Gartner predicts that by 2028, at least 15% of day-to-day work decisions will be made autonomously through agentic AI—up from effectively zero today—and that 33% of enterprise software applications will embed agentic AI capabilities.
Demand for professionals who can build, govern, and orchestrate these agents is rising faster than supply, making graduates with hands-on agent-building experience among the most sought-after profiles in today’s job market.
This year at SAP Sapphire, SAP laid out its vision for the Autonomous Enterprise, where AI agents manage and execute business processes end to end. For universities, this raises an immediate question: How do graduates get ready for a world where AI agents are part of daily operations?
SAP is now providing new no-cost offerings and resources for universities that give lecturers and students hands-on access to AI agent building, process management, and enterprise architecture tools. The goal is to help higher education keep pace with the rapid adoption of agentic AI in industry and prepare graduates for a changing job market.
Preparing the next generation of AI agent builders
SAP has put together a new set of offerings and resources that help universities embed agentic AI-related concepts and technology into their teaching hands-on. Three offerings, each covering a different angle of agentic AI, are now accessible at no cost for academic lecturers and their students:
- SAP Signavio for lecturers and students: Before building an agent, the process it will operate in must be understood. SAP Signavio Process Transformation Suite gives lecturers and their students access to process mining, modeling, and process transformation capabilities. They can model and analyze existing processes, spot inefficiencies, and design improved workflows that include AI agents. Additionally, students and lecturers can now experience process modeling with SAP Signavio Process Modeler as part of SAP Learning Hub, student edition.
- SAP LeanIX for lecturers: For students to understand where agents sit within an organization’s IT landscape, this is the tool. Newly available at no cost for academic lecturers via SAP Learning Hub, student edition, SAP LeanIX lets students model enterprise architectures and reason about what changes when introducing AI agents into an existing system landscape.
- Starter resources for agent building: Lecturers and their students can access an agent-building environment from SAP and leverage various enablement resources. These allow students to explore configuring and building an AI agent, either in a guided demo experience or in a live system hands-on.
What makes this especially valuable is how the pieces connect. Students can explore different components of agentic AI hands-on using SAP solutions. They learn that building an agent is only part of the job. Understanding process context, architectural and governance implications is equally important.
Collaboration with educational institutions globally
SAP will also collaborate intensively on embedding agentic AI into teaching with lecturers from more than 10 universities globally, including:
- Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Hungary
- Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary
- Hasso Plattner Institute, Germany
- HEC Montréal, Canada
- Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany
- National University of Singapore Business Analytics Centre, Singapore
- TEC de Monterrey, Mexico
- Technical University of Munich, Germany
- Tongji University, China
- Technical University of Dresden, Germany
- University of California, Irvine, U.S.
The institutions will get exclusive early access to SAP’s latest agent building platform capabilities, benefit from agent building deep dives for students with SAP experts, and from the opportunity to articulate academic needs with regards to teaching agentic AI related concepts hands-on to SAP.
“We want students to work with the same tools and scenarios that companies are using right now,” Dr. Katharina Schaefer, head of Academic Partnerships at SAP, said. “By giving lecturers free access to our agent-building resources, we make it easy for them to bring that reality into their courses. Students who build AI agents on real enterprise processes during their studies will have a head start when they enter the job market.”
For faculty, the practical element is what counts. Students do not just read about AI agents in a textbook. They build them on real systems with real constraints.
“What excited me is that students get to work with enterprise-grade tools, thanks to this new platform,” said Prof. Jesús Aguilar-Gonzalez, TEC de Monterrey. “Students from our School of Engineering & Sciences build agents connected to real business processes and have to think about architecture and governance. That is much closer to what they will face in their first job than any textbook exercise.”
What sets this apart is its enterprise context: Agentic AI is taught in connection with business processes and the system landscape that supports them, so students learn how AI fits into real operations rather than experimenting in isolation.
Building the workforce of the future
As part of the SAP University Alliances program, SAP has been partnering with more than 2,800 educational institutions for decades to enable students to learn, research, and innovate with business applications and technology. With these offerings, SAP supports students in developing sought-after SAP skills, preparing them for job opportunities worldwide.
Ready to bring agentic AI into your classroom? Visit the SAP University Alliances page on sap.com or reach out via universityalliances@sap.com to get started.
