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, she said — 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?’” she said.

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 on, 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.’”