Why SAP Americas CFO Embraces a ‘Failure Culture’ Around Tech Experimentation

Why It Matters

A structured tolerance for failure accelerates AI integration, boosting finance efficiency and strategic insight across SAP. It also signals a shift toward agile, experimental cultures in traditionally risk‑averse corporate functions.

Key Takeaways

• SAP finance team runs lean, managing 40% global revenue.
• CFO promotes “failure culture” to accelerate AI experimentation.
• Dedicated role scouts existing finance AI tools for early adoption.
• Team built cloud backlog simulation tool, improving insight despite imperfections.
• Regular AI discussions embed technology awareness across finance staff.

Pulse Analysis

SAP’s finance organization illustrates how legacy enterprises can embed artificial intelligence without overhauling existing structures. By segmenting finance into specialized pods—human resources, compensation, revenue accounting—the company maintains a lean operating model while allocating resources to explore AI pilots. This modular design enables rapid scaling of successful experiments, ensuring that innovations are vetted within a controlled environment before broader rollout. The approach also aligns with SAP’s overall digital transformation agenda, which prioritizes data‑driven decision‑making across its global operations.

The "failure culture" championed by CFO Sonja Simon flips the conventional finance mindset on its head. Traditionally, finance teams guard against error due to the high stakes of financial reporting. Simon’s strategy reframes mistakes as learning opportunities, encouraging teams to prototype tools like the cloud‑backlog simulator even if outputs aren’t perfect. This philosophy reduces the fear barrier, fostering creativity and faster iteration cycles. By celebrating incremental improvements rather than flawless results, SAP cultivates a resilient workforce capable of adapting to the rapid evolution of AI and automation technologies.

Industry observers see SAP’s experiment as a bellwether for the broader corporate finance sector. As AI models become more accessible, finance leaders must balance compliance with innovation. SAP’s model—combining dedicated scouting roles, regular AI dialogues, and a permissive error environment—offers a replicable blueprint for firms seeking to modernize their finance functions. The ripple effect could accelerate AI adoption across supply chain, HR, and other back‑office domains, ultimately reshaping how enterprises extract value from data while maintaining governance standards.

Why SAP Americas CFO embraces a ‘failure culture’ around tech experimentation

By Grace Noto, Editor · Published Feb. 6, 2026 · ![Signage at the headquarters of SAP, Germany's largest software company on January 8, 2013 in Walldorf, Germany] · Signage at the headquarters of SAP, Germany's largest software company on January 8, 2013 in Walldorf, Germany · Thomas Lohnes via Getty Images

For SAP Americas CFO Sonja Simon, artificial intelligence and its potential to change the way we work represents “a great opportunity to help get the finance organization ready and excited about what will come,” she told CFO Dive. AI very much remains a “fast‑moving train,” she said, with the technology continuing to evolve at a rapid pace and with much of its potential still left unclear or untapped.

When “there is such a dramatic change in what technology has to offer, it is only human to initially say, ‘Wow, what does it mean for me? How is it going to impact my job? Will I still have a job tomorrow? And if I have a job, then what will it look like?’” Simon said in an interview. “I feel, as a leader in finance, we really have to help the teams” work through that response, she said.

Getting comfortable

Strategically leveraging technology, including automation, is a critical part of how the Walldorf, Germany‑based company approaches running finance. Over the course of her 18 years at the multinational software provider, SAP has grouped the tasks of its finance function by creating dedicated teams for different areas, such as human resources, compensation and revenue accounting.

The move has allowed SAP to become “very, very lean,” and to leverage technology: the finance team Simon oversees in her current role is comprised of 30 people and manages both the revenue and associated expenses of approximately 40 % of SAP’s global revenue, she said.

Simon has held various roles during her near‑two‑decade career with SAP. She was previously responsible for external reporting before being appointed to the role of CFO for Latin America and the Caribbean in 2020. She took her current role as CFO of SAP Americas in April 2025, which added the U.S. and Canada to her remit, she said. Prior to SAP, she worked for seven years at the Big Four firm Ernst & Young.

As AI and automation continue to evolve, it’s important for the finance function to become familiar with new tools. Within Simon’s team, “there are some small things that we do to ensure that people get comfortable” with AI, she said. That includes bringing AI up in team meetings and asking for volunteers who are willing to talk about how they have used the technology lately—whether in a professional or personal setting.

Simon also has an individual on her team that is “tasked with continually working on what is available for us within finance at SAP today, already, to ensure that we are really at the forefront of the adoption,” she said. As a global entity, there are numerous teams at SAP which are all examining how AI could be tapped within their functions, and it’s important that finance stays top of mind.

“We always want to make sure that they don't forget about us, so that…they ask us, ‘Okay, do you want to be the first user? Do you want to be the early adopter?’”

Creating a ‘failure culture’

To drive early adoption of emerging tools and technology, however, it’s key to create the room for professionals to experiment and make mistakes. Simon said she is “a strong believer in creating a failure culture,” which can particularly be a challenge in finance. As the numbers crunched by the function make their way into the reports that govern executive decisions, there’s little room for error.

However, opening up space for financial professionals to experiment with new and emerging tools, and to make mistakes, is also crucial to driving creativity and finding new solutions, she said.

“The tricky thing here is you really have to celebrate failure, and you really have to make it stick, because it is only human,” Simon said of her approach.

For instance, Simon challenged the team at SAP to find better insight per deal for a key performance metric at the company: current cloud backlog, a KPI which is relied upon by investors and analysts to evaluate its cloud journey.

The team did come up with a tool that helps to simulate the impact on that metric, she said. While that tool may not give the right figure 100 % of the time, “that is an example of where I say, ‘Okay, what you have put together is a lot better than what we had, which was, in that case, nothing,’” she said. “And so the fact that this isn’t 100 % correct, keep in mind that you still improved the process significantly.”