Beyond the Leaderboard: Bridging Research and Real-World AI Performance
Overview
Benchmark scores are often treated as the gold standard for measuring AI progress, but they rarely capture how models perform in practice. Subtle variations in prompts, instruction-following behavior, and context handling can shift leaderboard rankings without reflecting a model’s true reasoning or usefulness in real-world applications.
In this session by Appen, Daniel Dahlmeier (Chief Data Scientist, SAP) will share how SAP bridges the gap between research and applied AI. Drawing directly from SAP’s enterprise experience, Daniel will discuss why benchmark results alone can be misleading and offer practical insights on evaluating models when application-specific performance, safety, and domain context matter.
Event Details
- Date: Tuesday, November 11, 2025
- Time: 7:00 – 8:00 PM ET
- Format: Live Webinar (Microsoft Teams)
Why Attend
- Understand why benchmark results don’t always translate to production performance.
- Gain insights from SAP’s approach to evaluating and deploying AI responsibly.
- Learn methods to measure contextual understanding, safety, and reliability in AI systems.
- Hear from leaders driving the next phase of applied AI innovation.
Speakers
Daniel is a Data Science Manager and the Chief Data Scientist at the SAP Business AI unit, where his team develops deep-learning models for document processing and benchmarking. He also serves as an adjunct assistant professor at the Singapore University of Technology and Design and teaches at Heidelberg University.
Si leads strategy and marketing at Appen and brings extensive experience across traditional AI/ML models, generative AI, multimodal AI systems, and intelligent robotics. Prior to Appen, she held leadership positions at Tencent AI & Robotics Lab and AWS China, driving innovation and partnerships in applied AI.
Register Now
Be part of this live discussion and explore how industry experts are redefining AI evaluation.