It’s wrap on NRF, and it is no surprise that customer engagement and artificial intelligence (AI) were top of mind for most retailers. This furthers SAP’s commitment to delivering compelling innovation that empowers our customers to deliver the best customer experience.

We are leaving the biggest retail event of the year with so much excitement for what’s to come for the SAP Customer Experience portfolio this year. Here’s a look into SAP CX innovations for 2025.

Data-Driven Loyalty Management Solution

We announced a new loyalty management solution that helps brands earn the loyalty of their customers using experiential journeys and personalized, real-time offers.

Creating loyalty is key to profitable growth; however, lasting loyalty has been illusive to many brands. According to the SAP Emarsys Customer Loyalty Index, there are diverse motivations among consumers that drive brand loyalty. Forty-percent credit their loyalty to long-standing reputations, 30 percent say brand consistency is what brings them back, and 22 percent say it’s because of a brands iconic status. Yet, despite this loyalty, only 17 percent of consumers feel “truly valued,” leaving the majority wanting more.

Helping consumers feel truly valued is no small feat. Traditional reward redemption methods focus only on customers who actively join loyalty programs, and that is no longer enough. Brands are innovating loyalty programs to create a sense of nostalgia, community, and devotion that delivers a memorable experience through personalized offers across the entire life cycle and on every channel.

The new loyalty solution from SAP aims to equip organizations with experiential journeys and personalized, real-time offers to help earn customer loyalty through integration with the SAP Commerce Cloud, SAP Service Cloud, SAP Emarsys and SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, retail, fashion, and vertical business solutions. Key features that enable this are:

• Loyalty profiles that connect every shopper with a cloud-based loyalty wallet, facilitating targeted and personalized offers, entitlements, and real-time basket analysis
• Multi-brand loyalty management, as well as shared loyalty programs with partners that centralize loyalty programs across regions and markets, enabling combined brand programs for gaining market share
• A single place for omnichannel promotion planning with real-time redemption to deliver any type of offer, digital payment, and gifting to all customers on any channel
• Loyalty journey planning that delivers experiential omnichannel journeys tailored to customer needs through personalized commerce, marketing, service, and retail interactions
• Quantifiable metrics that track promotion performance and loyalty-related liabilities, linking to financial systems to measure ROI, and enable settlements with the member and partner brands

We are currently recruiting customers for a lighthouse program, and interested customers can learn more by contacting Yaron Gur-Ari. The solution is expected to be available in the second half of 2025.

Artificial Intelligence Makes Shopping Frictionless

We are also launching an AI shopping assistant to make e-commerce search and discovery a lot easier for customers.

Search abandonment is a real challenge. According to a 2023 Google research report, retailers face more than a $2 trillion loss when shoppers cannot find what they are looking for on a retailer’s website. And to add insult to injury, search challenges also serve a huge blow to customer loyalty, with 78 percent of consumers viewing brands differently and 82 percent of consumers saying that they would avoid websites where they’ve experienced search difficulties.

With the AI shopping assistant, users can now deliver that white-glove experience to their customers online. For industrial buyers, it acts as a technical specialist — helping source specific replacement parts, comparing complex specifications, and suggesting compatible components. For retail customers, it serves as a personal shopper — understanding style preferences, recommending complementary accessories, and answering detailed product questions.

The assistant seamlessly integrates with SAP Commerce Cloud through a flexible API, allowing users to easily plug it into new or existing storefront while maintaining the brand experience. With built-in security and support for multiple languages, it is designed to deliver sophisticated product discovery at scale.

The AI shopping assistant, as part of the SAP CX AI Toolkit, is available for early access now and will be generally available in March of 2025 for SAP Commerce Cloud customers.

Effortless Payment Service Integration

We previously announced a new composable payment solution, SAP Commerce Cloud, open payment framework, that helps retailers continue to scale and remain agile as new payment options gain popularity.

Open payment framework is a no-code, low-code framework that gives retailers a low-cost, adaptive, and agile payments system that can best fit their business and customer needs without the need to build out integrations on their own. Extensible and headless, the framework ensures that the front and back ends are decoupled and operate independently, catering to a wide range of requirements across channels and allowing customers to have the freedom to pick their preferred payment methods. It covers common payment needs and end-to-end payment processes across authorization, capture, refunds, and re-authorization as well as automatic updates with security and compliance standards. Open payment framework is natively integrated with SAP Commerce Cloud.

Open payment framework is planned for general availability on January 22, 2025. Customers can sign up for SAP Early Adopter Care program here.

Intelligent Search Service Makes Product Discovery Easier

The intelligent search service is a modern, multi-tenant SaaS solution designed to deliver seamless, AI-powered search experiences for both shoppers and business users. Key benefits that empower end-to-end commerce journeys are:

• Effortless product discovery for shoppers on the storefront with natural, intuitive search capabilities, enhanced by AI-driven verbatims, flexible indexing, and intelligent scoring. Features like smart word suggestions and personalized recommendations help showcase the most relevant products, improving navigation and driving higher satisfaction.
• Search operation management with ease for business users through back-office processes that enable data-driven merchandising strategies, powered by integration with intelligent selling services. This ensures measurable impact and optimization of search experiences.

By combining modern technology with AI, the intelligent search service maximizes conversion rates and product views, delivering a natural and intuitive shopping experience. It helps retailers not only enhance customer satisfaction but also build long-term loyalty and lifetime value.

The service is planned for general availability on January 22, 2025. Customers can sign up for SAP Early Adopter Care program here.

At SAP, we are committed to empowering businesses to deliver exceptional customer experience while driving profitable growth. By leveraging connected, insightful, and adaptive technology solutions, we help our customers put their customers at the center of their operations to build loyalty, foster innovation, and unlock new opportunities for success.

To learn more about SAP CX, visit sap.com/cx.

Balaji Balasubramanian is senior vice president and global head of Commerce and Industry Cloud at SAP.

A topic that has come up many times at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos over recent years is the increasing fragmentation of our world — within societies and between nations. But, amid this division and disagreement, there is one hope that many still share: the belief that artificial intelligence (AI) will lead to significant progress across the globe.

From my work at a company that pioneers AI in business processes, I hold this hope too: AI has the potential to stimulate growth and make companies more productive. It can make economies more resilient by helping businesses navigate disruptions, whether through global trade crises, natural disasters, or regional conflicts.

AI can also play a critical role in our ability to achieve our sustainability goals, tackle climate change, and mitigate its impact. While many recognize AI’s positive potential, the growing fragmentation of our world greatly reduces our ability to take full advantage of the opportunities AI presents.

AI can only be as good as the data it can access and work with. The more restrictions, limitations, and political borders we impose on it, the less positive impact AI can have in our countries and companies. AI can’t thrive in a fragmented world. This is what I call the AI progress challenge.

Tackling the AI Progress Challenge, Step by Step

Finding solutions to something as vast and as complex as global fragmentation requires us to divide the problem into smaller, individual challenges that are easier to overcome. How can we make AI a stronger tool for progress? How can we navigate the AI progress challenge step by step?

1. Begin at company-level

It starts on our doorsteps — at the level of the individual company. Cloud migration is an integral first step. The cloud makes data accessible for AI, systematically and comprehensively, and cloud solutions can easily — even automatically — be kept up to date with the latest AI innovations. What is more, integrated cloud software offers a standardized environment for data and processes. It makes it easier for companies to keep their data structured, clean, and coherent across the company — and consequently easier for AI applications to use.

2. Create an industrial ecosystem

The second step toward maximizing the potential of AI is to bring individual companies together in an industrial ecosystem. To become more productive, resilient, and sustainable, companies need to exchange information with suppliers — sometimes thousands of them — as well as with their clients and innovation partners. In the age of business AI, the need to build intelligent business networks is more important than ever. The more broadly and widely data can be shared between companies, the better and more impactful AI outcomes can be. The whole ecosystem profits in terms of added competitiveness and innovation power.

3. Build international frameworks

The third step is to build international frameworks that allow AI innovation to thrive in a responsible way. Governments and regulators can reduce unnecessary barriers to the exchange of data within countries and between countries. In cooperation with industry, public actors can also work towards aligning and harmonizing technological regulations wherever possible, especially between the key economic powers of North America, China, and Europe.

At the same time, we must build trust. Lack of trust is perhaps the greatest driver of global fragmentation — and the biggest obstacle to collaboration. By joining forces, international companies can agree on common rules for data usage, data privacy, and responsible, ethical AI. Such “confederations of trust” encourage more frequent data sharing.

Putting the AI Puzzle Together

The cloud, business networks, and a more harmonized global environment based on trust; each of these steps reduces fragmentation and increases federation. And, each of these steps can help the organizations involved reap much greater benefits from AI.

It’s like putting together a 10,000-piece puzzle. It’s not easy to start with and it’s not something that can be accomplished in one go, but if we begin by putting a handful of pieces into place, the big picture gradually emerges. As the degree of federation increases, progress accelerates.

It’s on us to put the AI puzzle together and reduce fragmentation, one step at a time. This is how we maximize the potential of AI — not just for some, but for many.

Christian Klein is CEO of SAP SE.

This piece originally appeared on the World Economic Forum website.

The technology space—and the business world—are changing rapidly. The race to explore and capitalize on AI’s potential is accelerating that change even more. However, businesses can only realize AI innovations if they transition from on-premise systems to the cloud to leverage the unparalleled speed and agility they offer.

SAP’s vibrant ecosystem of over 25,000 partners and SAP PartnerEdge open ecosystem members helps ensure customers are supported and thriving across the entire customer journey. These trusted partners share SAP’s vision of helping companies bring our their best and can be the catalyst to true business transformation. Partners apply their deep technical expertise and business experience to build on, sell, service, and run SAP’s leading cloud ERP and AI solutions.

Recognizing this and the need to empower partners to set the right foundation for the cloud, SAP is revamping SAP PartnerEdge—its flagship, global program to engage with partners, no matter their route to market. The program, now 100% cloud-focused, is designed to help recognize and elevate partners that are ready to support customers in the cloud-powered AI economy.

A Closer Look at the Changes Coming in 2025

Prioritizing partners that are in lockstep with SAP’s vision to drive business growth and customer value, we are focusing on the following key pillars for the SAP PartnerEdge program in 2025:

• Aligning with SAP’s cloud vision: We’ve redesigned the program with elements that support and incentivize partners to reflect SAP’s strategic cloud focus. This helps differentiate partners that are fully aligned with SAP’s direction.
• Deepening SAP expertise: Under the new framework, expertise plays an even stronger role in determining partner levels. Competencies and specializations—focused on cloud solutions from SAP—serve as benchmarks of a partner’s maturity and credibility. These also signal to customers that they can trust a partner’s expertise in areas most critical to their business.
• Championing AI adoption: To meet the AI moment, partners are further motivated to innovate on tools that can lower the bar to entry for customers to leverage AI technologies. From no-code simplicity to advanced customization, partners are encouraged to build on SAP’s embedded AI portfolio and create tailored solutions that meet our customers’ unique needs.
• Committing to customer value: Long-term success for our customers is our top priority—and it holds true weight in our partner program as well. By prioritizing solution adoption-led growth, aligning delivery practices to SAP’s cloud methodologies, and delivering measurable outcomes, partners can create lasting value throughout the customer lifecycle, ultimately propelling their partnership too.

An Approach Endorsed by Industry Experts

These changes to the SAP PartnerEdge program signal our deepened commitment to the cloud, AI innovations, and, most importantly, our customers and their success. Industry experts agree, highlighting the drivers behind this transformation and SAP’s proactive approach:

“The convergence of cloud and artificial intelligence is ushering in a new era of business innovation,” said Dave McCarthy, research vice president, Cloud and Edge Services at IDC. “This synergy is driving transformative advancements across industries.”

“SAP understands this shift and is actively taking steps to ensure its partner ecosystem is aligned and paving the path for businesses to leverage breakthrough innovations,” added Steve White, program vice president, Channels and Alliances at IDC.

Supporting Customers to Find Their Best-Fit Partner

Under our new program framework, SAP and partners will be able to experience increased synergy as they move forward focused on the cloud and AI. However, customers will see the greatest benefits. While SAP PartnerEdge is designed for partners, its goal is to ultimately create a robust ecosystem that has the experience, knowledge, and specialization to address the unique needs of all of our customers and create a blueprint for long-term success.

For businesses ready to find their best-fit partner, SAP Partner Finder can provide easy search functionality to quickly find partners that match their industry, line of business, or size. It also showcases each partner’s level, competencies, and unique qualifications, such as the GROW with SAP partner designation. 

For customers to find success in the AI-driven era—and to thrive with the pace of innovation it brings—partnerships are more crucial than ever. By combining partner expertise with the power of SAP’s robust portfolio of cloud solutions, AI technologies, and data capabilities, customers can capitalize on this exciting moment as they transform their business.

SAP encourages businesses to explore our ecosystem of partners today and take the next step towards business transformation, greater competitiveness, and growth.

Karl Fahrbach is chief partner officer at SAP.

WALLDORF — SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) will release its results for the fourth quarter of 2024 and 2024 year-end results on Tuesday, January 28.

SAP CEO Christian Klein and CFO Dominik Asam will host a press conference to present fourth quarter financial figures and 2024 year-end results, as well as an outlook on the current financial year.

Media representatives are invited to join in person or participate in the press conference via Webcast at 10:00 a.m. CET/4:00 a.m. ET, accessible at broadcast.sap.com/go/pc.

In an era where artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly displacing and disrupting employee skill sets, it’s imperative to help current – and future – employees bridge the gap between the skills that AI demands and the skills they currently have. While corporations focus on reskilling their current workforces, educators around the world are hard at work developing and delivering courses to equip today’s students with the skills required to thrive in a world increasingly defined and driven by AI.

A recent World Economic Forum survey reported that cognitive skills, such as creative thinking, analytical thinking, and technology literacy, a type of critical thinking skill, are forecast to be the most sought-after employee skills by 2027.

Collaboration between academia and industry is essential to deliver these skills at speed to students. That’s why the SAP University Alliances program has been forging partnerships with educational institutions for 25 years, with more than 2,800 institutions currently working with SAP to educate tomorrow’s talent with SAP skills.

One of these partners is HEC Montréal, a prestigious, internationally recognized business school with a long history of creating innovative learning approaches to equip students with SAP skills.

Two decades ago, HEC Montréal pioneered ERPsim, a revolutionary and hugely successful educational tool immersing students in a real-life business scenario within SAP. Today, an estimated 30,000 students a year learn with ERPsim.

In an interview, Professor Pierre-Majorique Léger of HEC Montréal talked about the latest collaboration between HEC Montréal and SAP: Business Builders, the next generation of SAP gamified learning.

Business Builders: Game On with SAP Analytics Cloud

Business Builders is a gamified learning tool that can develop STEM skills and helps students sharpen their analytical, critical, and creative thinking skills using the SAP Analytics Cloud solution.

Professor Léger says educators are caught up in the generative AI tsunami and need to “rethink a new pedagogical approach for students to develop data analytics and data literacy skills while at the same time recognizing that ChatGPT, for example, makes it super easy for students to circumvent doing the tasks themselves.”

Business Builders is one solution to that problem.

The game can be played either face-to-face or in virtual teaching sessions, either synchronously in a single session or over several sessions.

Students find themselves in one of three scenarios in a fast-paced, competitive game with interactive, realistic learning scenarios. There is no chance of resorting to ChatGPT or a similar AI tool to win. Instead, students must demonstrate data-driven decision-making skills and apply visualization techniques to make informed decisions.

In each game, students take on roles such as marketing or product researcher, financial analyst, or supply chain analyst. Each game has multiple stages, with subsequent stages demanding greater skills and knowledge.

The stages comprise 10 business questions targeting different levels of skills and knowledge. The business questions are designed for students with little or no data analytics skills as well as those with more advanced data visualization and manipulation skills.

As part of the game, students use SAP Analytics Cloud to visually analyze the data and identify the best graphical representations to answer the questions.

Real-Life Problems with Realistic Data

The game uses vast synthetic data sets to make the business decision-making process as authentic as possible. “The notion of synthetic data is important,” Professor Léger explains, “because sometimes reality is too complex to bring into the classroom and does not serve the pedagogical process. Based on experience with ERPsim, creating a realistic synthetic data set that is as close as possible to reality is the best way to go.”

Business Builders currently offers three game scenarios offering a diverse range of real-life problems that students can solve using SAP Analytics Cloud: environmental, social, and governance; supply chain resilience; and international expansion.

According to HEC Montréal, the most-played scenario to date is supply chain resilience. This scenario involves a real-life problem where the Panama Canal gets shut down due to climate change, affecting the shipment of holiday gifts from Southeast Asia to the United States. Students are tasked with deciding how to reroute the containers and prioritize products to minimize the impact of this event.

A Win-Win for Students, Educators, and Employers

“It is the challenge of our generation of professors faced with generative AI to come up with a novel way to teach students about data analytics,” Professor Léger says. “We have found a way of using gamification to engage students in leveraging what they know about analytics and mathematics to become business builders. Using data to get insights and solving problems on the best technology that exists – SAP Analytics Cloud. And the best thing of all, it’s free for lecturers and their students around the world.”

To guide students through the game scenario questions and help optimize the learning experience, educators have access to tailor-made training materials. Instead of taking a hit-and-miss approach with the data and platform features, these tailor-made training materials help lecturers deepen the learning experience. Students can understand how insights are uncovered and how to make informed business decisions based on analysis of data sets and data visualizations.

SAP has also created a handbook about the basic concepts of data visualization and storytelling in SAP Analytics Cloud. Available in a slide-deck format, educators can refer to the theoretical aspects while students are getting hands-on practical experience in SAP Analytics Cloud.

Since its launch in July 2024, more than 300 educational institutions have registered for access to the Business Builders game and an anticipated 2,500 students will use SAP Analytics Cloud to compete with their peers in the game by the end 2024.

With technology accelerating at an ever-increasing speed, the good news is that educators can register and get up and running with Business Builders free of charge in a just matter of days. Find out how on the Business Builders website.

The devastating COVID-19 pandemic exposed some of society’s most precarious fault lines, like in our healthcare systems, supply chains, and social support systems. People who once felt secure – those with stable jobs, access to food, and reliable safety nets – suddenly faced the harsh reality of vulnerability.

Once perceived as a distant issue, food insecurity became a lived experience for millions as economic instability, layoffs, and shortages spiraled out of control. Even in the most affluent countries, the cracks became visible. In March 2020, a former refugee, Amine Diare-Conde, watched as social service agencies and food banks in his adoptive country of Switzerland were shuttered, risking enormous food waste and adding to the 745,000 people already living below the poverty line in one of the world’s most prosperous nations.

Meanwhile, an unprecedented lockdown created drastic shifts in consumer demand, and surplus food and other necessities accumulated in warehouses while families went hungry, amplifying another existing crisis: food waste. Millions of tons of food are lost annually in Switzerland alone, and food waste worldwide accounts for a quarter of the environmental impact of the entire food system.                                

As the pandemic wore on, Diare-Conde saw an opportunity to tackle two urgent challenges simultaneously – feeding people in need and reducing food waste. He founded Essen für Alle (EfA), an entirely volunteer-run non-governmental organization (NGO) dedicated to eradicating hunger in Switzerland by redistributing surplus food to anyone who needs it. Essen für Alle means “food for all.”

The Right Partners, Across Generations, at the Right Time

Diare-Conde found an unlikely IT lead in then-thirteen-year-old Matthias Beeler, who coded the software that got EfA up and running, collecting and distributing food at its first location in Zurich. As the organization continued to grow, Beeler’s heroic, homegrown solution was struggling to keep up with increasingly complex logistics – coordinating the shifts of hundreds of volunteer workers, tracking the intake and distribution of thousands of pounds of food and other supplies, and keeping secure records – especially, Diare-Conde explained, since EfA’s IT lead was often otherwise occupied with school and homework.

EfA needed a secure, scalable, user-friendly solution that would help maximize the organization’s resources and supplies and, therefore, impact. Enter Keywan Nadjmabadi, who brought Diare-Conde a possible solution: perhaps Nadjmabadi’s employer could sponsor the organization’s new software and build EfA a cloud-based technology foundation. Nadjmabadi’s employer? SAP Switzerland. Diare-Conde was quickly convinced. SAP jumped on board, and within five months EfA’s new software, created using SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP), went live.

Streamlining Aid, Maximizing Reach

In the short time since, EfA’s user-friendly, cloud-based, mobile-optimized solution has streamlined food distribution and volunteer management – enabling the distribution of around 900 tons of food and the management of 10,000 volunteer shifts – while offering 360-degree visibility for planning and oversight and providing advanced analytics to enable further process innovation and optimization.

Of particular importance to EfA’s clients were the new solution’s stringent protocols for safeguarding sensitive personal data. “Many clients come to us asking if we can guarantee that [their] details will be kept securely, and I can say we work with SAP so we have everything we need to guarantee secure data handling,” Diare-Conde said.

By leveraging the SAP BTP AI-enabled business optical character recognition (OCR) capability, new clients experience a seamless registration process with a passport scanner that securely captures their personal information, while returning clients benefit from a smooth and efficient check-in experience.

The scalable, cloud-based SAP BTP solution that runs on a database as a service means that EfA’s technology solutions can quickly and efficiently evolve with the organization. “We are constantly working on enhancements and improvements to the existing solution,” Nadjmabadi said. SAP BTP was instrumental in integrating and connecting the entire EfA landscape.

For now, every Saturday, volunteers from a database that has grown to 1,000 members distribute 20 tons of food to 2,000 people at up to five locations across Switzerland. And, Beeler explained, EfA’s impact is even more significant than these numbers suggest because some recipients are collecting food for an entire family, meaning that the organization’s dedicated volunteers serve as many as 10,000 people each week.

A Beacon of Hope

Unfortunately, demand for EfA’s services will only be increasing. In 2023, 30,223 refugees applied for asylum in Switzerland, up 20% from 2022. Diare-Conde plans to keep pace: “We will cover almost all of Switzerland soon.” And the NGO isn’t stopping there – the organization is currently exploring a partnership with a prominent German food bank.

But given that food waste is estimated to account for 8% to 10% of global greenhouse gases, EfA’s impact is already reverberating beyond Switzerland’s borders by directing thousands of tons of food that might otherwise be wasted onto the plates of people in need and by blazing a bold trail that others may follow.

Technology Serving People

The human side of technology is about ensuring that technology serves people, not vice versa. Known for his thought leadership in intelligent automation and digital transformation, Pascal Bornet said: “It’s about designing and implementing technology with empathy, understanding how it impacts individuals and society. Doing so enables a future where innovation benefits everyone – ethically, inclusively, and sustainably.”

The Full Episode

Learn more about how Essen für Alle is feeding Switzerland and tackling food waste by the ton:

• Thought leadership podcast: Essen für Alle IT Leads Beeler and Nadjmabadi and AI and Automation Expert Bornet sat down with Thulium CEO Tamara McCleary to discuss how technology can be of service to humanity.
• Practitioners’ video: Diare-Conde, founder of Essen für Alle, shares how a talented teen equipped with tenacity and technology created a solution that reduces food insecurity and waste at the same time.

Explore more success stories of customers leveraging SAP BTP to solve a problem innovatively:

• Brigada Carcarae: Through geo-referencing and image records, Brigada Carcarae modernized its operations and work with real-time data for monitoring and analysis. Learn how SAP helped Brigada Carcarae achieve its goals of preventing forest fires, salvaging and reestablishing apiaries, and reviving and replanting forests.
• Canton of Zurich: Learn how the Canton of Zurich expedited compensation processing and payments during COVID-19 using SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation.

For the full Essen für Alle episode and the on-demand Better Together: Customer Conversations series, visit sap.com/btp.

Timo Elliott is VP and global innovation advocate for SAP BTP at SAP.

In September 2024, SAP celebrated the first anniversary of Joule, our generative AI copilot. Over the past year, Joule has rapidly evolved, supporting business processes across customer experience, procurement, human resources, and more. Today, we are thrilled to announce that Joule is expanding its capabilities even further – it is now available in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition and supply chain management applications.

This marks a significant step in transforming how businesses operate by simplifying everyday tasks and making interactions more efficient and intelligent.

Starting today, you can use Joule to help optimize your interactions with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, the SAP Integrated Business Planning for Supply Chain solution, and SAP’s product data management solutions. Additionally, SAP Asset Performance Management customers are invited to explore early access to Joule through the SAP Early Adopter Care program.

Joule in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition: A Transformative Experience

Joule Is Now Available in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition

Joule is now seamlessly integrated in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition as part of the November 2024 release after being in early adoption since February this year. This isn’t just another tool – it is a transformative experience designed to help address the everyday challenges customers face. This integration offers a more intuitive way for users to interact with SAP solutions. Instead of manually searching for information or navigating multiple interfaces, users can simply ask Joule for what they need – whether it’s insights on business data or guidance on performing specific tasks.

Joule Helps to Simplify Your Work

Joule is a part of the broader vision of autonomous ERP, which offers businesses ready-to-run cloud business solutions powered by AI. Through the embedded AI features in GROW with SAP, businesses can simplify everyday work processes while scaling efficiently.

Supported by Joule, SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition users can work faster, smarter, and more efficiently, all while maintaining control over crucial decisions and data.

You can use Joule for:

• Quick navigation: Find and quickly navigate to applications for your next task.
• Instant insights: Get fast insights on critical business data, such as purchase orders and outbound deliveries.
• Enablement content: For those needing help, Joule can guide users to relevant enablement content, speeding up task completion.

A recent study showed that businesses using AI-powered tools like Joule experienced a 30% reduction in time spent on administrative tasks. This saving of time allows employees to focus on more strategic activities that drive value.

Customer Experience and Feedback: AGILITA AG

Several customers have already tested Joule through the SAP Early Adopter Care program. Their experiences with Joule give us valuable insights that help us continuously enhance our solution.

Swiss and German-based IT services and consulting company AGILITA AG has already tested Joule as a GROW with SAP customer. As both a customer and a partner of SAP, AGILITA AG is uniquely positioned to understand the value of the latest AI solutions in GROW with SAP and help other customers realize these values for their own businesses.

According to Thomas Neuhaus, head of Digital Experience at AGILITA AG, “When we started using Joule at AGILITA, we quickly observed significant improvements in our operations. Joule has made it incredibly easy for our employees to find the SAP applications they need for their daily tasks and access help documentation quickly when required. This has streamlined our workflows, allowing our team to interact with SAP systems seamlessly and retrieve important information much faster.”

Joule in Supply Chain Management: Building Resilience

Supply chains are becoming increasingly complex, driven by global disruptions, unpredictable demand patterns, and other evolving challenges. To address these issues, businesses require AI-driven supply chain solutions that enhance agility and resilience. With Joule now integrated into supply chain management processes, SAP’s vision of AI in supply chain management is empowering customers to transition their supply chains from digital to adaptive and, ultimately, to autonomous systems. This vision comes to life when you look at what Joule can now do for you and the skills it will gain over the coming months to help you build a more resilient supply chain.

How TE Connectivity Leverages Joule for Supply Chain Planning

TE Connectivity is a global industrial technology leader creating a safer, sustainable, productive, and connected future. It offers a broad range of connectivity and sensor solutions that enable the distribution of power, signal, and data to advance next-generation transportation, renewable energy, automated factories, data centers, medical technology, and more.

SAP Integrated Business Planning is used across the organization to enable more than 1,500 supply chain professionals to manage the demand and supply of the different business units of TE.

According to Luis Rocha, IT director for SAP Integrated Business Planning Solutions at TE Connectivity, “We are excited about the future capabilities that Joule brings to TE, such as explaining planning results, quickly highlighting key constraints, and autonomously comparing different scenarios. These features will empower us to make better supply decisions with significantly less effort.” 

TE’s IT team has activated Joule in SAP Integrated Business Planning and has done first tests with the help documentation use case. They confirm how easy it is to engage with the copilot and how relevant it is to do contextual querying of SAP Integrated Business Planning features– it speeds up the investigation of requirements and the adoption process.

Joule will be available for research and development (R&D) functions via SAP’s product data management solutions and for planners via SAP Integrated Business Planning. For those that want to explore Joule to improve the health of their assets, you can now register for the SAP Early Adopter Care program for Joule in SAP Asset Performance Management.

See examples of Joule in action in your supply chain:

• Joule for SAP’s product data management solutions
• Joule for SAP Asset Performance Management
• Joule for SAP Integrated Business Planning for Supply Chain

How to Get Started with Joule

For more information on how to activate Joule, please contact your SAP support contacts directly to identify the channel and regional prerequisites. To learn more about how these tools can streamline your operations and drive efficiency, visit the SAP Help Portal for detailed information about SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, product data management, and SAP Integrated Business Planning.

To learn more, see AI in GROW with SAP, supply chain management, and SAP’s AI copilot Joule.

By integrating generative AI tools like Joule into everyday operations, businesses can simplify complex tasks, make faster decisions, and focus on what truly matters – driving growth and innovation. As we move forward, we’re committed to helping companies not only meet today’s demands but also thrive in the face of tomorrow’s uncertainties. Together, we’re shaping a future where technology serves as a true partner in building stronger, more agile organizations.

Jan Gilg is president and chief product officer for Cloud ERP at SAP.

As the Federal Government continues to adopt a cloud-first strategy, SAP National Security Services (SAP NS2) is proud to share it has been selected as the winner of the 2024 Amazon Web Services (AWS) Federal Government Technology Partner of the Year award.

SAP NS2 is an independent, U.S. subsidiary of SAP, with a mission is to provide U.S. sovereign cloud services to highly regulated agencies. This award focused on top AWS partners with government competency that delivered innovative, mission-based wins for the Federal Government. In cooperation with AWS, we have continued to provide an avenue for the Federal Government to adopt leading technology while protecting their mission-critical data.

“SAP NS2 is honored to have received this award,” shared Harish Luthra, CEO of SAP NS2. “Our partnership with AWS supports our mission of delivering industry-leading technology to government agencies. This award is a testament to our work within the public sector thus far, and we look forward to continuously supporting the government’s cloud smart strategy.”

As the U.S. sovereign cloud provider of SAP software, the SAP NS2 secure cloud environment and delivery model protects Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI), Personally Identifiable Information (PII), HIPAA information, and other sensitive data. This empowers Federal Government agencies to adopt commercial innovation with government-grade security at the forefront.

Expanding even further, SAP NS2 has built strong relationships with SAP and AWS to successfully deliver leading enterprise SAP applications on AWS GovCloud infrastructure. This delivery model supports our government customers with elevated compliance needs, as it provides the innovation of SAP with U.S.-specific security controls.

In 2024, SAP NS2 and AWS have collaborated to bring new capabilities into our existing infrastructure—such as resilience testing tools and performance processors. These strategic conversations support the federal cloud computing strategy, as government agencies continue to transition mission-critical workloads to cloud-based applications. In 2025, we’ll begin to look at ways we can further modernize our offerings to the Federal Government through services such as AI.

In addition to the Federal Government award, SAP NS2 was named a finalist for the Public Sector North America Technology Partner of the Year. As our relationship with AWS continues to develop, we can further strengthen and improve the ways we deliver industry-tailored cloud solutions to our customers.

SAP NS2 is dedicated to being a cloud service provider that delivers innovative SAP solutions while addressing mission-critical security needs. This award, and our collaboration with AWS, helps us pave the path for highly regulated agencies to find their footing in a cloud-first world.

Learn more about securing your cloud with SAP NS2 here.

Lillian Chang is senior vice president of ,Product Strategy and Portfolio for SAP NS2.