SAP, one of the world’s leading business software solutions, recently announced plans to acquire digital adoption giant WalkMe.
This is a colossal acquisition (totaling $1.5 billion to be exact) and hopes to bolster both solutions, drive business transformation and aggrandize SAP business AI offerings.
Who is WalkMe?
WalkMe’s mission is to “analyze, automate, and optimize experiences to eliminate digital friction”. They’re a digital adoption platform, meaning that they utilize an AI interface that unifies the interactions between employees of an organization and the suite of applications and software used by the organization.
More specifically, WalkMe’s solutions stop organizations from feeling so overwhelmed by the constant tide of changing technology, providing users with advanced guidance and automation features that enable them to execute workflows seamlessly across any number of applications. Where does the adoption part come in? Well, higher confidence in the technology translates to more product enthusiasm, and therefore more value realization.
How Does it Work?
WalkMe was initially designed to provide on-screen guidance in real time, making website navigation that little bit easier. Their gradual growth led them to focus on a bigger picture, using that same real-time, on-screen guidance venture to assist in the world of enterprise and consumer solutions.
They’re behind some of the little text bubbles or text prompts you’ve likely seen on websites, ushering you to call an agent to discuss a product or check another page for more information.
WalkMe can also provide information on user behavior, tying everything together quite nicely.
Why Are SAP Interested?
A big part of WalkMe’s mission is making things easier for its users and customers, and it wouldn’t take much to guess which two avenues fit into that mission: automation and AI.
The automated, platform-central prompts and guidance that WalkMe have perfected provide extra value to SAP’s customers, playing an important role in increasing customer satisfaction in a tumultuous time; 72% of customers are likely to switch brands/products entirely after just one bad experience.
It’s also a matter of timing too. This acquisition comes after a few unsteady years for WalkMe, including a rapid devaluation post-2019. They certainly started positively; they had raised around $300 million before their IPO in 2021, but like many other companies across a whole host of sectors, it fell victim to the pandemic.
Horizons looked brighter in May this year, when the company unveiled WalkMeX (also known as WalkMe for AI), with the aim to get teams going with “all of the AI with none of the risk”. This is a particular interest for SAP, as they said they intend to integrate WalkMeX with its own Joule copilot.
Dan Adika, the CEO of WalkMe, sells this unification spells out success for customer satisfaction and business transformation going forward:
“Integrating the strength of WalkMe’s adoption capabilities with SAP’s copilot Joule will boost AI assistant and productivity gains for all SAP customers. Additionally, integrating distinctive e-learning features in the SAP Enable Now solution with WalkMe will form the center of SAP’s people-centric transformation approach going forward.”
Summary
This notable acquisition from SAP can be seen as a green flag for organizations worried about an AI bubble. Evidently, there is still value in keeping AI as a focus, but it seems that the best way to move forward with it is by being aware of what you can offer alongside AI as a USP.
This acquisition is expected to close in this year’s third quarter.