Your competitor can buy the same AI you can, on the same morning. So what’s left to set you apart?
Francesca Carboni, Vice President of the Partner Excellence Center (EMEA) at SAP, points to what can’t be bought: your data, your knowledge of your own processes, and how clearly you know what you want the technology to do.
For this episode of TechTalk by Ciente, Suruchi Bhargava, CMO at Ciente, sits down with Francesca to follow that idea through the enterprise. It starts with partners who measure success by the same number, moves through a core clean enough for agents to reason on and data whose meaning holds across systems, and arrives at trust: being able to show what an agent did, and why, before you hand it a decision. There’s a warning along the way, too. Put an agent on a poorly designed process and you haven’t fixed anything. You’ve just got an inefficient process that now runs at night.
And because the assumptions built into these systems today are the ones businesses will be running on for years, she argues the time to get them right is now.
Pour a coffee and press play. We think you’ll enjoy this one.
Francesca Carboni leads the Partner Excellence Center (PXC) for Europe, Middle East & Africa at SAP, bringing over 16 years of enterprise experience in high-performing, results-oriented partner strategy, ecosystem development, and cross-functional leadership across one of SAP’s most diverse and dynamic regions.
In her role, Francesca shapes and executes SAP’s partner excellence agenda across EMEA, ensuring that SAP’s partner ecosystem is equipped, performing, and aligned to deliver outstanding customer outcomes at scale. Her mandate spans partner enablement, maturity management, GTM execution, and program compliance across a wide range of markets and partner profiles.
She is recognized for her ability to translate complex strategic priorities into actionable partner programs.
With deep expertise in enterprise ecosystems, partner lifecycle management, and performance frameworks, Francesca plays a pivotal role in strengthening SAP’s partner community across Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.