Season 07 · Episode 05 · Marketing · 52 min
AI in Enterprise Marketing: How SAP Approaches AI at Scale
Sanjay Chaudhary, Head of Enterprise Marketing at SAP, makes the case that in the AEO era getting found is no longer the goal. Getting recommended is.
August 21, 2026·With Sanjay Chaudhary
§01Chapters
Introduction & The AI Revolution in Marketing
Sanjay’s Journey: From Sales to Nonlinear Marketing
The Surprising Correlation Between Running and Marketing
How Marketing Has Evolved Over Three Decades
Differentiating Your Brand in the GenAI Era
Why In-Real-Life Events Still Matter in a Digital World
India’s Mid-Market: The Next Wave of Business Growth
The 3 Ingredients of a Successful Industry Event
The 3 Rs of Marketing Success: Revenue, Relationships, Reputation
How Startups Can Host Major Events on a Minimal Budget
Secrets to Getting CXOs to Show Up at Your Events
Will AI Replace Marketing Teams?
AEO vs. SEO: Why Being Recommended Is the New Being Found
Building a Trust Engine: Off-Page Signals in AI Search
Serving the New Customer: AI Agents and 10 Billion Bots
Startup Branding: Getting Your First 10 to 100 Customers
The F1 Analogy: CEO, Strategy, and Marketing Synergy
The Litmus Test for Real Account-Based Marketing (ABM)
Future Readiness: The 70-20-10 Rule for CXOs
Overcoming Career Anxiety in the Age of AI
Why Leaders Must Stay Close to Reality on the Ground
Rapid Fire: The Future of SEO, LLMs, and Human Empathy
Why Every Marketer Should Run a Marathon
Final Message: Upskilling and Resilience
§02Show Notes
His split of AI search versus traditional search is specific: in AI search only about 30 per cent of what shapes a recommendation is on-page and inside a brand’s control. The other 70 per cent is off-page, the editorial coverage, social presence and third-party validation an AI system weighs before recommending anything.
Why that matters now: roughly 250 million Indians aged 15 to 35 already use ChatGPT or Perplexity as a primary source of information, and enterprise buyers drafting RFPs are reaching for the same tools. A brand absent from the recommendation set never enters the room.
He treats AI systems as a trust engine that discounts a brand’s claims about itself, on the assumption a brand will only ever say positive things about its own product.
Agents are becoming a customer category of their own alongside humans, in his estimate more than 10 billion of them online by 2030, with no interest in colour, storytelling or brand feel, only facts, structured data and verifiable trust signals.
The three Rs of marketing success are revenue, relationships and reputation, but the causality runs backwards: reputation brings relationships, and relationships bring revenue.
At the fintech startup Lentra he built the Digital Lending Summit by convincing technology partners that promoting it served their own interests, leaving roughly 60 per cent of the cost carried by the ecosystem. It drew 600 senior executives, 220 of them CXOs.
His litmus test for account-based marketing: remove the account’s name from the messaging. If it still reads as generic, it was never ABM.
The org chart shift he expects: every person becomes a manager, because everyone will be managing agents. The Chief Marketing Officer also becomes a Chief Agent Officer.
Three layers of AI in marketing: a data foundation, an execution layer already accelerating past pilots, and strategy, which does not automate away because knowing which question to ask still decides the answer.
His personal rule for staying future-ready: 70 per cent of time on the job, 20 per cent on upskilling, 10 per cent given back to the wider community.
“Chief Marketing Officer will also be a Chief Agent Officer.”
Referenced in this episode
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