Thirty years ago, SAP launched its certification program to help professionals prove expertise and advance their careers.

At SAP Sapphire, that mission is being redefined for a fundamentally different environment, one in which every industry faces the same core challenge: success depends not just on what professionals know, but on how effectively they can apply that knowledge alongside AI.

Technology has already changed. What now differentiates organizations is not access to innovation, but the ability to translate it into outcomes. According to the World Economic Forum, skills gaps are the primary barrier to transformation, ranking ahead of investment constraints and regulatory complexity. Closing that gap requires more than expanding training catalogs. It requires rethinking how skills are built, validated, and continuously developed.

Certification reimagined

SAP Certification has been redesigned to reflect how work actually gets done. Across more than 100 certifications, traditional multiple-choice exams have been replaced with scenario-based and system-based assessments. Candidates work through case-based challenges, role simulations, and practical tasks in SAP environments that mirror real-world complexity. They can also use AI tools during exams—by design, not exception.

This marks a fundamental shift. Certification is no longer a test of knowledge recall; it is a demonstration of applied capability: the ability to navigate ambiguity, make decisions, and use AI as a tool without relying on it. More than 100,000 exams have already been completed under this model, establishing a new benchmark for certification at scale and reinforcing the relevance of certification in an AI-driven workplace.

Learning is evolving in parallel

In SAP Learning Hub, AI is transforming how professionals engage with content. These capabilities are enabled by the integration of selected functionalities from Google NotebookLM into the customer and partner editions of the platform.

This shifts learning from passive consumption to active interaction. Learners can engage with SAP content in more than 80 languages, ask questions, and receive precise, source-based answers with direct references to official materials. AI also generates complementary formats. Podcasts are available for moments when a screen is neither available nor practical, whether commuting, traveling, or simply stepping away from the desk, available both for passive listening and as interactive conversations with AI hosts. FAQs, study guides, mind maps, timelines, briefing documents, and video overviews allow learning to adapt to individual needs and time constraints.

Early adoption underscores the impact. More than 7,500 users are already leveraging these capabilities. LTIMindtree reports onboarding that is 50 percent faster, while NTT Data Business Solutions has made SAP Learning Hub its primary environment for developing talent prepared for the agentic AI era. The shift is clear: Learning is becoming embedded in daily work, not separated from it.

Building the data foundation

At the same time, SAP is addressing a prerequisite for effective AI: data. Many organizations continue to operate with fragmented and inconsistent data landscapes, limiting the impact of AI initiatives. The Becoming a Certified SAP Data Architect learning journey focuses on building the capability to connect, govern, and structure enterprise data, ensuring that AI systems operate on a reliable and consistent foundation.

This capability is increasingly strategic. Organizations that establish a strong data foundation can move faster from insight to action, scale AI more effectively, and create more consistent business outcomes. In this sense, data architecture is no longer a back-end concern; it is a core enabler of enterprise transformation.

Skills at scale

SAP has committed to equipping 12 million people with AI-ready skills by 2030. Delivering on this ambition requires expanding access while maintaining depth and relevance. Select AI live learning sessions such as All Things Business AI: Latest Insights, Updates & Live Demos, are now available without login or cost, giving professionals at all career stages direct access to SAP’s business AI strategy.

Role-based learning journeys provide targeted development for key profiles such as enterprise architects, while a dedicated “Clean Core” course supports organizations in maintaining SAP S/4HANA landscapes in ways that enable faster innovation cycles and more efficient adoption of new capabilities.

Scaling skills also requires ecosystem reach. SAP’s partnership with Accenture LearnVantage expands global access to instructor-led training, combining SAP-authored content and training systems with Accenture LearnVantage’s proven experience in technology skills development for enterprise clients. This creates a continuous path from foundational knowledge to hands-on experience to certification, reflecting how professionals actually develop skills: progressively, in context, and in alignment with real-world application.

A broader shift

These developments point to a broader shift. Learning is no longer episodic; it is continuous, adaptive, and embedded in how work gets done. Participation in SAP learning has increased by 33% year over year, reinforcing that organizations increasingly view skills as strategic assets in an AI-powered economy. The Autonomous Enterprise takes shape differently across industries, and so does the capability required to make it work.

At SAP Sapphire, SAP marks 30 years of certification not by looking back, but by redefining its role. Certification is becoming a measure of capability in action. Learning is becoming an ongoing process that evolves alongside technology and business needs.

In an AI-driven world, advantage will not come from access to technology alone, but from the ability to apply it with purpose. Across industries, the pattern is consistent: how quickly organizations capture value from AI depends on the people deploying it.

To explore these innovations in more detail and understand how SAP is enabling organizations to build AI-ready skills at scale, read the SAP Sapphire Innovation News Guide.

Andre Bechtold is president of SAP Industries and Experiences.

In an evolutionary step toward intelligent, autonomous business decision-making, SAP announced this week that it will make new sustainability AI agents generally available by the end of 2026.

Currently in beta, the agents help organizations deliver measurable results: a greater than 50% reduction in packaging compliance review hours, scenario simulation time cut from a day to 20 minutes, up to 80% reduction in manual GHS classification effort, and over 20% fewer packaging compliance errors.

The agents handle multi-step workflows that previously required hand-offs between teams and systems, including sustainability reporting preparation, packaging and product compliance assessments, carbon footprint simulation, and workplace safety documentation. They address mounting pressure across the enterprise: giving finance teams visibility into how carbon exposure affects forecasts; helping procurement teams manage regulatory risk without slowing down innovation; enabling supply chain teams to spot emission hotspots while maintaining service levels; and supporting operations in connecting safety observations to proactive, audit-ready actions.

New AI sustainability agents

The Sustainability Regulatory Readiness Agent helps organizations prepare for upcoming sustainability regulations such as the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) by translating materiality assessments into a defensible reporting scope and mapping the right data and metrics to each disclosure requirement. This enables sustainability teams to capture, validate, track, and ultimately disclose ESG information with far less manual effort.

For finance teams that need to manage carbon costs and disclosure risk while balancing the financial implications of sustainability performance, the agent automates financial-grade data mapping between material topics, regulatory requirements, and SAP finance data, improving audit readiness and turning an existing materiality assessment into a clear, defensible reporting scope. Unlike a standalone sustainability point solution that only surfaces issues or a generic AI model that drafts narrative text, this agent works inside SAP Sustainability Control Tower and the broader SAP landscape to keep reporting scopes aligned to policy and keep underlying data structured and traceable.

The Footprint Optimization Agent brings together carbon, energy, and waste data from across Scope 1, 2, and 3 sources and pinpoints where emissions and other environmental impacts are highest across products, plants, and supply chains. It then runs side‑by‑side simulations of different reduction levers and turns the results into reports, supplier requests, and targeted initiatives that support decarbonization projects and ESG goal tracking. For operations, the agent makes it easy to test “what‑if” operational changes and see their projected impact on carbon and other environmental footprints. It reduces scenario simulation time from approximately one day to about 20 minutes, making operational decisions based on real impact projections available at workers’ fingertips. This directly addresses the financial implications of carbon exposure: with ESG data often derived from industry averages that can vary by 30 to 40% or more from actual values, the ability to simulate and act on granular, accurate data carries significant margin protection value.

The Packaging Compliance Agent reads and interprets evolving packaging regulations starting with the Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR), maps supplier and product documentation to a structured data model, infers and flags missing information, and checks product designs for conformity at scale. It turns scattered, often unstructured packaging data into an auditable compliance record for each SKU, shipment, and product run, reducing manual review effort and error rates in the process.

Procurement and sourcing teams facing growing pressure to ensure supplier eligibility, material compliance, and traceability while managing cost and availability now have an agent that helps protect revenue by catching packaging issues before they block orders or trigger fines. This equates to a greater than 50% reduction in manual compliance review hours and over 20% reduction of packaging compliance assessment errors. As sustainability moves to the transaction level—compliance per SKU, per shipment, per product run—this kind of automated, embedded compliance capability becomes an operational necessity.

The GHS Classification and Labeling Agent collects the required input data, applies the relevant Globally Harmonized System (GHS) rules, and proposes classifications and label elements that can be used directly in downstream product compliance processes.

By automating these steps, it delivers up to an 80% reduction in manual efforts and a 60% reduction in GHS labeling and classification errors. For product and compliance teams that must keep launches on schedule and avoid shipment holds or market access denials, the agent embeds GHS product compliance into everyday workflows, turning a historically expert‑driven, error‑prone process into a consistent, auditable control point across the portfolio.

The Workplace Safety Agent supports workplace safety by analyzing reported observations and proposing follow-up tasks, risk assessments, and controls. It generates updated, approved safety instructions based on those observations to help organizations strengthen safety governance. With operations under increased pressure to ensure safe work environments without compromising service and speed of production, the agent delivers proactive, standardized safety management at scale, reducing the risk of incidents and unplanned downtime. At the same time, HR and EHS leaders can point to a clear trail of actions and updated instructions to demonstrate continuous improvement in safety culture to employees, regulators, and boards.

Only AI can deliver sustainability at scale

To ensure compliance and enhance strategic decision-making, sustainability data needs to become granular. It should move beyond a record of what happened and become a driver of future outcomes. To reach this level of insight, sustainability data needs to be analyzed at transaction level. Getting transaction-level data at scale is not something that can be done manually.

Granular sustainability data allows businesses to ensure compliance, control carbon and cost exposure, safeguard product marketability, and strengthen supply chain transparency and resilience. Perhaps most important is the ability to embed sustainability into business performance and across all business functions. This final point is the key to unlocking sustainable business autonomy.

In the sustainability context, becoming an Autonomous Enterprise means that sustainability policies are executed automatically inside enterprise workflows. This includes connecting financial and sustainability data for trusted steering, automating disclosure and performance insights, and blocking non-compliant shipments. Ultimately, sustainability becomes a governing factor in enterprise decisions, as opposed to a reporting or compliance activity.

Enterprise autonomy entails gradual AI maturation:

• Intelligence: Faster visibility into reporting and materials compliance risks across the enterprise
• Optimization: Data-driven decisions that balance cost, risk, and sustainability impact
• Autonomy: Actions executed directly within operational workflows, eliminating manual coordination

The choices enterprises make now—how data is structured, how decisions are supported, and how sustainability is integrated—will determine whether they can safely scale automation later or whether complexity and risk increase as systems evolve.

With the Autonomous Enterprise, leaders can deliver sustainable outcomes at scale.

Why SAP?

AI needs three things to successfully run autonomously: business and process context, data connection and integration, and a reliable governance structure.

Generic models can read data, but without business context they cannot reason how a business actually runs. They see tables, not operations, and provide recommendations that may be commercially or operationally unviable. Without data that is integrated and connected across all business departments, AI has to perform in siloes, unaware of how sustainability decisions might impact financial targets, or how procurement decisions affect supply chain risk. SAP’s rich ERP data foundation ensures that enterprise AI has the full business picture, not just fragments of it.

Finally, AI that lacks governance and cannot be audited or controlled can be more harmful than helpful to a business. SAP’s more than five decades of business process expertise anchored in governance, risk, and compliance, mean that AI for enterprise deployment can be managed safely and reliably. Sustainability agents operate within defined parameters, ensuring that automation scales without sacrificing control or compliance.

This is the foundation that makes everything possible. Without it, an enterprise has AI experiments. With it, it has an operating model.

Sophia Mendelsohn is chief sustainability and commercial officer at SAP.
Gunther Rothermel is chief product officer of SAP Sustainability.

Procurement and finance leaders are facing a nearly impossible mandate. Cost control is no longer enough.

They are expected to manage risk, ensure compliance, and deliver strategic value, all while navigating talent shortages and increasing operational complexity. And most are doing it without the end-to-end visibility they need.

Workflows are disconnected, decision-making is reactive, and policies are inconsistently enforced. I have heard this from customers across every industry and, frankly, it is a problem that traditional approaches to procurement technology haven’t fully solved.

That’s what makes this moment different. At SAP Sapphire, we introduced the Autonomous Enterprise, a fundamental shift in how businesses operate, with AI assistants and agents powering end-to-end execution at scale, with governance built in. Critically, this isn’t just about adding AI features to existing tools. It is about moving from AI in applications to AI on applications—intelligence that works across your entire landscape, not just inside individual products.

Autonomous Spend Management: From concept to reality

Autonomous Spend Management is a core pillar of the Autonomous Enterprise vision, designed to address the fragmentation that holds procurement and finance teams back. By applying agentic AI across procurement, travel, expenses, and external workforce processes, we’re creating continuity where disconnection exists today—intelligent systems that orchestrate activities, connect context, and surface the right insights at the right moment.

What this means for the people doing the work is equally significant. When AI handles routine execution, decision-makers get time and clarity back. They can intervene earlier, with better information, and focus on more strategic work that actually moves the needle.

To bring this to life, we are introducing a new set of Joule Assistants, AI-powered teammates designed to support procurement and spend management across the full life cycle:

• Category Management Assistant: Analyzes spend patterns, delivers market intelligence, and helps build sharper category strategies
• Sourcing Assistant: Manages the entire sourcing life cycle, from drafting RFPs and bids to recommending negotiation strategies
• Supplier Management Assistant: Provides comprehensive oversight of the supply base, from intelligent classification to continuous multi-dimensional risk monitoring
• Contract Assistant: Streamlines contract authoring, flags renewal opportunities, and connects supplier selection through to contract execution
• Requisition Assistant: Guides users to the right buying channel, auto-fills fields, and uses advanced trade-off analyses to help maximize volume discounts
• Buying Assistant:Helps professional buyers identify spend leakage, surface optimal suppliers, and automate order consolidation
• Receiving Assistant: Auto-creates goods receipts and service entry sheets and guides users through quality tracking so nothing falls through the cracks
• Invoicing Assistant: Handles invoice capture, duplicate detection, and payment proposals so finance teams can close faster with fewer errors
• Services Procurement Assistant: Manages the full SOW life cycle from creation through compliance tracking
• Travel Assistant: Simplifies trip planning with pre-spend estimates, streamlined approvals, and built-in compliance guidance
• Expense Management Assistant: Automates expense reporting, capturing details, flagging errors, and keeping everything compliant

The Autonomous Spend Management capabilities run across our cloud ERP application portfolio, including SAP Cloud ERP Private, for end-to-end coverage across business processes and systems.

Why connected processes are critical

Connection is just as powerful as intelligence, and that conviction runs through everything we  announced this week. AI can only do so much if the underlying processes are still fragmented.

In next-gen SAP Ariba Buying, new Joule Agents support purchasing and policy management through a more intuitive, persona-driven experience, guiding users toward compliant, contract-linked options while improving catalog management and document traceability. Deeper integration with SAP S/4HANA Private Cloud Edition and SAP ERP Central Component means these capabilities work with existing ERP investments, not around them.

SAP Ariba Contracts now brings contract creation, approvals, and compliance tracking into a single unified workspace. AI-assisted drafting lets teams create contracts using natural language, while centralized visibility into terms, pricing, and key dates keeps data consistent and connected to downstream procurement processes.

We also introduced a new Joule Agent in SAP Ariba Intake Management to automate how procurement requests are captured and routed across SAP and non-SAP systems. And expanded supplier evaluation capabilities in SAP Ariba Supplier Lifecycle and Performance let teams segment performance data by geography, business unit, or category – with insights feeding directly into 360-degree supplier profiles to inform sourcing and procurement decisions.

Expanding visibility into services spend and supporting adoption

Nowhere is the need for connected processes more apparent than in asset-intensive industries. In oil and gas, mining, and utilities, external workers can make up 40% of the workforce, yet most organizations are still managing them through manual processes and disconnected systems. The risks are real: expired certifications, overpayments, and poor visibility into work billed versus work actually done.

New SAP Fieldglass capabilities address these challenges by bringing together the full contractor life cycle, from the moment a worker arrives on site through to final payment. Organizations can now automate time tracking, verify worker credentials and safety requirements before granting site access, maintain tighter controls over equipment, and dramatically reduce the manual effort involved in invoicing.

We’re also using AI to accelerate SOW creation by automatically recommending worker roles based on the SOW description and historical buyer data, which reduces manual setup and improves consistency from the start. And to support adoption, WalkMe Premium is now integrated with SAP Fieldglass and SAP Ariba, providing in-app guidance for tasks such as creating statements of work, approving timesheets, and hiring candidates.

The future of spend management

Autonomous Spend Management marks a fundamental shift from managing processes to delivering business outcomes. From chasing cost savings to actively shaping resilience, margin, and growth. From reacting to events to anticipating them.

The real strategic implication is this: Spend does not happen in isolation. Every contract and invoice has a downstream effect on financial performance. When those decisions are made in context—with AI connecting procurement, supply chain, and finance—the enterprise doesn’t just run more efficiently, it runs as one system.

That’s what we are building, and what we announced this week marks a significant step forward.

For more details on this week’s announcements, see the SAP Sapphire Innovation News Guide. For more details on the latest updates in travel and expense, please refer to the SAP Concur Fusion 2026 announcements.

Etosha Thurman is co-business lead and chief marketing officer for SAP Finance & Spend Management.

Supply chains play a central role in how businesses deliver for their customers and grow profitably. Every decision—from planning and sourcing through manufacturing, logistics, and service—has an impact on cost, service levels, and resilience.

While expectations for reliable, on-time delivery remain high, organizations are navigating faster‑changing demand, more complex global networks, and increasing pressure on cost and working capital. And they’re looking for ways to turn insight into action more quickly and consistently across the supply chain.

SAP has been helping organizations build more connected and intelligent supply chains for over 50 years. At SAP Connect in October, we introduced SAP Supply Chain Orchestration, establishing a foundation for detecting issues, coordinating responses, and connecting execution across complex supply networks.

The innovations announced this week at SAP Sapphire extend that vision further. By introducing a new set of AI-driven assistants and agents, we’re moving orchestration toward an autonomous operating model, where planning, manufacturing, logistics, and asset operations increasingly anticipate, coordinate, and resolve without manual intervention at every step.

AI grounded in real operations

AI delivers lasting value in supply chain management only when it is embedded where work actually happens. Autonomous agents do not operate independently of enterprise applications; they rely on deeply integrated processes and trusted data. Precision, compliance, and resilience depend on this foundation. Without it, AI does not scale or earn trust.

At SAP, the Autonomous Enterprise represents a vision for how organizations will run their businesses in the future: with insight, decision-making, and execution increasingly connected, while people remain firmly in control. Autonomous Supply Chain Management is a practical step toward that vision.

Autonomous Supply Chain Management reflects an evolution in how planning, execution, and operations work together. People define goals and priorities, assistants orchestrate activity across domains, and agents execute the work—all within governed, end‑to‑end processes.

At SAP Sapphire, we’re introducing Autonomous Supply Chain Management, enabled by new Joule Assistants and Industry AI scenarios that apply this model to daily operations across planning, manufacturing, logistics, engineering, and asset management. General availability will be phased throughout 2026, starting now.

Joule Assistants across the supply chain

Rather than disconnected AI tools, the following assistants will be embedded directly into core SAP supply chain applications, where deep process knowledge, semantically rich business data, and enterprise‑grade governance already exist.

Each will support a distinct area of responsibility while sharing context, data, and outcomes across the supply chain:

• Asset and Service Assistant: Changes how work gets detected and dispatched, turning signals and anomalies into action rather than queue items
• Business Network Assistant: Extends this coordination outward across suppliers, logistics providers, and service partners so execution doesn’t stall at the edges of the enterprise
• Logistics Assistant: Keeps warehouse and transportation execution moving as conditions change, coordinating agents rather than waiting for human handoffs at every step
• Manufacturing Assistant: Connects shop floor signals with broader operational context so teams can act on disruptions faster
• Planning Assistant: Helps planners stay ahead of exceptions and constraints without having to manually piece together signals from across the network
• Product Design Assistant: Helps engineering and manufacturing teams stay aligned as products evolve, surfacing the downstream implications of changes before they create rework or delays

From assistants to autonomous agents

In addition to these assistants, SAP is delivering more than 60 purpose‑built agents across supply chain processes. These agents are designed to sense events, analyze impact, and take guided action within defined business guardrails, helping coordinate execution while keeping people firmly in control.

In manufacturing, agents such as the Production Excellence Agent and Production Master Data Readiness Agent continuously monitor production, quality, and machine signals to detect issues early and keep routings and work instructions aligned with enterprise plans. In asset and service operations, the Asset Performance Alert Processing Agent and Technician Briefing Agent are designed to assess asset conditions, prioritize work, and increase first time fix rates, helping reduce downtime and improve responsiveness.

Beyond supply chain-specific scenarios, these assistants and agents will also extend into SAP’s cloud ERP environment, including SAP Cloud ERP Private, supporting SAP’s broader Autonomous Enterprise strategy. General availability will be phased through 2026, starting now.

Building on this foundation, SAP Industry AI adds industry-specific intelligence that complements the core assistants. Rather than standalone features, Industry AI brings together purpose-built agents, process expertise, and business data to drive measurable outcomes. This value-led approach helps organizations apply AI in ways that reflect regulated requirements, complex production models, and asset-intensive operations – accelerating information across entire industry value chains.

People remain responsible for strategy, oversight, and the decisions that require judgement. What changes is how consistently high-volume, time-sensitive coordination happens across the supply chain.

Where this shows up in practice

The Autonomous Enterprise is our vision, and the innovations we’ve announced at SAP Sapphire are concrete steps that customers can build on within current SAP environments. They are focused on addressing value leakage caused by fragmented handoffs, delayed decisions, and manual work.

In planning, new SAP Integrated Business Planning capabilities will connect commercial decisions directly with supply planning, linking promotion and pricing plans to inventory and replenishment to reduce stockouts, minimize write-offs, and improve planning consistently. New capabilities include vendor-managed inventory, transportation load building, deployment optimization, and co- and by-product planning.

In manufacturing and engineering, updates to SAP Digital Manufacturing will strengthen compliance and traceability in regulated environments. AI capabilities in the engineering-to-manufacturing handover will help teams understand the downstream impact of design changes before they reach the shop floor, surfacing implications for bills of materials, routings, lead times, and costs directly in context.

In logistics, new Joule Agents will support execution-level decisions across warehouse and transportation operations, validating inbound receipts, aligning labor with real workload, and helping organizations respond faster to shifting constraints. Predictive labor planning in SAP Extended Warehouse Management will allow operations teams to anticipate workforce needs rather than react to gaps.

In asset and service management, a new SAP Field Service and Asset Management solution will bring planning, scheduling, dispatching, and field execution together in a single experience, connected to SAP Cloud ERP so work execution, parts usage, and costs stay aligned across service, operations, and finance.

These capabilities will become available in phases through 2026, aligning with customers’ existing SAP landscapes. Together, they represent incremental but meaningful progress toward more connected, automated, and resilient supply chain operations.

The path forward

Supply chains don’t become autonomous overnight. This evolution happens workflow by workflow, expanding automation where it delivers real value, while keeping people firmly in control. As AI becomes embedded in execution, supply chain teams spend less time monitoring and firefighting, and more time shaping decisions, managing trade-offs, and building resilience.

This shift is bigger than any single organization. In a new white paper, Navigating the New Supply Chain Paradigm, we explore how leading organizations are moving beyond isolated AI pilots toward AI embedded across end-to-end supply chain processes, and what it takes to get there. This article draws on multiple sources, including analytical support from McKinsey & Company.

That’s the direction we are moving, from reacting toward supply chains that anticipate, absorb, and adapt. What we’re introducing at SAP Sapphire reflects that commitment.For more details on all announcements made this week, please refer to the SAP Sapphire Innovation News Guide.

Dominik Metzger is president and chief product officer of SAP Supply Chain Management.

Finance leaders are under mounting pressure to make faster, smarter decisions, but the environments they operate in no longer move in predictable cycles.

Market volatility, liquidity pressures, and currency fluctuations are exposing the limits of traditional planning models built around fixed timelines and after-the-fact analysis. To keep pace, finance teams need the ability to continuously sense change, understand its impact, and steer performance with confidence.

The challenge is that many organizations are still planning with processes designed for a different era. Siloed data, manual workflows, and episodic planning cycles make real-time decision-making difficult, limiting visibility across the entire business. IDC research reinforces the urgency: 72% of organizations still find financial planning, budgeting, and forecasting too time-consuming.* In a volatile environment, that lag translates directly into slower responses to risk, missed opportunities, and diminished confidence in the decisions that shape performance.

This is why finance needs a new operating model, one that moves beyond periodic exercises and toward continuous steering. At SAP Sapphire, we are introducing SAP Enterprise Planning, a new flagship offering designed to close the gap between insight and action, enabling planning to continuously drive business performance.

The shift from periodic planning to continuous steering

Traditional financial planning has always provided structure, but too often that structure comes at the expense of agility. Planning occurs in fixed windows. Teams work from historical snapshots, static assumptions, and fragmented inputs. By the time a variance is understood or a scenario is modeled, the business may already be operating in a fundamentally different environment.

SAP Enterprise Planning is designed to move organizations beyond these constraints through a continuous approach to planning and execution built on speed, confidence, and control. Finance teams gain the ability to detect signals as they emerge, evaluate constraints in real time, and connect plans directly to execution.

This Sense-Reason-Act model represents a fundamental shift in how planning operates. Rather than waiting for a planning cycle to surface issues, agents continuously monitor for material changes and respond through guided, explainable decisions embedded in everyday processes. At the same time, SAP Analytics Cloud continues to support the iterative Plan-Do-Check-Act cycles that finance teams rely on for strategic and tactical planning across mid- to long-term horizons, including model creation, forecasting, variance analysis, and scenario simulation. Together, these two approaches create a planning ecosystem that is both responsive in the moment and disciplined over time.

The solution embeds Joule Agents directly into the planning process, helping connect strategy to operations in real time. Agents can interpret internal and external data signals, model their impact on KPIs, simulate scenarios, recommend actions, and orchestrate planning workflows with built-in governance and explainability. Planning shifts from a single point in time to continuous workflows. When decisions are made, Joule Agents can update plans to support downstream execution. General availability is planned for Q3 2026.

Built on SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP Business Data Cloud, these capabilities form a more connected, intelligent planning ecosystem that enables organizations to act decisively and with full transparency.

Why governed data and connected planning matter

Continuous planning is only as reliable as the data it is built on. Without a unified data foundation, even the most advanced analytics cannot produce trustworthy outcomes. As automation increases, this challenge becomes more acute: decisions execute faster, but errors can scale just as quickly.

That is why our approach is not AI in isolation. SAP Enterprise Planning is built using SAP Business Data Cloud data products and the SAP Analytics Cloud solution. SAP Analytics Cloud remains the foundation for strategic and tactical planning cycles, while SAP Business Data Cloud provides the governed data foundation underpinning the entire ecosystem. This helps ensure compliance, auditability, and enterprise-wide trust, which becomes even more critical as AI-driven automation expands.

Continuous planning in practice

What makes this vision tangible is how it shows up in real financial workflows. By continuously monitoring market signals and financial positions, these solutions help organizations reduce the lag between insight and action, improving both speed and decision quality. This is the Sense-Reason-Act model at work: sensing shifts in currency markets, reasoning through the impact on cash positions, and acting through guided decisions that keep the business aligned with its financial objectives.

More broadly, the Autonomous Finance domain brings together Joule Assistants and Joule Agents to provide CFOs and finance organizations with more insight, control, and support across their operations. Beyond planning, specialized Joule Assistants coordinate multiple agents to support key finance processes including financial closing, billing, governance, and tax and compliance. The result is a finance function where intelligence is embedded across the full operational scope, not confined to a single workflow.

Because these agents are delivered within SAP’s planning and finance solutions, they carry a native understanding of enterprise data, planning semantics, and mission-critical business processes. The goal is not to replace finance expertise, but to augment it. This gives teams the foresight needed to navigate complexity with greater confidence.

The Autonomous Finance capabilities run across our cloud ERP application portfolio, including SAP Cloud ERP Private, for end-to-end coverage across business processes and systems.

The future of finance is continuous

The future of finance will be defined by the ability to connect data, processes, and decisions across the enterprise in a continuous loop. Organizations that can sense change as it happens, reason through its impact using trusted and governed data, and act by connecting plans back to execution will be best positioned to navigate volatility with the agility and discipline that modern finance demands.

With SAP Enterprise Planning, organizations can move beyond static planning cycles and toward a more intelligent, continuous approach to steering performance.

For more details, refer to the SAP Sapphire Innovation News Guide and the Financial Planning and Analysis area of sap.com.

Lawrence Martin is chief product officer and head of Public Cloud Engineering at SAP.
David Imbert is head of Finance Product Marketing at SAP.

*IDC Spotlight, sponsored by SAP, The Rise of Dynamic Planning in the Agentic AI Era, #US54493826, April 2026