Kicking off Season 2 of The PowerTalk Show, Navin Shetty sits down with Chris Carter — four-time best-selling author, founder of Approyo, Mugatu AI, and Charging Bunny, and a fixture in the SAP and cloud ecosystem since 1989. From a Commodore VIC-20 to generative AI, Chris has watched enterprise technology evolve for nearly four decades. In this conversation he breaks down the SAP-versus-Oracle AI race, why AI exploded on speed rather than novelty, how a backyard doodle became a solar EV-charging company, and the leadership lessons that only 30-plus years in the trenches can teach.

The Behemoths Awaken — SAP Joule vs Oracle

For organizations on legacy systems, the leap to AI can feel like a mountain. Chris's point is that the "Big Two" have already done the heavy lifting. SAP's Joule is ingrained across its BTP platform — 400-plus templates and over 5,000 pre-built use cases — to support the RISE transformation, while Oracle has been building on the virtual-iron backbone it acquired more than a decade ago.

"It's not just about asking a chatbot a question. It's about taking your organizational data and leveraging it at the speed of a snap of a finger."

Chris Carter

He's candid that he came out of retirement for it — he's currently working on an SAP project using Joule and BTP to validate what organizations need before they move to RISE.

Why Now? The Speed of Consumption

Cloud, machine learning, and LLMs all existed for years, so why did AI suddenly become the word on every board member's lips? Chris's answer is speed. The shift from processing data in seconds to milliseconds and nanoseconds is what unlocked real-time decision-making — and the value depends on the persona of the customer, whether retail, CPG, or banking.

"Once you get those prompts proper, it's amazing. It's taking the data you have in your organization and leveraging it at the speed of a snap of a finger."

Chris Carter

The Partner Ecosystem — A Double-Edged Sword

Having been in the SAP ecosystem since 1989, Chris has watched it grow as SAP mandates more partners and more specialisation. But he's blunt about the downside: some partners arrive strong in AI or cloud yet lack real SAP depth, and the move from a legacy ECC environment to a cloud-only RISE environment changes everything — applications, AI, and cloud all at once. Knowing that difference, he argues, is what separates genuine success stories from partners who can't "spell AI if you gave them the A first."

Charging Bunny — A Single-Direction Solar Revolution

Innovation doesn't stop at software. Chris shared the origin of Charging Bunny — born from a backyard doodle after he bought a Tesla and started measuring the car to see how much solar he could fit above it. Most chargers pull heavily from a strained grid; Charging Bunny flips that. Large solar panels charge battery backups, the system runs single-direction rather than bidirectional, and excess stored power is fed back to the grid at 11:59:59 PM each night with a data stamp recording the contribution. It earns carbon credits and offsets, and Chris singles out Dubai and Saudi Arabia as ahead of the curve, with sandstorm-resistant mesh seals adapting the panels to Gulf conditions.

Leadership — Hire Faster, Help Others Up, and Just Do It

Despite the accolades, Chris is open about his mistakes. His biggest regret is hiring late — believing he could do it all himself before bringing in a CIO, COO, and CFO.

"I thought I could do it all myself. I wish I'd hired my CIO, COO, and CFO 20 years ago rather than 15 — I'd probably have more hair now."

Chris Carter

His broader philosophy is to help others up the ladder, even when that means writing the recommendation letter that sends a star employee to a Big Four firm. And his advice to the 2026 generation comes from an old Nike line his mentor gave him: fail fast, learn from small failures rather than system-crashing ones, and just do it.