SuccessConnect 2026 Recap: Chains, Agents & Eat the Broccoli

[00:00:00] Payroll Baddies! Payroll Baddies! It's been a while! Welcome back to the Payroll Baddies Podcast. Thank you to all of our listeners out there and thank you for new ones who are coming and joining us.

[00:00:19] Just as a reminder, we're the Payroll Baddies and we have one mission that is to shine a light on all those baddies out there who are making sure that you get paid. So please go and say thank you to all those people out there. We have a lot to cover today. I'm so excited. We're coming off of the biggest event, bigger than probably the Super Bowl probably I think if I looked at the numbers.

[00:00:43] Success Connect in Vegas. I'm so excited because it's always such a great feeling coming off of an event like that because it gets you hyped up. It gets you hyped up for what's coming, but seeing all your people, colleagues, everybody out there and discussing all the fun stuff. You know, a lot late nights talking about AI. Right, I didn't see a lot of Todd Asevedo though. Yeah, Todd, what happened? Yeah, what was... I was there. Was Todd there?

[00:01:12] I was there for one day. I was there a little bit. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Yeah, yeah. Let's really talk about that. You know, I did have a bone to pick about that because having Success Connect without a baddie daddy, I mean, there was something. It wasn't quite the same. I missed all you guys in spirit, but the partner summit was super, super fun. I'm glad I was there to at least take a couple pictures with y'all and meet some of the most important folks.

[00:01:38] But do you want to share with our amazing audience what you were doing and not at Success Connect? Yeah, what were you doing daddy? I went on a safari with my family. That's what I was... I see. I see where your priorities lie. It was awesome. You know, from that perspective. Yeah, you had a good flight too, right? Yeah. Yeah, thank you to Qatar Airlines for putting us in the honeymoon suite. I joined a club. Oh, that's awesome. Very nice. That's awesome. All right.

[00:02:06] Todd, you were telling us you joined a club on your vacation? That's... After 34 years of marriage, I joined a club, finally. That's... That's... That's great. That's definitely getting cut. That's right. That's just kidding. I'm glad I'm not wearing Raj's sweatsuit. That's awesome. Well, that's great. So, let's go around the table. Let's go ask, you know, what was, you know, one memorable thing?

[00:02:35] What are things that we enjoyed about Success Connect? And maybe, you know, just share some of the experiences. Imran, you want to go first? Oh, you're giving it to me first. All right. I appreciate that, Raj. Thank you, man. So, you know, we got to do the session with Shiva Sundaresan. I thought that was awesome. Obviously, I like the keynotes a lot, but I think this was the first SAP Connect or the main conference with the new leadership, right? With Dan leaving and everything. So, that's always makes people think, okay, what's going to be different, right?

[00:03:05] We've seen how the past leadership changes impact SAP, their focus, their development. So, you know, just... I know there was a lot of questions, especially in the partner ecosystem. Shout out to Jesse at the partner day. She did an entire session that was awesome with the SAP leadership team. Asked a lot of questions ahead of the event. So, that was really good. That was really good. Jessie, that was one of my highlights as well. You did a great job with that. All right. We can keep it down. We can keep that down. I know. Let's just continue. Let's continue.

[00:03:34] It annoys Raj. He's always jelly. He's always a little jelly. He is, but you know... And I think he has a pride to it too, as well. So, he just doesn't like to display that publicly. But no, we were very proud of you, Jessie. But I think you also asked them a lot of hard questions. It was not softball questions. And you know, like the partner ecosystem, it's been established for a long time. And you know, to have some of those questions about, okay, what's the focused area of SAP?

[00:04:04] Is payroll still important? Right? Because in the past, we all know that payroll wasn't as important. And for us and our listeners and everyone that's a part of the community, this is a very important topic. And so, just to have Shiva kind of double down on that and explicitly say that it is important. The core solutions are important. You know, to me, that was very, very important with the whole change in leadership. So, yeah. I guess I'll pass it next to... Go ahead, Jessie. You go next.

[00:04:32] You know, you did your whole thing with the SuccessFactors leadership team with Laura, Harriet, Shiva at the partner summit. So, while people couldn't, you know, see that, we all saw it and you did a great job with it. Well, thank you, my friend. That was so nice. No, that was definitely a highlight for me, sitting down with them because we talked about it. There was a lot of change from a leadership standpoint and change can be hard. You always wonder, okay, are we going to pause and we're going to lose some momentum or time?

[00:05:00] And my gosh, they stepped right in and they're ready to go and I think they're ready to go hard. And so, I think that for me, that was also a highlight, but I would say a couple more highlights. I felt like the whole week was a highlight, honestly. I love, you guys know I talk about SAP Connect every year. This group started at SAP Connect in Portugal, right? So, kind of our anniversary too. So, happy anniversary, friends. That's true. But I felt like the whole week was just this crazy high of energy.

[00:05:28] A couple of my favorite opportunities, you know, I love taking things away from Raj. And so, one of my favorite moments was taking his spinner chain. We did give up and we gave it to Mr. Christian Klein, who was very excited. That was fire. Can you tell me how that happened? Did you like rip it off his neck? You know, what was that like?

[00:05:53] It was probably not as aggressive as I would have preferred, but I also... That's true. Yeah, I said, give me your chain. And he looked at me funny and I said, it's for CK and he's fine. If it was for anybody else, I probably would not have given up because that's my OG. That's my OG spinner chain, right? But for Christian Klein, I mean a true payroll baddie out there, I mean, come on. Yeah. I got to give it up. He absolutely is, right? Yeah. So, that was an exciting moment.

[00:06:22] And then also, I'll let Raj share one of the other people that we were able to pass the chain to and that was a funny moment. So, I would say the whole week was great. Spending time with customers. We had a great couple of events in the evening and I just love spending time with customers and our SAP friends and other partners. It really is, you know, bringing everyone together. And so, it was fun seeing people wearing their chains at the event or just getting as excited

[00:06:51] as we all do. So, I'll pass it to Raj if you wanted to share one of the fun moments of getting another chain to another big personality at the event. I really don't know who you're talking about. The dance floor, Raj? Who did it? The dance floor? There were so many 90s. There were so many 90s. Of course. There's just so many. I just forget, you know. Okay. I mean, it was just, I mean, if some people have, you know, heard of the band called One

[00:07:20] Republic, I don't know if you guys have out there. Not One Republic. Not One Republic. Not One Direction. Do you know how funny it is? How many people were, even Shahzad, who was like, hey, I just saw One Direction. I'm like, no, you didn't. When he joins us, have him tell his story. I can't really hear that story. That's a funny story. It's like, no, you saw One Republic. I was super excited to, you know, again, we had such a great event, SAP, and, you know, did such a wonderful job of putting that together.

[00:07:47] But, you know, again, our Baddies chain was put onto One Republic front man singer, Ryan Teter, and it was awesome to see that happen. And he, and, you know, again, to kind of, obviously he doesn't know the symbolism behind it, but we all know, you know, we all know. So it was very cool to see that. We'll put that picture with this clip. Yeah, yeah. So things that I was excited about. And again, I also, you know, from our listeners perspective, sometimes some are, know what happens at Success Connect. Some people don't. And some things stay at Success Connect.

[00:08:17] We won't talk about it here. Right, Sonny? You know, just calling that out. So, you know, from that perspective. But for us, it's again, like when we get there, it is, you know, clients, SAP, partners, all there, you know, and we get to kind of, you know, talk, you know, really experience what we've been going through for the whole year, which is we talk on calls. Sometimes we see them. Sometimes we don't. But to get to experience all that together is so much fun.

[00:08:43] I think SAP did a very phenomenal job of kind of taking the, again, the autonomous enterprise message. Again, it is, you know, a big message that they're trying to push forward. Right? What does that really mean? What does it mean to me as the payroll admin? What does it mean to me as the, you know, HR admin? Like those things are getting there. A lot of it, I think what was great is, you know, the talk about the agents coming out

[00:09:11] and then again, seeing, okay, that agent relates to me. I understand what that means to me, which can then kind of go into this autonomous enterprise. Right? And, you know, one of the key message, Imran, you and I, and, you know, Shiva and Shahzad was there for our session that we did together was again, all these things are coming. They're here. Some of them are here, some of them are coming, but all of these are so important to you now more than ever. Why you got to have a connected enterprise. Right?

[00:09:41] So just, just again, I'm, you know, I'm a big believer in that. I know, you know, everybody here is. So hearing that message now and kind of showing them, showing people the value of that is pretty cool. Like that was really cool to see that. I'm not, again, I think there's still a lot of messaging that needs to get refined, but that's part of it. It's changing every day. There's AI is adapted, you know, things are changing every day on, you know, things like AI. So it's going to be, it's going to take some time, but I think SAP did a fantastic job. So I love that. Love seeing all you guys.

[00:10:10] Loved our sessions. I did. I got, I was lucky enough to do a session with one of our clients, which I really enjoyed again, getting to see our clients present is really an amazing thing too. Cause they are the ones who, you know, living this. Oh, who just joined us? Hello. Let's get her to drop in. Thank you for coming Shahzad Naseem. Hello, Mr. Shazad. Murphy's law. Anything that can go wrong goes wrong. Yeah, absolutely. You're here. So that's what you're doing. Perfect timing though.

[00:10:40] The truth is Shazad partied so hard in Vegas when we did the success connect. He's it's a month. I think it's been almost a month that he's still recovering. So he just, he just, no, Shazad, we were just going around and talking about what are some of the key experiences we enjoyed at success connect. But tell us your bathroom story. Shazad actually. That's what I want to hear first. We really want to hear your bathroom story. I do. It is a funny story.

[00:11:09] We have bathroom stories. Yep. Shazad, tell us the time. Tell us how you saw one direction and how much you. Oh, yeah. Or where you saw this guy and you were just asked him. Right. Before the gig started, I came in and I was like, you know, high up in the sky. I was all having fun. Good mood. So I go to the toilet and I meet this guy.

[00:11:33] He's wearing this tattoo, which is, I don't know if anyone who knows this band called Megadeth. It's a very famous character by Megadeth called Rattlehead. Right. So he's wearing this tattoo and I'm like, I looked at it like, like two guys, two gentlemen standing on the thing and like a nice tattoo. And it's like, yeah, like you're chatting. I'm like, you're a Megadeth fan. He's like, yeah.

[00:11:58] And then somehow, if I remember correctly, it's like, yeah, I'm playing today. I'm like, all right, cool. So I came out. I had no idea. Right. Whoever that guy is. Then I came out and look, I am a metalhead. So if you give me a name of a metal band, I'll tell you the 500 year history of that band. But anything apart from that, I have no idea.

[00:12:23] So I'm standing there with my teammate Jeff and they started playing a couple of songs. And I'm like, I know this guy. He's like, but what's the name of the band? And Jeff looks at me like, you don't know who these guys are. I'm like, and he's like, this is one Republic. I'm like, I've heard of One Direction. I was going to say, did they know a big celebrity like you was also there?

[00:12:53] Because you're also in a band as well. Yeah, that's true. That's true. They had no idea. But I only play exclusive shows. I don't, it's not like I'm not a paid player. It's exclusive. So since Shahzad Naseem just dropped in, Shahzad Naseem, why don't you tell us what were a couple of things memorable for you? From Success Connect that you enjoyed? I mean, other than that part, C1 Republic, of course. I think our keynote was really nice. The SuccessFactors keynote was amazing.

[00:13:23] We unveiled the whole, as we call it internally, the project Vanguard. But now we are talking about delivering real AI outcomes. And we are starting with these six customers. We will prove it. And you may have heard Rebecca talk about this, where all of these outcomes and everything that we are delivering to these customers is going to be available to all of our customers in April. Right?

[00:13:51] I mean, I don't think anyone who's been in the SAP world for a while. I have never seen that pace. Right? This is like, in six months, we're going to make a massive leap. And regardless of however big or small you are as a customer, you'll have all of that. Right. Like, IBM will have. The Vipro will have. You will have all of that. Amazing, right? That was like the biggest.

[00:14:18] Like custom development turned into product development that everyone gets access to. FDE on steroids, FDE with context. And listen, I want to say something about the, about Success Connect. If you didn't make it this year, or if you did, and you're, and you're a baddie or a baddie adjacent, make sure that the baddies get to Las Vegas in 2027.

[00:14:47] Like start peppering your boss now for some budget. Get your pass to the event. Don't miss out on, on 2027. I mean, it was such a mountaintop experience, at least the first day. Yeah. I just want to add. And I also talked to your family, that family comes second, Success Connect one. 100%. Just calling it out for people. We know that, Raj. SAP people, SAP payroll people, without spilling too many beans.

[00:15:17] No, let's build them. 27 might be a special one for payroll. So. Woo! Be there. Okay. I love it. I love it. I love it. I love it. Sonny, we haven't heard. Yeah. I mean, you, you guys covered a lot of the key things, right? Like, I think in terms of the innovation, the autonomous enterprise, I think for me, I like the whole sort of the concept where,

[00:15:41] you know, Christian Klein started talking about sort of jerseys from jerseys, that whole sort of, you know, autonomous sort of enterprise with the Gentic. Kind of bringing in the HR, procurement, supply chain, all of that together and seeing like how can a true Gentic enterprise operate well. So I think that was pretty cool. I think all, I think all the sessions, the customers, I think I had a lot of customers come and, you know, talk to me about, I'm seeing a lot of cool stuff.

[00:16:08] Like, smart recruiters was a big, big topic besides payroll. Obviously payroll is the best one, but it was also another one that I had a, you know, conversation about with a lot of customers. But then they were also, with this whole like a Gentic enterprise, a lot of conversations around like how much of an ability are they going to be able to get to sort of configure or customize or, you know, however they want to set up their systems based on their processes.

[00:16:35] And it's really getting to that, like, you know, how much control do they have, right, with all of these agents coming on board. And I think all the conversations we've had, they were very happy with the, you know, innovation that SAP introduced and also the partnerships that all the partners were able to kind of bring, right? Because I think all of us sort of being in that, you know, community have our unique tools that's, you know, unique processes and ways to deliver implementations.

[00:17:02] But again, all of this is making, you know, customers excited because it's delivering faster outcomes, you know, accelerated timelines, right? And just bigger opportunities to partner with, you know, their broader ecosystem. So it was, it was very exciting. And yeah, again, shout out to Jesse for recording an awesome partner summit. I think a lot of, you know, people were excited. Guys, we've heard it enough. We get it.

[00:17:26] She did a 10 minute presentation with like, where she asked some questions. It was one of the ones where people really didn't fall asleep. Where I'm like, okay, fine. No, no, no. Before we talk about that. You're right about that. Jesse was on stage doing something small or big. Raj, were you on any stage? I was on a stage. I was on a dance stage. Yes, he was. So I was on a dance stage. Who were you up there with, Raj?

[00:17:54] I don't think anybody remembers who was there with me, Jesse. I don't think anybody remembers. I was just, you know, you know, where I needed to be at that moment. I was in the right place, right time. Jesse wasn't done talking. Stop interrupting Raj. Honey, keep talking. I've got another question for all of you, right? So first of all, two questions, actually. I know it's not payroll, but what did you guys think about the tech world announcement? Tech Wolf.

[00:18:24] Yeah, you got a point of view on that? Yeah, that was very interesting, especially with having other skills partners there and then having Tech Wolf. I'll announce that right with SAP. So that that was interesting. Happy for, you know, our boy Daniel there, because I'm sure coming back to SAP, that's that's a real nice reunion for him.

[00:18:47] I think it's going to be awesome because it's going to be able to like just partner with a tool that's already been vetted and be able to provide our customers with some skills transformation, which is much needed. I think, you know, we all know that everybody wants to undertake the skill world, but it hasn't been as easy when you have to use a third party tool. Now having it with SAP, it's going to be a competitive race there for or maybe not anymore with Tech Wolf. But I'm excited to see that for sure.

[00:19:16] I think you guys echo a lot of, you know, top favorites just because I love to do this. I have to again say that one of my favorite areas, you know, moments in time was I think the partner summit was a very special one after 10 years. I haven't seen the partners come together as nicely as it did in this particular partner summit. I agree. And I love the way Jesse. Oh, there we go. I know. Well, I got it. I got to give shout out to my girl. That's it.

[00:19:47] She didn't show up to our session. You know, sorry. I slept in. I slept in. But I love the words of saying no matter who you are, all the different partners, all the SIs, we got to come together and beat Workday. Right, guys? Yeah. That's the time. Beat everybody. Talking about it. Beat everybody. The momentum of that, we just worked at everybody. Yeah, we are beating Workday. We got some more people to beat. Yeah, we got a bunch more.

[00:20:16] So I love that camaraderie that Jesse's words echoed in that moment. And I think everybody really resonated. Raj just had to throw up over there. Raj is just, listen, Raj, stop it. We throw you a lot of love. You're here to tell. We're just, you know, you didn't show up to our session. So we're just a little jealous. Don't be jelly. Okay. So I overslept. So my apologies. Oh, dear. It was 11.

[00:20:46] You know who never sleeps? No, actually, I'll tell you what happened. I did. I actually was in a session with a client that was a little bit under the weather. And I woke up under the weather. So, you know, in Vegas, you can't escape from what happens. Carol, Daddy Daddy, support me here. No, I definitely was not out as late as many of you here on this. Oh, dear. You know who never sleeps? It's Raj Vod. Raj Vod.

[00:21:15] Raj Vod or Raj? Both. Both. No, no, me and Imran. I mean, Imran's there too. It's always sunny. Like again, and Shazad, we were all, everybody was, you know, the main baddies because Todd was too busy in Africa, you know, riding an elephant or whatever he does. Other baddies. Is, you know, the other, the true baddies were out there and mingling and spreading the love. I know. Don't make any statuses or elitism in this baddie.

[00:21:46] I do want to finish up Shazad. So that was a great question about TechWolf. I just, I do want to say I was sitting right next to Sandeep Nahara, who, you know, again, a great person. It was really good to hear his insights of it because he really dabbles in the whole world of, and he has a product that kind of competes with TechWolf, but then he also implements TechWolf. So it'd be great to kind of bring him in. I mean, I would love to hear as much as I try to stay away from talent side. You know, I know it's a big deal.

[00:22:14] I mean, I think TechWolf was a big deal because I heard all the excitement from everybody, right? From that perspective. Yeah. So it would be good to kind of hear his thoughts too on this. We have to, let's kind of go backwards before we go forward. There was a lot of people that could not make a success connect this year and hear this whole payroll story that we're talking about. And we think we've got a solution for them. It's coming up in the next couple of weeks.

[00:22:40] We have payroll events in that we're putting on in Dallas and in Phoenix. You guys have, who knows the dates off the top of their head. Dallas is the 17th. November 17th. Yeah. Phoenix is the November 10th. And then we'll have one more after the new year's, probably in February in Boston. Yeah. And three road shows where we were talking about all about payroll, right? And who's going to be there? Who's going to, other than us, who's going to be there? It's going to be at BU's. Sorry.

[00:23:10] If you want to name the people, the companies are going to be there. Yeah. So this is, this is, this is a joint effort again, going back to how partners are working together. Right. It's so cool. Veritas prime, uh, epi use deal, um, and daily pay. These are, these are, again, every scenario, these are all great partners coming together in the SAP ecosystem to give our clients a really good roadmap of what does payroll look like. And that could be payroll for, you know, again, mid market. It could be payroll about global payroll.

[00:23:40] It's about payroll experiences for their employees too, with things like daily pay and time entry and things like that. So again, a very cool, again, very, very excited because it's going to be what we're calling the payroll baddies road show. We're going to do a live event in the morning with, uh, with our, with our boy, Pete Tillyakis. Yeah. Shout out to him. I mean, it'll be really good. Again, he is absolutely a great thought leader when it comes to this space.

[00:24:06] So it'll be very cool to hear his thoughts on, you know, where the payroll, you know, landscape is going, but how do we tie that into actual, you know, tangible stuff for our payroll baddies out there, um, who are going to be there in the audience. So very excited about that. Yeah. Looking forward to it. And if you need to know any more about it, um, look at, look at the payroll baddies, uh, website on LinkedIn, or we have a new website. Raj, you want to talk about that too? Uh, of course.

[00:24:36] And that was the good, the good segue into that. So people, if you haven't checked it out, I would love for you guys to go out and go check out payroll baddies.com. We have revamped the whole thing. Um, there's also a game on there. If you want to go play a game, it's a fun game. You can play as me. I would, I would pick me as a character to play with. Cause you know, uh, that's true. We, we're trying to keep again, as the world is evolving, as new events are happening, as

[00:25:06] new things are, you know, there's new podcasts that we're doing and new, uh, thought, you know, leadership, uh, things that are coming out. We would love to put that on our website with payroll baddies. We're trying to keep that fully up to date. Uh, we also launched, uh, uh, uh, you know, a store where you can go buy payroll baddies, uh, you know, merchandise. And we've got people buying stuff already. People are buying stuff. Things are coming in again.

[00:25:31] All these things are just to again, highlight what, what the bottom reason why we're doing this. This is the only reason we're doing this because we have day jobs, all of us, except for Jesse. I don't know what she really does, but all of us are all about shining a light on those people out there who are, who are out there working day and night to make sure you get, get paid because they are truly the heroes. Right. And how do we, how do we just shine a light of them, shine a light on them and make them the heroes. Right.

[00:25:59] And maybe on segue to that, Imran, do you want to share with our new, um, uh, our new campaign that we're starting that we actually kicked off yesterday? Yeah, I'm really excited about this. So, um, it's actually front and center on the website as well. And so what we want to do just as our core thing is like Raj said, shine a light on the people, because you know, there's a lot that happens behind the scenes and no one ever gets the recognition for it. Right. I think, and all of us have probably been there.

[00:26:27] Uh, Shazad, I know you've, you know, implemented payroll, uh, across the world, but like, so I'm sure you have stories of like, man, this one person came in, whether it was doing tax research or, you know, someone doing the configuration that prevents a catastrophic issue. They never get recognition for that. Right. And so what our website actually allows you to do is nominate a baddie that you know, um, and just fill out a very small form that says, Hey, you know, Shazad did this.

[00:26:56] He saved our go live. And then, um, what we're going to do is try to take that and recognize those people. So I think there will be a lot more coming. We're still talking about the specifics of what that looks like, you know, whether that's getting them, uh, you know, maybe a special spinner chain or, um, other things like that. But, um, shine a light on what they did, give them that attention that they deserve, give them the thanks that they deserve. And then hopefully we can also give them a gift, uh, that they deserve as well.

[00:27:23] And we'd love to kind of just not just make this a one-time thing, but an ongoing thing where we're always accepting these nominations. And then every once in a while we do like an award thing and not in a egotistical, uh, way, right? Because there's a lot of top X number lists that are in my opinion, very arrogant. And they're just highlighting, you know, people that are popular. That's not what this is about. I don't care if you have zero LinkedIn followers. Um, you've never posted a single thing online.

[00:27:51] You know, if we hear a story about something you did, you're the person we want to shine a light on. So no ego, you know, not trying to get the biggest, uh, follower count or anything like that. Just shining a light on the people that are working hard behind the scenes. But that's what it's about. Check out the website. And you know what, please, please nominate someone that, you know, I don't care if it was something that someone did five years ago, nominate them.

[00:28:16] Now there's no, um, specific date that this, this, uh, is, it's not something that has had to have happened in the last month or, or something like that. So please, you know, great story guys. I want you all to at least nominate one person, all of you. So even us, our payroll, nominate someone that did something, um, that, that you, uh, found was, was useful in regards to payroll. So yeah. See, if you need help spelling my last name, I'll let you know. It's the run payroll for you.

[00:28:45] So you can, uh, no, that's awesome. The spinner chain spins almost as long as Imran was talking. Oh, wait. So does that, is that, is that a way of saying that Imran was talking too long or the spinner chain spins a long time, which is, which is cooler. Both can be true. I like Imran. We are unhinged today. Yeah. Yeah. We're very on.

[00:29:12] So guys, so we just covered again, I know it was a very quick recap of success connect. This, this episode definitely has a lot of good inside jokes. So this is why follow the baddies. You'll get more inside jokes. It's pretty good. And, and, and, you know, again, the website update, we're so excited that we can share some of these new things that were, that we're going to be here. I got an idea. Should we, I know we've never done it before, but for the purposes of these gifts to really make it nice, should we consider having a sponsor?

[00:29:42] I know we've had a lot of offers to sponsor us. We've always said, no, we've turned down money left, right, and center. For this gift, should we do something? You know how I feel about PAC money. I just, you know, I just don't know if I can accept it. No politics. Yeah. No politics. Yeah. Yeah. I say, no, we're talking about the other PAC. This is not politics PACs. This is a partner advisory council. Partner. Yeah. Partner. But no, should we, you know, should we consider that guys? What do you think? Yeah. Let's consider it. Let's consider it. All right.

[00:30:09] We'll take some nominations there too. If you're quoting Raj out of the group and allowing the sponsor to come in and take his seat for the next podcast, that'd be fun. I mean, Jessie, I think you're the only one who feels that way. So. I don't know. I felt a lot of love today, Raj. You're just upset your name wasn't. No, it was. All right. And then we have the road show coming up in a couple of big cities, Phoenix and Dallas. That's, that's good. Big news.

[00:30:36] If you, you know, if you want to hear what everybody heard at, at success connect regarding payroll, that's a great place to show up to and not as far away as Vegas and with a lot better, cleaner air. Where are those? Are those on LinkedIn page? I know I posted something from the Veritas prime LinkedIn page. Is that where it is or where are we sending people? There's a LinkedIn page. And then what, what we're going to do is also updated on our website. Okay. That is website. We'll have a page that's calls. Okay. So those are coming up next week in the week after.

[00:31:06] Yeah. Come and they're free. Yeah. So calm. And you get breakfast and lunch and you get to hear Pete Tillyakis and maybe see us do a live podcast. Absolutely. Very cool. Anything else? Anybody wants to share about anything? It's been almost over a month since we've done a podcast. So anything happening that we should be sharing? Let me ask you another question. I've got a lot of questions. I can keep on asking questions. I love it. I love questions. These are good clips.

[00:31:34] Maybe, maybe everyone who's watching, maybe you, you can also comment under this, right? If you made it to success connect or SAP connect as we call it, and you went around and saw all the demos and the cool AI things, which one was your favorite? So let's start here, right? What is the AI use case? One AI use case that you saw that you thought was actually really valuable.

[00:32:00] The reason I'm asking this question, there's a lot of confusion and myths around, oh, everything that all of these big vendors, including SAP, we're terrible. All the AI that we're delivering is just bling, not a lot of value. So, well, definitely the payroll agents don't fit that. Well, no, I think we should have Jesse go first. Jesse, please tell us what was your favorite agent or favorite AI? Well, okay.

[00:32:30] So he's saying this because he knows I'm a little triggered by how much he talks about AI. So all Raj wants to do is talk about- That's fine. You're avoiding the question. Answer the question. I'm going to say AI assisted off-boarding because then I can say, dear agent, please off-board Raj from Akaria. S-H-A-R. There you go.

[00:32:52] So I guarantee you she literally just AI-ed it to find out what are the AI agents that came out and she picked the one that she could include in this comment. Or even if not something that has already come out, things that we've talked about. Are coming out. You know, I'll take a stand of it. I'm not going to answer your question exactly, but I am excited about Joule Studio 2.0 and the ability for customers and partners to build your own stuff, right?

[00:33:20] I think that's also a very exciting thing. That's exciting for sure. There was a lot of lessons learned from 1.0. Look, I've set it up, right? I've integrated it. I've actually done it myself, hands-on. And, you know, wasn't so great, but from what I've seen of 2.0, I think it's a big leap forward. So I'm excited about that because I think there's so many things, you know, it's not just SAP. Partners are going to build really cool stuff. Customers themselves are going to build very cool stuff.

[00:33:47] And so, you know, if I change the question around from an AI standpoint, that's actually what I'm most excited about. And, you know, Raj, I know we've gone and we were talking to people and, you know, there were always questions around that. But what about, you know, X, Y, Z thing? Like, well, this is how you do it. Let's do this. Let's do this, right? Let's not spill the beans because we were all there, right? So we've seen a lot of things. I know a lot of things. Let's get people who are watching this and they've seen either they were there at SAP Connect or they,

[00:34:17] they are watching this and they know what we're doing, what SAP is releasing. Let them comment below where they can say which one is their favorite and what value they think. And think about timesheet. The timesheet agent too is amazing. It's not, I know it's not payroll, but it is. That is going to be amazing. But maybe, maybe for the audience, Shazad and also Imran, I don't, I know you're very close to this, but like, I, I think all the, most of the agents that were announced were supposed to be out.

[00:34:46] By the end of last month. Did that happen fully? Uh, so we have, uh, certain agents already GA. Some are coming this month. Yes. In November. So that's what we announced. End of October to November. Because we've got the, so some agents are already out, but some agents are coming out with the actual big release that's happening this month. Yeah. And you know what guys, this actually brings me up another point.

[00:35:13] A huge topic of conversation that we haven't really talked about is this whole move from, um, customer managed jewel to SAP managed jewel. Right. Um, I don't know how many people have heard about that, but that's a big initiative that's going on. And personally, I'm a big fan of it because if I'm completely honest setting up jewel, I don't know when I first did it six months ago, it was very painful to do. It was clunky. It was clunky. Right.

[00:35:39] Just like studio 1.0 and look, that's not necessarily, um, surprising either because you know, iteration one and always is, um, clunkier than, um, going forward. But I think. The SAP managed jewel is how it should be because you know, right now what you had to do is you had to take it, you had to figure out the license stuff. You had to get the, the, you know, infrastructure, you know, there's a BTP license implications and things you had to do from an infrastructure standpoint. All of that will be simplified with this. Right.

[00:36:09] And so I should add, I don't know if you have the timelines. I know I got them at some point, but I can't recall them off the top of my head, but kind of going forward. This will ultimately for customers make jewel easier to turn on. Whereas, you know, before it was a little clunkier, harder to do. You had to have a partner that really knew, know what they're doing and probably, um, done this before. So I think that was a big topic of conversation and it will get to the whole point of AI adoption and jewel adoption. And all of that going forward.

[00:36:38] And I know there's also some commercial things. I don't know if we want to get into that. Uh, Shahzad, if you want to talk about that or Todd, but I think the simplification of the commercials for AI also is another topic that is happening a lot right now with different customers. So yeah. I agree. Yeah. No, I mean this whole, uh, SAP managed jewel is part of the bigger project, which is what we are calling, uh, SAP managed cloud. Right?

[00:37:05] So you'll just part of that where we say you get cloud ERP plus success factors, all integration provisioning. All of that is harmonized delivered by SAP. Joule is part of that delivery, right? So for you as a customer, all of that is now taken up by SAP. Uh, and unlike a lot of vendors, I won't name name, they charge a fee. Mm hmm. That's awesome.

[00:37:34] And something to bring up, I don't know, um, this month there was a, a whole AI, um, HCM series that was provided to customers. And that particular, uh, topic was brought up how it's going to get managed to through SAP and it's going to be more consistent. And, um, for a lot of clients who were yet to turn on and use anything in Joule. So this is going to definitely expedite adoption. So that's for sure.

[00:38:02] For sure. I mean, look, I, and I, I mentioned this to someone at SAP, they didn't take too kindly to it, but I kind of pointed out the way it's been right now is similar to like on-prem adding ESS MSS, right? It's like this add on and configuration and other things you have to do. Whereas when you look at the cloud and how things were with success factors, ESS was just there, right? Mobile was just there. And so the fact that now, you know, we're able to do this, whereas you buy success factors and Joule is just there and it's managed by SAP.

[00:38:30] And now you're just choosing your use cases and doing things like that. To me, that is how AI native should work, right? As opposed to stitching it on and having to, you know, connect things and do stuff. So I'm excited about that. I think it'll work out better. And there will be an increase in adoption, which I know from the keynote, Christian Klein was very, very clear of that as a core goal of that. Because it's one thing to get clients to just basically turn it on and do nothing with it as opposed to true adoption. Right.

[00:39:00] But also it's making clients aware of, okay, I turn it on. Well, what are some of the foundational pieces that I'm missing that I can't yet leverage all the, you know, skills review or anything because I don't have TIH set up. Right. Right. So maybe I need to do that as a prerequisite. So it's really forcing the clients to understand, hey, am I getting the best out of my current solution and with everything and the best return of investment here? And what do I need to do to do a little groundwork? Right.

[00:39:29] And I think that's exciting just because everyone's moving towards that path. And I know customers that I've talked to are really looking to have conversation on, can you tell me what I need to get set up so when I do turn jewel on completely, I'm getting the best usage out of it. So that's exciting. A hundred percent. Yeah. Same thing with master data management, Todd. Right. It's a talent version of master data management. If you don't have TIH set up, then you haven't done what was it, Raj? They haven't eaten the broccoli yet.

[00:39:59] So, you know, you can't eat the broccoli. Gotta eat the broccoli with your ice cream. Well, on that, there's so many fun topics we can always talk about and go into, but I think we have to wrap it up, boys and girls. So, you know, again, thank you to our listeners. Thank you for, you know, all the love, but please, please, please go out there and nominate, nominate those payroll baddies out there. Let's get some, let's get some more lights shining on them. Right. So thank you everybody. And until next time. Bye. Thank you. Bye. Peace out.