There’s no question the Covid pandemic made kingmakers out of many manufacturers that play in the outdoor cooking space. More people cooked at home, so naturally, demand for outdoor cooking appliances like griddles, grills, smokers and pizza ovens skyrocketed.

That was then, this is now.

Recent data suggests consumer demand and confidence are declining, hitting lows not seen in years, potentially signaling a slowdown in the economy. What does this mean for outdoor cooking stalwarts like Weber Grills? Keep innovating — but make sure as much bang for the buck is delivered to consumers.

“Over the past five years, we’ve significantly expanded our research and development efforts, aiming to launch innovative, high-quality products annually,” said Duane Miller, vice president of Research and Development for Weber Grills. “Some years, that means reimagining iconic Weber lines like our Genesis or Summit gas grills. In other years, we introduce new platforms, such as the Slate Rust-Resistant griddle, Searwood wood pellet grill, Lumin electric grill, and the Weber Works accessory line.”

At the heart of Weber’s fiery innovation strategy is the consumer, something that has never wavered since the day Weber was founded.

“We focus on creating meaningful experiences — products that enhance how people cook and live,” said Miller. “Every invention must be purposeful, manufacturable at our high standards, and priced to deliver exceptional value.”

For 2025, Weber’s reimagined Spirit gas grill, which turns 30 this year, is a prime example. First launched in 1995, Spirit was designed to bring Weber’s legendary grilling experience to more people with a smaller footprint, high-quality, and affordable gas grill. Today, it’s the world’s best-selling gas grill by volume, renowned for its durability, versatility, and performance.

Weber’s goal in reinventing Spirit was clear: purpose-driven innovations that enhance outdoor cooking without compromising the grill’s core strengths.

“Affordability was key, so we designed a line that upholds Weber’s reputation for exceptional quality, performance, and culinary results — at the right price,” Miller said.

The new Weber Spirit lineup and accessories are impressive. This begs a very important question: How was Weber able to cram so much innovation into such an economically attractive package?

According to Miller, it all starts with understanding what consumers genuinely value and making strategic decisions about where to invest, while also knowing where to optimize to keep costs down without compromising performance.

“For the new Spirit gas grill specifically, we worked closely as an integrated team — R&D to product to supply chain to manufacturing to marketing — to strike that perfect balance between innovation and value, making sure we delivered on what consumers told us they needed the next generation of the Spirit grill to do for them while balancing cost,” he shared.

All Spirit models now feature a closed cart for a more polished look and added storage. At the same time, the company made thoughtful adjustments, such as removing the standard tank scale. Weber also worked to gain efficiencies in packaging, which lowered freight costs.

“Perhaps the most meaningful innovation is that we engineered a powerful sear zone technology that is now available at a $449 price point,” said Miller.

Hands-on approach to customer feedback

According to Roberto Carvajal, general manager of Gas Product for Weber Grills, the core of the Spirit grill development was a commitment to listening to consumers, just as the company first did 30 years ago.

“We conducted extensive research across three continents, grilling alongside outdoor cooks in their homes to understand their lifestyles and what truly matters in a stand-up gas grill,” said Carvajal. “This hands-on approach ensured we weren’t designing based on assumptions but on real insights from both current and prospective Spirit owners.”

These insights shaped every detail of the grill — from the cook engine to the closed cabinet that discreetly hides the gas tank to the sturdy stainless-steel handle, a signature of Weber quality.

Carvajal said consumer feedback also inspired its Weber Works accessories line, a series of interchangeable, snap-on, or drop-in accessories that let owners customize their grills. In essence, Weber Works is designed to make every step — from kitchen to grill to table — more seamless and efficient.

Avoiding supply chain snafus

Weber’s thoughtful and customer-centric approach to innovation means nothing if product is not available online or at brick-and-mortar retailers. How does the company manage cost of materials and logistics so that Weber products show up on time?

Carvajal said Weber has one of the industry’s best supply chain teams, who along with trusted partners help the company navigate the macro-economic environment’s complexity and changes, often ensuring Weber gets ahead of shipping disruptions to secure supply and manage costs.

Carvajal said SAP enables the Weber supply chain team to stay one step ahead of disruptions: “It is an essential part of getting products to the marketplace — from demand planning to component purchasing to on-time shipping to our retail partners. SAP helps ensure we deliver on our commitments to customers.”

Positive feedback for the new Spirit lineup indicates Weber’s innovation strategy is working, with consumers giving the line an impressive 4.7-star average rating.

“Our new Weber Spirit grills have been met with tremendous enthusiasm worldwide,” Carvajal confirmed. “The most rewarding feedback comes from the stories our customers share — the meals they’ve cooked and the moments they’ve created with their Spirit grills.”

So where does Weber take the Spirit brand from here?

“We’re passionate about helping people experience the joy of outdoor cooking and continually innovating to make it easier and more enjoyable,” said Carvajal.

While the Spirit grill line already offers a wide range of accessories, Carvajal said Weber is constantly evolving based on consumer feedback: “Whether through smart technology, upgraded tools, or enhanced cooking capabilities, we’ll continue refining the Spirit line with meaningful innovations while staying true to the quality, performance, and value that have made it the world’s best-selling gas grill.”

Tim Clark is head of Brand Journalism for SAP.

This story originally appeared on SAP BrandVoice on Forbes.

WALLDORF — SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) will release its results for the first quarter of 2025 on Tuesday, April 22.

SAP CEO Christian Klein and SAP CFO Dominik Asam will host a virtual financial analyst call to review first quarter results.

Media representatives may may listen in on the virtual analyst conference via Webcast on April 22 at 11:00 p.m. CEST / 5:00 p.m. ET.

The prowess of generative AI with text has brought immense value — from writing emails and answering questions to generating wedding speeches. AI models trained to deal with text, like large language models (LLMs), have powered this value and are only getting better at natural language.

However, there are challenges when we move beyond text to apply these models to structured, tabular data, which is essential for enterprise business operations. This imbalance comes partly because of the availability of training data. Text used to train models is plentiful, often consisting of text scraped from the internet, whereas tabular data, especially data with multiple linked tables, is scarce.

To bring AI advancements to the enterprise sector, researchers working on training and benchmarking the performance of these models in an enterprise setting need realistic tabular data. That’s why SAP developed “Sales Autocompletion Linked Business Tables” (SALT), a curated dataset that includes anonymized data from a customer’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.

SALT is specifically designed to support researchers working on AI models for real-world business contexts and can be accessed on Hugging Face and GitHub.

Challenges of getting and working with enterprise data

Providing the research community with realistic enterprise data like SALT has been challenging. Data privacy, confidentiality, and commercial interests make obtaining large, clean, high-quality enterprise datasets difficult for training models and benchmarking them for specific use cases. This means there is a growing gap between what researchers are working on and what actual enterprise data looks like.

In addition to the problem of availability, enterprise data is complex. First, business data is usually stored in multiple interconnected tables. For example, a sales order entry may be linked to numerous tables, such as customer IDs connected to a supplier table containing address information. Second, tables are inherently heterogeneous in the data type they can contain. One field may be text, while the other contains numerical or categorical values. Finally, business data frequently shows significant column imbalances, meaning that, for example, a specific product category makes up 90 percent of all sales orders while others are rarely used.

The best way to help researchers develop enterprise models for these challenges is to provide accurate enterprise data.

SALT dataset

Accurate enterprise data is a bottleneck in AI research. The SALT dataset alleviates this bottleneck by providing the research community with the first real ERP dataset. It uses actual industry data collected by an ERP system that records sales orders. It has been minimally processed to protect privacy.

“There is a gap between academia and industry in terms of data. It cannot be closed easily because of privacy,” says Tassilo Klein, one of the SAP researchers behind the dataset. “But we want to enable the research community to work on real problems, not just simulated problems.”

ERP systems help organizations manage core business operations like finance and spending. With millions of entries and extensive, interconnected relational tables focused on sales, the SALT dataset replicates customer interactions in an ERP system. SALT’s realistic enterprise data means it is a perfect basis for helping models understand the characteristics of business data and validate their performance through benchmarking. It also should help researchers develop better foundation models for linked business data.

Getting this right will advance enterprise automation, as many enterprise business processes are heavily centered around data in structured tabular formats. Even though this data plays a crucial role in enterprise day-to-day activities, the generative AI revolution has yet to tap into them.

“SALT is a first step to providing researchers with authentic representative industry data that gives a glimpse into actual enterprise data; for now, we are starting with just one customer and use case,” shares Johannes Hoffart, CTO of Business AI at SAP. “However, we plan to publish more datasets that cover a diverse set of customers and use cases that, along with SALT, can serve as a basis for pre-training, adapting, as well as benchmarking models.”

Collaboration with academic institutions is also a motivation for publishing this data.

“At SAP, we hope to collaborate with academic partners who usually can only publish their results on open repositories,” Klein says. “Another hope for the dataset is encouraging more people to explore and validate new methods that help foundation models better deal with tabular enterprise data.”

What SAP is doing

Alongside its investment in the open research community with SALT, SAP is building SAP Foundation Model to handle enterprise tabular data. This table-native AI model aims to accelerate time-to-value for predictive tasks on tabular data, offering a model that can work with tabular data out-of-the-box with little or no additional training data. The PORTAL paper, published alongside SALT, provides a first glance at how this model could look.

Knowledge graphs are critical here. They work by exposing metadata — the who, what, and when of data — making relationships between information accessible. This provides a structured, interconnected representation of the data that AI models can easily understand and utilize. With the help of SAP Knowledge Graph, SAP Foundation Model can be scaled and adapted to a wide array of diverse use cases with some lightweight fine-tuning.

Learn more about:

• SAP Knowledge Graph
• SAP Foundation Model
• PORTAL
• SALT

Many finance leaders are gearing up for a step change in 2025. New technologies are bringing significant opportunities to improve productivity in finance and beyond. However, CFOs also have a chance to widen their influence this year as they use their unique skills to help organizations strategize around returning growth and business reinvention.

These changes bring vast challenges but large potential rewards for those who can upskill their teams and tackle the looming talent crunch.

To set up their organizations for growth, CFOs will need to be nimble in executing their strategies, evaluate the technologies they invest in, prioritize cybersecurity, integrate ESG reporting, and tackle talent crunch.  

1. Bringing to life 2024 growth plans 

In 2024, many CFOs focused on devising growth and reinvention plans to scale their businesses in a sustainable manner. In this quest, they had to be nimble and creative: according to PwC’s 27th Annual Global CEO survey, over 80 percent of CEOs thought that their company would no longer be viable if it did not try to reinvent itself. In order to succeed in 2025, CFOs will need to continue building trust with CEOs to partner on executing these plans successfully. 

To sell their vision in 2025, CFOs will also need to build their leadership image with the wider business, internal and external stakeholders. This is why they will need to dedicate resources to mastering their storytelling skills. This will enable finance leaders to ensure that peers and colleagues are aligned with the business’ short- and long-term planning, especially as it undergoes reinvention in challenging market conditions.  

2. Evaluating technologies for long-term benefit and efficiency 

According to the recent CFO Insights research by SAP Concur, 94 percent of finance leaders say that AI has already helped improve decision-making. Also, 73 percent see a positive impact on cost and risk reduction. In 2025, CFOs need to lead the business-wide charge on delving deeper into the technologies they are investing in. As a number of companies are rushing to adopt AI, CFOs are uniquely positioned to ensure this adoption is truly valuable to the company. To do so, they can drive establishing ROI measures to ensure it is used productively and ethically.  

They will need to be involved in critically evaluating the technologies that businesses invest in, ensuring that risks are properly assessed and in accordance with compliance or responsible-use frameworks.

With AI becoming an essential business tool across many industries, CFOs will need to make sure that it adheres to federal and international AI regulatory frameworks. They should also continue investing in new capabilities to strengthen their compliance, auditing, and planning toolkits. Because CFOs have a holistic view of their business’ data and needs, they have a unique insight into the most efficient ways to use AI.  

3. Prioritizing cybersecurity  

The global average cost of a data breach in 2024 is $4.88 million – 10 percent up on 2023, according to IBM’s 2024 Cost of a Data Breach report. The ubiquity of generative AI provides bad actors with more tools to commit complex fraud schemes. Consequently, in 2025, CFOs will need to dedicate resources to protecting their organizations from cybercrime in the coming year and onwards. According to CFO Insights research, 59 percent of finance leaders plan to increase their cybersecurity budget to respond to growing threats.

Because CFOs understand business risk and reporting, they are well-placed to take an oversight role. This best positions them to work with their business’ Chief Information Security Officers (CISO) to assess investments and the maturity of security arrangements, as well as budgets dedicated to this. 

Another way that CFOs can protect their organizations’ financial assets and data is to appropriately prepare their teams. Since human error remains the biggest risk for a cyber-attack, it is essential that CFOs educate their teams on best practices and develop incident response plans.  

4. Integrating ESG reporting 

Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) frameworks are becoming increasingly important for businesses as wider regulation schemes are established globally. For CFOs to set up their business for success in 2025, they should embrace ESG as more than just a set of rules, but as a means to build a data base and strengthen their business’ profile. 

Forty-eight percent of finance leaders are focusing on sustainability and ESG to drive growth this year. Not only does collecting ESG data help boost a business’ revenue, but it presents them with a unique opportunity to see how they are performing and inform future related decisions. For example, giving employees sustainable business travel options and recording their decision can help inform future reporting. CFOs ​​​should also set measurable goals for how sustainability data will be used to enhance the business’ performance and value creation. These goals will guide the development of the organization’s staff and its infrastructure. 

A CFO’s focus on integrating ESG reporting is one element of an even bigger shift – a shift from carbon counting to carbon accounting. In the future, organization’s entire carbon impact is going to become an integral part of its balance sheet, measured and managed with the same precision as the financial bottom line. A green ledger will form part of a more integrated view of reporting that goes way beyond financials. Adding this green ledger will help companies to a more holistic approach uniting financial and carbon accounting, making sustainability profitable and profitability sustainable.  

5. Retaining employees despite the “talent crunch“

In 2025, the workforce will continue to evolve, as baby boomers retire and young finance professionals re-evaluate their working priorities. CFOs will need to retain employees and keep them enthusiastic. They can do this by better understanding younger employees’ values and adapting development, training, and recruitment policies accordingly.  

They will also need to collaborate with HR to foster continuous learning, reskilling, and adaptability for staff. This same flexibility should be applied to bringing in new technology. By accepting to adopt these, businesses can drive more competition for the right talent.  

Similarly, CFOs can embrace using technologies such as AI to automate certain tasks, freeing people for more meaningful work. This not only resonates with the values of younger workers but will highlight to employees that their time is valued, boosting retention.  

A CFO’s role continues to evolve in challenging market and macroeconomic conditions, so adaptation and flexibility are key to unlocking rewards for themselves, their teams, and their organizations. Embracing the outlined strategies promises CFOs can continue to secure the business’ future and steer it toward success.

Victor Domingos is chief financial officer for SAP Concur.