SAP SE today announced the appointment of Walter Sun as Global Head of Artificial Intelligence. Sun joins SAP on September 1 from his current role as vice president of Copilot Applied Artificial Intelligence for business applications at Microsoft. With a proven track record of driving technological innovation and strategic business leadership, Sun will play a pivotal role in strengthening SAP’s pioneering vision of relevant, reliable and responsible AI built for business.

“We are thrilled to welcome Walter Sun, a leader in enterprise AI with a long history of developing and deploying cutting-edge technology to solve key business problems, to SAP,” said Thomas Saueressig, Member of the Executive Board of SAP SE for SAP Product Engineering. “As SAP builds on its pole position in Business AI, Walter Sun is the perfect person to ensure we continue innovating to help our customers solve their most pressing problems.”

Sun joined Microsoft in 2005 and has held progressively senior scientific and product development positions, culminating in his current role leading an interdisciplinary team developing business-ready AI and machine learning capabilities. In addition, he founded Bing Predicts, which leveraged anonymized and aggregated data for predictive analytics. He also delivered many AI features across Microsoft’s portfolio, including applications such as Bing Search, Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform. Previously, Sun worked at BlackRock Financial Management as a quantitative portfolio analyst and at Apple Inc. as a senior software engineer and scientist.

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His applied research includes work in stochastic processes, signal processing, machine learning and deep learning, operations research and large language models. He has been an adjunct professor at Seattle University and an affiliate faculty member at the University of Washington. He is currently an advisory board member at Georgia Tech.

Sun obtained his PhD in statistical signal and image processing and computer vision with applications in medical imaging from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“I’m thrilled to be joining SAP at a time when the company that invented enterprise software is once again on the threshold of redefining how business runs,” Sun said. “AI has never been more important. I believe at SAP, we have a unique opportunity to fundamentally change the way in which companies operate, using AI on a much larger scale in business practices than ever before. We have the breadth of applications, customers, scenarios and people that allow us to best leverage the power of generative AI across all industries.”

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