achieving results as quickly as possible.

Michał SzopaDigital Transformation Director, PRESS GLASSBiography

He leads digital transformation at PRESS GLASS, including its current greenfield SAP implementation. He moved into transformation from the business side, having led logistics and previously worked in procurement and operations. He runs the AI Champions programme, in which employees from different departments identify processes that could benefit from AI, then design and test their own solutions.

Outside work, he is developing his own AI agent: an always-on assistant equipped with nearly a hundred tools, which he uses to test solutions before proposing them to the organisation.

Sebastian RosińskiGlobal IBP Manager, IONWAYBiography

At IONWAY, a joint venture between Umicore and PowerCo, he is building planning from scratch alongside the launch of a new factory: the S&OP cycle, the MPS process, a KPI framework for the entire supply chain and requirements for the data layer that feeds these processes from SAP.

He worked his way into planning through eight years in an international environment in Ireland: first as a shop-floor team leader, then a production planner, and finally in global planning systems at Johnson & Johnson. As a business SME for an APS implementation, he gathered business requirements, validated distribution optimisation logic, and led acceptance testing, rollout and training across six sites on three continents.

That is where his main focus emerged: AI-assisted citizen development. He is not a programmer. He designed an automation for switching forecasts across the product lifecycle for more than 500,000 material codes, and built the code and data pipeline with an early version of ChatGPT. In its first week, it removed approximately USD 3 million from the production signal.

He teaches what he practises as an ASCM/APICS instructor. He is now building his own AI planning tools: an agent that collects demand signals from the EV market to feed a Monte Carlo forecasting engine, and a model for testing planning logic before work begins on the SAP PP/DS optimiser.

Marcin DąbrowskiObywatel Bielik – Product ManagerBiography

Chief AI Officer at 3Soft. For over a decade, he has worked at the intersection of IT and business, translating AI into the language of both. He lectures at Warsaw University of Technology and serves on an area education council at the University of Silesia. As Product Manager at Bielik AI, he helps develop Polish artificial intelligence. He co-created and leads Obywatel Bielik, one of Europe’s largest AI crowdsourcing initiatives, in which thousands of people help build the first Polish vision-language model (VLM) by adding and describing images through a mobile app.

Dariusz SamólSolution Architect, WesternacherBiography

He specialises in transformation projects in manufacturing, logistics and supply chains based on SAP S/4HANA and SAP IBP. He has delivered implementations in Poland and abroad, including China, Japan, Singapore and the USA. In the 1990s, he led pioneering MRP implementations in Poland.

Mirosław KonkelJournalist at Puls BiznesuBiography

A journalist at Puls Biznesu. He writes and produces podcasts about psychology, artificial intelligence, leadership and the ethical challenges of today’s world.

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