An Economist Impact study sponsored by SAP found that 89% of procurement professionals feel confident in their ability to leverage AI to drive efficiency and productivity. This finding highlights the urgency of the challenge and the optimism around AI’s potential to strengthen resilience.

In times of uncertainty, spend is one of the levers companies can actively control. Leaders are expected to deliver not only savings, but also resilience, sustainability, and risk-aware processes.

At SAP Connect, we introduced several new AI capabilities to bring more automation, deeper integration, and smarter insights across our spend management solutions. These innovations are focused on improving outcomes: reducing risk, strengthening supply chains, increasing productivity, and freeing people to focus on higher-value work. They ensure spend continues to fulfill its elevated role as a driver of business growth and resilience while helping customers stay ahead of evolving demands.

Next-gen SAP Ariba brings deeper AI integrations and new AI assistants in Joule

SAP is rolling out the next generation of SAP Ariba solutions for source-to-pay to automate the power of procurement, improve cost savings, ensure compliance, and build supply chain resilience. Next-gen SAP Ariba is the world’s most modern source-to-pay solution designed to power the future of procurement.

The first AI-native source-to-pay suite redefines what is possible today and sets the course for the future. With businesses facing ever-present change, our customers can take advantage of a solution that’s built to endure — intelligent, integrated, and scalable. The capabilities delivered as part of next-gen SAP Ariba will empower businesses to tackle today’s challenges and excel in the future.

Next-gen SAP Ariba is built on SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP), and has a completely redesigned user experience, embedded analytics, and seamless integration with SAP Cloud ERP public and private applications.

The advanced capabilities and benefits of next-gen SAP Ariba solutions offer the following:

• Accelerated value realization: Faster adoption with intuitive interfaces and guided workflows
• Deeper insights: Actionable analytics that translate into tangible savings and operational improvements
• Empowered teams: A more productive experience for procurement professionals

Next-gen SAP Ariba capabilities will be rolled out starting in Q1 2026.

SAP also introduced new agentic and generative AI capabilities across the SAP Ariba suite to help organizations optimize productivity and decision-making. Planned for release in Q1 2026, a new Joule Agent for bid analysis automatically compares supplier bid data, including total cost, to give procurement teams insight and recommendations for award decisions.

SAP also added three AI features to the SAP Ariba procurement portfolio:

• AI supplier-response summary will use Joule to help review, analyze, and summarize supplier responses to questionnaires, helping procurement specialists make more informed decisions. This is planned to be generally available in Q1 2026. 
• Joule for simplified invoice creation will help employees outside accounts payable to easily submit invoices from SAP Cloud ERP for processing with minimal input. The feature will be generally available in Q4 2025.
• Intelligent contracting will use Joule to automatically extract key information, generate summaries, and search historical contracts for discrepancies and compliance issues. This feature will be generally available in Q4 2025.

As part of the broader SAP Ariba portfolio, SAP Ariba Intake Management is now globally available. The solution provides a single-entry point for all procurement requests to simplify intake, improve compliance, and give employees full visibility into status updates. With Joule, users can easily submit requests or follow guided steps, while the system orchestrates processes across SAP and non-SAP systems.

Learn more at our upcoming webinar, Simplify Procurement Intake with AI-Guided Orchestration, on November 20, 2025. Register here to see how organizations can streamline intake processes and drive meaningful results.

New AI enhancements in SAP Fieldglass connect the right external talent to the right roles

New AI enhancements to the SAP Fieldglass portfolio make it easier to match potential external workers with available positions by automatically analyzing role descriptions to determine the skills required for each position.

The new skills-based hiring feature automatically analyzes role descriptions to determine the skills required for each position, reducing the time to source potential candidates by up to 50 percent. By accelerating candidate matching, organizations can count on a faster, more cohesive, and efficient hiring process.

This feature is generally available and works in conjunction with existing AI features, including resume analysis and job description creation.

SAP Concur and American Express Global Business Travel make business travel easier, smarter and more impactful for organizations everywhere

SAP Concur announced a strategic alliance with American Express Global Business Travel (Amex GBT). Complete by SAP Concur and Amex GBT is a co-developed solution that will combine booking, servicing, payments, and expensing into one experience with AI at its core. The solution will benefit from SAP Concur and Amex GBT technology and business travel expertise. Complete customers will also have access to Amex GBT’s unmatched marketplace, software, and services via Complete, offering greater incentives and cost savings.

Smarter AI for travel and expense management in SAP Concur

We also introduced new AI capabilities for SAP Concur that will streamline reporting, strengthen fraud prevention, and simplify travel planning, helping organizations better control costs while improving the employee experience.

These innovations include:

• The Receipt Analysis Agent, a newly embedded Joule Agent in ExpenseIt, will go beyond basic receipt scanning, automatically completing missing information, determining expense types, and verifying vendor details, even for unknown vendors, to deliver accurate results without iterative learning. General availability for these features is expected for Q4 2025.
• Verify, the automated expense-audit service from SAP Concur now features an AI-generated receipt checker that flags receipts likely created by AI or online generators, helping auditors stop fraudulent claims. The service is currently generally available.
• A new pre-spend planner tool uses generative AI to estimate trip budgets based on policies and itineraries, while also providing relevant travel advisories to keep travelers informed. General availability is planned for early 2026 and Concur Expense customers can take advantage of the pre-spend planner at no extra cost. It will be available to Concur Travel customers later in the first half of 2026

Partnerships and integrations

SAP Concur has enhanced its integration with Uber for Business to further automate how ride and meal expenses are processed, providing better visibility to executives and business users. Ride and meal receipts are automatically routed into Concur Expense, with detailed tax, tip, and itemization data, resulting in cleaner data, fewer manual corrections, and faster reimbursement.

Looking ahead

SAP’s latest innovations across procurement, external workforce, and travel and expense help customers achieve positive outcomes such as cost savings, reducing risk, strengthening supply chains, creating value, improving productivity, and freeing people up to do higher-value work.

Etosha Thurman is chief marketing officer for SAP Finance and Spend Management.

New sovereign cloud collaboration combines SAP enterprise applications expertise with AWS cloud infrastructure, enabling customers in highly regulated industries to pursue AI innovation

WALLDORF — Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), and SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) today unveiled plans to make SAP Sovereign Cloud capabilities available on the AWS European Sovereign Cloud, a new, independent cloud for Europe backed by a planned €7.8 billion investment from Amazon.

The collaboration builds on the companies’ longstanding partnership and SAP’s comprehensive new approach to digital sovereignty and AI innovation. SAP Sovereign Cloud capabilities are security-hardened cloud solutions from SAP, aligned with industry standards for regulated industries and governments. The collaboration will focus on uniting these capabilities and SAP’s deep enterprise expertise with AWS infrastructure and operational expertise to meet customers’ evolving digital sovereignty needs across Europe.

“We’re delighted that SAP Sovereign Cloud capabilities will be available on the AWS European Sovereign Cloud. This will give organizations more choice in how they meet their sovereignty requirements while leveraging best-in-class cloud technologies,” said David Brown, vice president of Compute and Machine Learning at AWS. “SAP and AWS share a mutual vision – we want to ensure that our customers have access to some of the most advanced sovereignty solutions available, so organizations can focus on innovation and driving tangible outcomes. We’re looking forward to our ongoing collaboration with SAP and seeing the ways that organizations across Europe will innovate with the AWS European Sovereign Cloud.”

The AWS European Sovereign Cloud, which is set to launch its first AWS Region in Brandenburg, Germany by the end of 2025, is designed to give public sector organizations and customers in highly regulated industries further choice. The offering can help these organizations meet their unique digital sovereignty needs, including data residency, operational autonomy, and resiliency requirements. SAP Sovereign Cloud capabilities are already available on AWS in Australia and New Zealand (since 2023), the UK (since 2024), Canada and India (since 2025), and the addition of SAP’s capabilities to the AWS European Sovereign Cloud is a significant milestone for customers across Europe.

SAP Sovereign Cloud empowers organizations to innovate more securely, comply with local laws, and scale on their own terms. SAP Sovereign Cloud on AWS European Sovereign Cloud solutions will initially include SAP Business Technology Platform and SAP Cloud ERP. These solutions will provide customers with a secure foundation for managing critical business processes and sensitive data, while supporting compliance with relevant regulations.

“With our expanded SAP Sovereign Cloud offerings, we’re enabling customers across all industries to harness the full power of cloud innovation and AI,” said Thomas Saueressig, Member of the Executive Board of SAP SE, Customer Services and Delivery. “By deploying the SAP Sovereign Cloud portfolio on the AWS European Sovereign Cloud, customers gain access to our comprehensive suite of sovereign cloud solutions, further strengthened by our trusted, long-standing partnership with Amazon Web Services.”

The AWS European Sovereign Cloud will be separate and independent from AWS’s existing Regions and will have no critical dependencies on non-EU infrastructure. Backed by strong technical controls, sovereign assurances, and legal protections, customers can benefit from the full capacity of AWS with the same industry-leading security, resilience, and expansive service portfolio available in existing Regions.

AWS and SAP have been innovating in the cloud together for more than 16 years.  This new collaboration builds on that history to support customers’ digital sovereignty requirements and accelerate their digital transformation in Europe.

Visit the SAP News Center. Get SAP news via LinkedIn and Bluesky.

About Amazon Web Services

Since 2006, Amazon Web Services has been the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud. AWS has been continually expanding its services to support virtually any workload, and it now has more than 240 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, media, and application development, deployment, and management from 120 Availability Zones within 38 geographic regions, with announced plans for 10 more Availability Zones and three more AWS Regions in Chile, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and the AWS European Sovereign Cloud. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.

About Amazon

Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Amazon strives to be Earth’s Most Customer-Centric Company, Earth’s Best Employer, and Earth’s Safest Place to Work. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Career Choice, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, Alexa, Just Walk Out technology, Amazon Studios, and The Climate Pledge are some of the things pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.

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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