AI innovation provides role-specific support, automating workflows to boost business productivity

AI agents are no longer confined to demos and copilots. They are beginning to act inside real enterprise systems: executing tasks, invoking tools, and operating continuously across business processes.

For SAP customers, this shift promises step-change productivity. But it also raises a hard requirement: Enterprise AI agents must be safe, governable, and auditable by design.

This is the context for SAP’s deep technical collaboration on SAP Business AI Platform with NVIDIA OpenShell, an open source secure runtime for autonomous AI agents. This collaboration is not about SAP “adopting” a runtime. It is about SAP actively shaping, hardening, and productizing the execution layer for enterprise agentic AI—together with NVIDIA.

Why this matters to SAP customers

For SAP customers, the value of this collaboration is concrete and practical. It enables:

• AI agents that operate inside SAP processes without bypassing governance
• Security models aligned with enterprise IAM and compliance frameworks
• Clear audit trails for agent actions across systems
• Confidence to move from pilots to production

Most importantly, it avoids a false choice between innovation and control. Customers do not have to bolt security on later, or redesign their risk models to accommodate AI agents. Instead, security and governance are built into the execution model from the start.

The real enterprise challenge: Trusting agents that act

When AI systems move from generating responses to executing actions, the risk profile fundamentally changes. Agentic systems can touch systems of record, cross application and data boundaries, and operate without human review at every step.

In all enterprise environments, especially regulated ones, this makes execution safety and governance the defining challenge. Traditional chatbot-era controls are insufficient once agents can access shells, files, networks, credentials, and APIs.

SAP customers know this reality well. Business AI is only valuable if it can be:

• Inspected and audited
• Constrained by policy
• Trusted by security and compliance teams

Solving this problem requires more than infrastructure primitives or application-level rules alone.

NVIDIA OpenShell: The foundation

NVIDIA OpenShell addresses a critical layer of the problem: secure, sandboxed execution of autonomous agents.

As an open source runtime, OpenShell introduces strong capabilities, including:

• Isolated execution environments
• Policy enforcement for filesystem and network access
• Runtime-level containment that limits blast radius even when agent logic fails

These capabilities form a foundational layer for autonomous agents to execute safely. In practice, enterprises need that execution layer aligned with business context and governance.

Enterprises expect clarity on questions such as:

• Which business role authorizes an action?
• Which process context applies?
• How actions map to enterprise policies and audit trails?

This is where SAP’s contribution becomes decisive.

What SAP brings: Enterprise semantics, governance, and scale

SAP is co-developing and contributing to OpenShell based on enterprise reality.

1. Enterprise-driven runtime requirements

SAP operates at a level of scale and responsibility that few software providers do: mission-critical processes, regulated industries, and millions of transactions per hour.

By bringing real SAP agentic workloads into the collaboration, SAP provides the operational proving ground that OpenShell needs to mature from a powerful runtime into an enterprise-hardened one.

This includes shaping requirements around:

• Isolation boundaries that match enterprise risk models
• Policy enforcement aligned with real business constraints
• Auditability that stands up to customer and regulatory scrutiny

2. Co-development of OpenShell capabilities

SAP is committing engineering capacity to the OpenShell open-source code base, with a focus on areas that matter specifically to enterprises: runtime hardening, policy modeling, enterprise identity integration, and auditing and governance hooks.

SAP is helping define how secure agent execution must work for enterprises; not just theoretically, but in production.

3. Joule Studio runtime: From runtime safety to enterprise control

Where OpenShell secures execution, Joule Studio runtime provides the enterprise harness that makes agents usable and governable in business systems:

• Business-aware policy semantics like roles, skills, life cycle
• Enterprise identity and access control
• Observability and auditability across agent behavior
• Deployment and operational governance across landscapes

This ensures that agent autonomy is always framed by business intent and accountability, not just technical permissions.

OpenShell answers: “Can this action safely execute?”; Joule Studio runtime answers: “Should this action happen at all?”

Raising the bar for enterprise agentic AI

This collaboration represents more than an integration. It reflects a shared intent to define what “enterprise-grade” actually means for autonomous AI systems.

By combining NVIDIA’s runtime and security innovation and SAP’s enterprise productization, governance expertise, and operational scale, SAP and NVIDIA are working toward an integrated solution for trusted agent execution—one that enterprises can inspect, govern, and rely on.

For SAP customers, this means AI agents that are not just powerful, but designed to earn trust in the environments where trust matters most.

Andre Lamego is senior vice president and chief product officer of SAP BTP Fabric

WALLDORF and AUSTIN — SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) and Dremio today announced that SAP has agreed to acquire Dremio, an open, high-performance data lakehouse platform built to accelerate agentic AI and expand SAP Business Data Cloud’s ability to combine SAP and non-SAP data to more effectively run analytical and AI workloads in real time.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The transaction is still pending regulatory approval.

Most enterprise AI projects fail to deliver value not because of the AI itself, but because the underlying data is fragmented, locked in proprietary formats and stripped of the business context that makes it meaningful. The result is a familiar and costly pattern: pilots that cannot scale, slow integration of new data sources, duplicated engineering work and compliance risk when organizations cannot explain how an AI-driven decision was reached. Dremio helps eliminate that data fragmentation and integration friction. The acquisition will complement the SAP Business Data Cloud and SAP HANA Cloud offerings to ensure seamless data integration across SAP and non-SAP data with high performance and low cost to accelerate AI-ready context and time-to-value for AI.

“Enterprise AI doesn’t stall because the models aren’t good enough; it stalls because the data isn’t ready for AI agents,” said Philipp Herzig, CTO, SAP SE. ” Dremio eliminates that bottleneck. Combined with SAP Business Data Cloud, we can now take customers from raw, fragmented data to governed, AI-ready intelligence on a single open platform.”

With Dremio, SAP Business Data Cloud will become an Apache Iceberg-native enterprise lakehouse that unifies SAP and non-SAP data to power agentic AI at enterprise scale. Apache Iceberg is the industry-standard open table format, and SAP Business Data Cloud will natively support it as its foundation. This means no data movement or format conversion will be necessary. SAP and non-SAP data can coexist on the same open foundation, with federated analytical reach across every enterprise data source, combined with SAP HANA Cloud’s in-memory engine for real-time transactions and operational performance.

The Dremio lakehouse platform is set to vastly improve the economics of enterprise analytics. It is serverless and elastic, scaling up automatically when demand spikes and scaling back down when it subsides, meaning no fixed capacity to provision and no performance ceiling when it matters most.

With Dremio, SAP will deliver a universal, open catalog built on Apache Polaris and the open Apache Iceberg REST Catalog API. It serves as both the discovery and semantic layer of SAP Business Data Cloud, giving every connected engine – SAP or non-SAP – a single point of access to unified business context: meaning, relationships, access rights and data lineage. This catalog will form the foundation of the SAP Knowledge Graph, embedding business relationships, organizational hierarchies, regulatory classifications and cross-system lineage as native properties.

Dremio has been a leading steward of open-source projects at the heart of its platform: Apache Iceberg, Apache Polaris and Apache Arrow, and SAP is fully committed to continuing to invest in and prioritize these contributions.

The transaction is expected to close in Q3 of 2026, subject to customary closing conditions, including regulatory approvals.

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About Dremio

Dremio is the Agentic Lakehouse: the only Iceberg-native data platform built for agents and managed by agents. Every knowledge worker and AI agent gets instant, governed access to enterprise data through any LLM or tool of their choice. Federated queries reach any source without ETL pipelines. An AI Semantic layer adds business context so every agent draws from the same source of truth. The lakehouse manages itself, running clustering, optimization, and compaction autonomously. The result: trusted insights that drive better business outcomes, without the infrastructure complexity or overhead. A lead contributor to Apache Iceberg and co-creator of Apache Arrow and Apache Polaris. Trusted by Shell, TD Bank, Michelin, and thousands of organizations worldwide. www.dremio.com

About SAP

As a global leader in enterprise applications and business AI, SAP (NYSE:SAP) stands at the nexus of business and technology. For over 50 years, organizations have trusted SAP to bring out their best by uniting business-critical operations spanning finance, procurement, HR, supply chain, and customer experience. For more information, visit www.sap.com.

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In a sales cycle where every conversation counts, the quality of a demo can shape the direction of a deal. Buyers expect to see their world reflected back to them—their language, their metrics, their industry reality—not a one-size-fits-all scenario. Yet tailoring demos traditionally requires time, coordination, and changes that risk impacting complex landscapes.

That is why SAP has introduced the demo data personalization add-on for SAP Demo Environment 2.0, a way to adapt and personalize demos in minutes while keeping backend systems untouched and preserving confidence across presales, sales, and IT stakeholders.

From generic to personal

The demo data personalization add-on, powered by third-party provider Saleo, extends SAP Demo Environment 2.0, the already widely adopted platform for SAP partners used by more than 2,000 partner companies and over 10,000 qualified users, with a continuously growing library of partner demo scenarios. Offered to partners at an exclusive partner price, it enables teams to create personalized, predefined data-rich demos with the help of embedded AI functionality, quickly safely, and directly in the browser. Instead of building multiple demo variants or relying on time-consuming environment changes, teams can start from proven, preconfigured foundations and layer on relevant context for each meeting, bringing the right narrative to the right audience at the right moment.

At the core is the ability to adjust surface-level elements within the demo scenario in real time. With Saleo Live, teams can change specified UI components—such as text and images—on the fly via a Chrome browser plug-in. This allows a single demo to speak in the terminology of different industries or roles, from executive outcomes and board-level KPIs to practitioner workflows and day-to-day tasks, while preserving the integrity of the underlying systems. It can make last-mile tailoring part of the conversation rather than a separate workstream, helping presenters respond to questions, highlight specific use cases, and align quickly to customer priorities without switching environments.

Building on that, Saleo Capture converts those tailored moments into guided, ready-to-share, HTML-based demo experiences. By turning demo data into interactive journeys, sellers can offer scenario-based experiences that extended buying teams can review at their own pace and in the right context to make the customer feel like they are the system without being in the system. This is especially helpful for complex deals with diverse stakeholders, where asynchronous exploration and consistent messaging can accelerate consensus and keep momentum between meetings.

Together, these capabilities shift demos from a static show-and-tell to dynamic conversations grounded in the customer’s world. Teams can reuse consistent foundations from SAP Demo Environment 2.0’s preconfigured partner demos and broad solution library, then apply last-mile personalization to match specific priorities and use cases. The combination promotes repeatability and governance while preserving flexibility—an approach that helps reduce demo preparation time, elevate the relevance of each interaction, and support a scalable model for high-quality demo delivery across regions, industries, and segments.

Proven impact on speed and win rates

Early feedback points to meaningful efficiency and effectiveness gains: time saved in crafting personalized demos, a drastic reduction in weekly demo maintenance, and a positive influence on customer satisfaction and win rates. In fast-moving opportunities, that can translate into clearer storytelling, smoother collaboration between presales and sales, and greater confidence for customers evaluating complex solutions. Over time, organizations can build a durable library of guided, personalized flows that help shorten ramp-up for new team members and can ensure a consistently high standard for customer engagements.

By combining SAP Demo Environment 2.0 with the demo data personalization add-on, organizations can move beyond generic demonstrations to experiences that resonate—quickly, safely, and at scale. As Karl Fahrbach, chief partner officer at SAP, noted, “The new personalization option for SAP Demo Environment 2.0 is a significant leap forward in giving SAP partners the right tool to tailor demos to their customers’ needs—smarter, faster, more personalized.”

Andre Bechtold is president and head of SAP Industries & Experiences.