In an era where artificial intelligence has transitioned from a disruptive force to an operational necessity, global enterprises face new challenges and opportunities. The adoption of AI is no longer limited to experimental use cases or niche areas—it is the backbone of business transformation.

Our commitment to innovation drives every initiative we undertake. As a global leader in enterprise software solutions, we are uniquely positioned to deliver AI capabilities tailored to our customers’ needs. This dedication is at the heart of our enhanced AI strategy and why we are partnering with NVIDIA to embed NVIDIA NIM microservices, including a new microservice designed to work with a broad range of LLMs, which now supports deploying over 100,000 models into our architecture, enabling customers to harness the power of AI while meeting the specific demands of their local markets and industries.

Local AI from SAP can ensure that AI prompts and customer data stay within SAP-controlled environments, helping to enhance security and ensure compliance with regional regulations. By focusing on local deployment and aligning with NIM microservices, our strategy prioritizes scalability without compromising compliance or security.

“NVIDIA NIM microservices deliver optimized inference performance, portability, and enterprise support for custom models, helping customers accelerate innovation at every stage of the AI development and deployment cycle,” said Kari Briski, vice president, Generative AI Software for Enterprise, NVIDIA. “With NVIDIA NIM microservices on SAP Business AI, developers can supercharge AI adoption with local models running on local infrastructure.”

Why highly regulated industries demand a new AI paradigm

Industries like healthcare and public services stand at a crossroads. These are sectors where the stakes are highest—where AI can revolutionize patient care or streamline essential services—but the constraints are equally significant. Data sovereignty laws, compliance obligations, and the need for operational transparency often place these industries in a bind, forcing leaders to choose between accelerating innovation or staying compliant. SAP has long understood these challenges and has taken deliberate steps to provide solutions that strike the right balance.

Collaboration as a catalyst for innovation

As part of our ongoing drive to enhance AI adoption, SAP has optimized its architecture to leverage some of the most advanced inference technologies available. By collaborating with model innovators such as Aleph Alpha, Meta, and Mistral, alongside our own fine-tuned ABAP model, we aim to deliver a curated selection of trusted AI tools. These models are designed to address multilingual, explainable, and retrieval-augmented generation tasks, working to ensure that enterprises have access to solutions tailored to their unique business challenges. By placing our customers’ needs at the forefront, SAP can deliver AI systems that are not only more powerful but also deeply embedded in the enterprise ecosystem.

Building AI that’s market-aware and customer-driven

Enterprise leaders are under growing pressure to translate innovation into measurable outcomes. Our expanded collaboration with NVIDIA aims to address these demands with a focus on:

• Enterprise-grade performance: Leveraging NVIDIA NIM and curated models, fine-tuned by SAP for enterprise-grade performance
• Operational flexibility: Supporting local deployment while seamlessly integrating with SAP’s technology ecosystem
• Strategic alignment: Addressing the shifting dynamics of AI sovereignty and industrial leadership

What’s next for enterprise AI?

The road ahead for AI in enterprises is as exciting as it is demanding. Compliance will remain a core concern, but so too will the need for agility and innovation. Through our partnership with NVIDIA, we are not just responding to these demands—we are anticipating them, building infrastructure and solutions that can empower our customers to stay ahead of the curve.

For businesses ready to embark on this journey, the process starts now. Explore how our AI solutions can redefine what’s possible for your business.

Explore the opportunities ahead.

When we created the Customer Services & Delivery Board area just over a year ago, there was a clear intention to simplify engagement with customers to drive the most value out of our cloud innovations.

Our robust services strategy was developed to serve as a basis for success, driving faster time to value and increased business outcomes.

We made early strides by introducing the Enterprise Architect role, a qualified partner to ensure the RISE with SAP Methodology is in place to guide customers on their journey to the cloud. Already as a result, we are seeing better engagement and increased adoption rates.

Today, we continue these efforts by announcing a major evolution of our SAP Services and Support portfolio. In early 2026, we will make our simplified, tiered engagement model generally available.

Comprised of three distinct success plans that build upon each other, this model will align cloud operations, customer support, and premium engagement to make it easier to adopt SAP solutions and innovate with the transparency, speed, and flexibility the market demands. The new model will also provide more predictable total cost of ownership (TCO) and return on investment (ROI).

With this new engagement framework, businesses can choose from one of three plans, with AI tooling embedded in each plan along the entire project cycle:

• Foundational success plan: This plan supports in-house teams by helping to onboard and run solutions smoothly, maintain business continuity, and drive ongoing value. It is comprised of curated content and learning journeys for effective customer self-service. It also features application lifecycle management solutions and preventative mission-critical support. This plan includes and expands on our well-known SAP Enterprise Support offering and is provided with every SAP cloud solution. With the foundational plan, SAP turns on Joule for a customer’s business and supports the team ramp-up with learning journeys for SAP Business AI.

• Advanced success plan: This plan strengthens teams with specialized expertise that helps to continually unlock the full value of a customer’s SAP investment. It provides proactive guidance to identify improvement opportunities and adopt software innovations. It builds on the foundational plan to maximize solution value and accelerate transformation. With the advanced plan, SAP helps the customer build a plan and activate embedded AI use cases and provides ongoing product guidance and optimization advice.

• Max success plan: This plan offers strategic partnership for organizations pursuing innovation, competitive advantage, or complex transformation. It includes all the advanced plan features plus tailored engagement and end-to-end guidance from dedicated experts. This plan builds on the previous two and offers strategic partnership for organizations pursuing innovation, competitive advantage, or complex transformation. With the max plan, SAP helps the customer define a holistic AI strategy; create the necessary data and architecture roadmap; and build prototypes for customer-specific AI use cases. This plan provides the maximum opportunity for excellence and highest level of  SLA.

These plans complement the services that many SAP customers already receive from their systems integrators.

With these plans, we deliver on our promise to make our engagement with customers simpler and to bring the engagement closer, working together to deliver more business outcomes and leveraging the full potential of AI.

The power of the future lies in our customers’ hands — we’re honored to serve and support them.

Thomas Saueressig is a member of the Executive Board of SAP SE.