Last week at SAP Connect, SAP introduced new capabilities and partner innovations across SAP Ariba, SAP Fieldglass, and SAP Concur that help organizations turn spend insights into faster, better-informed decisions.

Procurement leaders operate in a very different environment than they did just a few years ago. Beyond cost and compliance, they must now strengthen resilience, manage supplier risk, support workforce strategies, and help businesses respond faster to changing market conditions.

Yet, many of the systems supporting these responsibilities remain disconnected. Supplier intelligence lives in one place, workforce information in another, and spend data often requires significant preparation before it can drive decisions.

At SAP Connect, we announced a series of innovations across the SAP Ariba, SAP Fieldglass, and SAP Concur portfolios designed to help organizations address those challenges: new AI assistants for spend analysis and contingent workforce management, embedded supplier risk intelligence through a new partnership with Moody’s, a new solution extension with ORO Labs that orchestrates procurement across complex enterprise landscapes, and new SAP Concur capabilities that simplify high-volume administrative work.

Together, these innovations point to a broader shift toward Autonomous Spend Management, a domain within the SAP Autonomous Suite. AI connects information, insights, and execution, while people remain in control of the decisions that matter most.

Better spend decisions start with better visibility

Many procurement organizations still struggle to turn spend data into actionable insight quickly enough to support decision-making.

According to the 2026 Economist Enterprise report, Procurement at a Crossroads: From Optimism to Realism, sponsored by SAP, digital transformation is now the top strategic priority for procurement over the next 18 months, and improving spend analytics is one of its biggest drivers, cited by 53% of executives. These findings reflect growing pressure to improve decision-making and business impact.

Earlier this month, SAP announced the availability of SAP Ariba Spend Analysis and Insights, giving organizations a new way to bring together spend data across SAP Ariba, SAP Fieldglass, SAP Concur, SAP Cloud ERP, and other systems into a single foundation for analysis and action.

Building on that foundation, we announced the new Spend Analytics Assistant at SAP Connect. Planned for general availability in Q1 2027, it helps procurement teams identify opportunities for cost savings, compliance, supplier consolidation, and risk mitigation. Rather than searching through reports, teams see highlighted areas that merit attention, along with supporting context to help them prioritize and act, so they spend more time on decisions and less on data preparation.

Bringing supplier risk into everyday decisions

Supplier risk is now a strategic concern across every industry, yet risk data often remains disconnected from the sourcing and purchasing decisions where it matters most.

At SAP Connect, we also announced a new partnership with Moody’s that embeds supplier risk monitoring directly into SAP Ariba Supplier Lifecycle and Performance. By bringing financial health, operational risk, and regulatory status into the same environment where supplier performance and relationship data are managed, procurement teams can evaluate risk as part of everyday decision-making rather than periodic reviews.

The partnership also strengthens the foundation for AI-powered procurement. When risk information is embedded directly within procurement workflows, it becomes part of the business context used to help identify emerging issues and support earlier intervention. This gives teams a more complete view of supplier relationships and greater ability to respond before potential disruptions affect operations.

General availability is planned for Q4 2026.

Connecting procurement across complex enterprise landscapes

The disconnection that slows procurement decisions often extends beyond data; it also shows up across the systems themselves. For many organizations, procurement unfolds across a mix of SAP and third-party applications, each supporting different parts of the process. Coordinating work across that kind of landscape, without disrupting the systems teams already rely on, can be one of modern procurement’s more persistent challenges.

To solve this, SAP announced a new solution extension developed with ORO Labs: SAP Ariba Procurement Orchestration by ORO Labs. It provides a purpose-built orchestration layer that connects procurement experiences, workflows, and systems across complex environments spanning both SAP and third-party applications.

For employees, this means a more unified experience and a simpler way to initiate and navigate procurement work. Low-code/no-code workflows let teams adapt processes as business requirements and policies change, without disrupting underlying systems. Organizations can also apply agentic AI within these workflows while preserving the controls, approvals, and human oversight that enterprise operations depend on.

The solution extension works alongside Joule Work, with Joule Work serving as the primary engagement layer. General availability is planned for November 2026.

Making external workforce management more proactive

For many organizations, contingent workers have become an essential part of how they scale skills, execute projects, and adapt to changing business needs. Managing those workers, however, often requires coordination across procurement, HR, hiring managers, suppliers, and compliance teams.

We also announced the new Contingent Workforce Assistant, designed to bring greater visibility to that process. Planned for general availability in Q4 2026, the assistant helps organizations manage the contingent worker life cycle by surfacing issues such as onboarding delays, pending approvals, compliance requirements, and other exceptions before they affect assignments. By bringing relevant information into a single experience, teams can address issues earlier while maintaining governance and auditability.

This proactive approach addresses one of the persistent challenges in workforce management: identifying issues early enough to act before they become operational problems.

Simplifying travel and expense management through targeted automation

Not every productivity challenge in spend management requires a major transformation initiative.

In many organizations, the greatest source of friction in travel and expense management comes from routine administrative work, such as retrieving receipts, locating invoice images, preparing audit documentation, and reviewing user permissions. Individually small, these tasks collectively consume significant time across finance, audit, compliance, and expense management teams.

To address this, SAP Concur announced new additions to SAP Micro-App Hub. Building on capabilities already used to support tax, audit, compliance, and reporting, SAP plans to introduce new micro-apps that help organizations export employee expense information, simplify access-governance reviews, and retrieve vendor invoice documentation in bulk.

The approach is intentionally practical: rather than redesigning entire processes, the micro-apps target specific operational pain points. Customer adoption of the existing micro-apps points to strong demand for this focused automation.

Additional micro-apps are planned for general availability in Q4 2026.

Turning spend intelligence into action

Most organizations have plenty of spend data. The persistent challenge is turning that information into timely decisions and meaningful business outcomes.

The innovations announced this year at SAP Connect address that challenge from multiple angles, improving visibility into spend, bringing risk intelligence closer to procurement decisions, connecting procurement processes across complex enterprise landscapes, improving external workforce management, and reducing administrative effort across travel and expense.

Better decisions require better visibility, stronger context, and fewer barriers between identifying an issue and responding to it. This is the goal of Autonomous Spend Management: applying agentic AI across every spend process so disconnected workflows operate as one intelligent, governed system.

This matters more as procurement takes on a larger role in driving resilience, growth, and business performance. For organizations that can identify opportunities faster, respond to risk earlier, and spend less time on manual coordination, spend becomes a source of advantage rather than a cost to control.

Baber Farooq is chief marketing officer for Spend Management at SAP.

As workforce challenges continue to outpace traditional HR processes, the organizations that lead won’t be the ones with the most AI. They’ll be the ones that understand their people, their skills, and how work really gets done—and know where AI can move them beyond incremental improvement into lasting transformation.

With the SAP SuccessFactors 2H 2026 release and throughout the remainder of the year, we’re taking the next step toward Autonomous HCM, bringing together agentic AI, trusted workforce data, and HR applications to help deliver the outcomes that matter most to organizations. At its core are three pillars: automate the HR function to release capacity from administrative work, redesign how tasks, workflows, roles, and teams are structured across people and AI, and reinvent how organizations recruit, develop, move, and reward their people.

This vision comes to life through Joule Assistants working together across SAP applications to help carry out end-to-end HR processes and help people make better decisions, faster, all within a single workspace: Joule Work. This is what it looks like when AI works across an organization’s data, applications, and processes: not more AI for the sake of AI, but AI that delivers impact you can measure.

Building on the SAP investments organizations have already made, the innovations we’re delivering throughout the second half of 2026 help automate, redesign, and reinvent work to realize the full promise of Autonomous HCM.

These innovations span the full employee lifecycle:

Plan & hire

Finding, hiring, and onboarding the right talent gets easier and faster, with every step aligned to business needs.

• As AI drives up application volumes, recruiters risk spending more time clearing a queue than assessing if a hire works for the business. Winston Screen can address this with repeatable, configurable screening that helps narrow large applicant pools to a focused shortlist. Winston Match builds on that, with results now fully reportable in Report Builder, giving recruiters visibility into the reasoning behind AI-assisted decisions. Together, they help free up the time and attention to do what the business actually needs—apply their judgement to identify and engage the candidates most likely to succeed.

• SmartRecruiters for SAP SuccessFactors helps put agentic capability directly inside the recruiter workflow so hiring never loses momentum, with Winston Companion monitoring pipelines and booking interviews through agentic scheduling, Winston Interview delivering a conversational AI-led screening experience, and the Interview Summary Agent automatically capturing and posting a structured summary to the candidate profile.

• Helping new hires get up to speed and start contributing faster, the Onboarding Assistant equips HR teams to deliver personalized, timely onboarding at scale, with intelligent prioritization, simplified onboarding task creation, and automated custom form conversion.

Manage & pay

These innovations help organizations work more efficiently and stay compliant while giving employees fast, seamless support to reduce the routine inquiry burden on HR teams.

• The Payroll Assistant helps build trust in payroll so employees can have confidence in every paycheck. Administrators can quickly identify anomalies, resolve issues, and stay ahead of compliance, while employees can get direct access to clear, confident answers about their pay without raising a support ticket.

• The HR Operations Assistant can reduce manual effort, prevent bottlenecks, and keep HR processes moving, proactively resolving workforce and payroll data issues, automating employee and job changes, and streamlining position management. It can also detect approval bottlenecks, nudge approvers, and recommend next steps.

• The HR System Assistant can give HR administrators a smarter way to manage day-to-day system operations—from audit readiness and compliance tracking to time and benefits configurations—reducing routine maintenance and helping HR teams drive continuous improvement and innovation.

Develop & grow

These innovations connect skill-building, learning, and career development into a more intentional experience designed for continuous growth.

• The Learning Assistant helps move organizations to proactive workforce readiness, connecting compliance monitoring, upskilling, and development in one experience. It can guide the right learning actions at the right time for employees, managers, and admins, from flagging compliance deadlines to identifying skill gaps and recommending targeted learning.

• People perform at their best when they know their employer is invested in their development. The Career and Talent Development Assistant helps employees close skill gaps, build personalized development plans, and set meaningful goals. For leaders, conversational talent discovery through Joule helps surface internal candidates, successors, and experts with a clear explanation of what shaped each result, helping organizations match the right talent to opportunities and grow people from within.

The next step toward Autonomous HCM

These are not standalone capabilities. Together, they are Autonomous HCM in action: AI working with trusted data and HR processes to remove friction, surface insight, and give people the space to focus on outcomes that matter. The organizations building that way today are the ones that will lead tomorrow.

Discover what’s new in the SAP SuccessFactors 2H 2026 release with the release brochure or overview video.

Rebecca Carr is president of HCM Products for SAP SuccessFactors and CEO for SmartRecruiters.

SAP has been named a leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Agentic Marketing for B2C Enterprises 2026 Vendor Assessment (doc #US54113426, September 2026).

We believe this recognition reflects SAP’s commitment to helping enterprises deliver intelligent, personalized customer experiences, enhanced by AI, built on trusted data and connected end-to-end business processes, and grounded in real-life business context. Joule Agents, Joule Assistants, SAP Business Data Cloud, and SAP Engagement Cloud together provide the agentic marketing backbone to advance this vision of the Autonomous Enterprise.

AI is evolving from assisting marketers to executing and acting on their behalf, creating a fundamental opportunity for organizations to completely rethink how they engage customers. Agentic marketing enables AI agents and assistants to understand context, take action, and help brands deliver more relevant personalized experiences.

Trust is the foundation to this shift. As AI takes on greater responsibility, organizations need solutions built with security, compliance, governance, and trusted business data so customers can confidently rely on AI-driven interactions and decisions.

Why agentic marketing matters

Consumers are becoming more comfortable using AI, reshaping their expectations of the brands they love and the organizations they interact with. SAP’s 2026 Global Customer Loyalty Index indicates that 33% of consumers now trust AI assistants to complete purchases on their behalf, while 31% say interactions with AI assistants make them more loyal to a brand. The trend is even more pronounced across younger consumers. Across generations, we see AI playing an influential role in purchasing decisions and long-term customer loyalty. For example, a consumer might ask an AI assistant to reorder a household product, book a trip, or recommend a new product based on past preferences. For those interactions to succeed, customers must trust that the AI is acting on accurate information, protecting their data, and making decisions within appropriate guardrails.

Organizations from manufacturers to fashion brands are seasoned in using generative AI to create content, build audiences, and improve marketing efficiency. Attention is turning to agentic marketing: moving from AI that recommends to AI that acts.

Marketing context meets business reality

Most marketing platforms understand customer interactions well: clicks, opens, purchases, and browsing behavior. Those signals matter, but they only tell part of the story. The most valuable signals often live elsewhere across the enterprise in inventory availability, order status, fulfillment performance, product profitability, return behavior, and subscription and replenishment cycles.

Marketing often sees customer behavior, while ERP systems see business reality. The greatest opportunity for AI emerges when those worlds come together. Because SAP sits at the heart of how many of the world’s leading enterprises operate, marketers can access the operational intelligence that lives within the systems running the business, enabling AI to make decisions based not only on what customers are doing, but on what the business can actually deliver. In an age of agentic marketing, that distinction matters.

Why SAP was recognized as a Leader

SAP was recognized for the following strengths by the IDC MarketScape:

• With the agentic layer of Joule, marketers get real-time, context-aware personalization without having to reconcile SAP and non-SAP data themselves, since Joule Agents and Joule Assistants draw on a harmonized SAP Business Data Cloud foundation. Teams receive role-based guidance for navigating complex workflows across Autonomous Domains, while everyday tasks such as retrieving information, connecting enterprise data, and completing multi-step processes happen independently, freeing staff from manual execution. In SAP Engagement Cloud, this means personalization and segmentation scale on their own, and the 4Q25 CX release lets customer service issues resolve autonomously, backed by SAP’s enterprise data layer and SAP Knowledge Graph, instead of requiring escalation.
• Because Joule Studio is low code, organizations with reasonable levels of in-house development capabilities can build custom agents themselves, without waiting on IT or writing code, while still connecting to Joule, the SAP Customer Experience portfolio, and third-party systems grounded in SAP Knowledge Graph and SAP Business Data Cloud. For sales and marketing teams, this means faster deal cycles and higher conversion: a sales-assistant agent, for example, automatically surfaces buying patterns and product recommendations from purchase history, sparing reps the manual analysis.
• Marketers running campaigns across email, digital ads, wallet, conversational, and web can manage them all from a single platform instead of stitching together point solutions. Because the engagement events service connects external data sources into real-time segmentation, campaigns stay relevant as customer behavior shifts. AI-assisted tools such as natural-language product search, AI-generated consumption summaries, and an AI-assisted report builder cut down the manual work of building segments and reporting, enabling marketers to focus on strategy while AI handles recommendations, translation, prediction, and reporting at scale.

AI that drives business results

Organizations around the world are using SAP’s AI-powered customer engagement capabilities to create more connected experiences and drive business results. For example:

• Adler Mannheim uses an AI-powered data foundation to boost fan subscriptions by 50% and improve pre-game fan engagement by 80%.
• Molton Brown combines AI-enhanced commerce and personalization to create seamless customer experiences that strengthen loyalty while maintaining 100% uptime during peak periods.
• Douglas connects AI-driven shopping experiences, such as virtual beauty tools, and personalized product recommendations to deliver engaging and elevated customer experiences.

Advancing toward the Autonomous Enterprise

Being named a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Agentic Marketing for B2C Enterprises 2026 Vendor Assessment is an important milestone for SAP and the evolution of agentic marketing as a category.  As organizations move from experimenting with AI to deploying agents that can reason, recommend, and act, we believe this recognition validates SAP’s approach of combining AI, trusted business data, and connected business processes to help customers navigate this next phase of transformation.

The vision of the Autonomous Enterprise is one in which AI-powered agents help organizations connect customer, operational, and business data to make and execute decisions with greater speed, relevance, and scale. In this future, AI doesn’t replace human expertise; it amplifies it. Intelligent assistants and agents can help teams act faster and more effectively, with governance and guardrails that keep people responsible for the strategy, creativity, and judgment that build lasting customer relationships.

Ultimately, the success of agentic AI will depend not only on what it can do, but on how much customers and businesses trust it to act on their behalf.

Learn more

Download the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Agentic Marketing for B2C Enterprises 2026 Vendor Assessment excerpt.

Sara Richter is chief marketing officer for SAP Engagement Cloud at SAP.

On September 15, 2026, the new sovanta AppHaus Newtown Square opened its doors for American customers.

The grand opening event was scheduled along the local SAP Connect Day events for AI & Data Leaders, so guests from the regional business and technology community were welcomed at the new creative space. Near SAP’s Newtown Square campus, the factory-style sovanta AppHaus now invites SAP customers to hands-on co-innovation work. Experts from sovanta help teams explore and design use cases based on the latest AI-infused technologies provided by the Autonomous Enterprise. As the company puts it, “Others talk about agents. We build them.”

Speakers with three different perspectives

The grand opening event started with a welcoming note given by Claus Heinrich, founder and CEO of sovanta; Christian Heinrich, president of sovanta America; and David Robinson, president, SAP North America and Americas Customer Success Functions. They shared their SAP and partner perspectives and fully agreed that the most important insights came from their joint customers. So, they offered the stage to two long-standing sovanta customers, Elanco Animal Health and Endress+Hauser. Both shared first-hand experiences of their innovation work and journey—and what AI-powered business transformation looks like in their concrete business contexts.

“What we value most about sovanta is how they collaborate with us: honest, well-organized, and always a step ahead in a rapidly evolving landscape,” Sunil Guna, senior director, ERP lead at Elanco Animal Health, said. “Over the past year, they have become a true trusted advisor, and the sovanta AppHaus Newtown Square gives us the place to keep turning ideas into real impact with SAP.”

“The Autonomous Enterprise is not built in a boardroom—it is co-created, use case by use case, in spaces exactly like this one. Having sovanta bring that capability directly to North American customers, right here in Newtown Square, is a genuine milestone for SAP and for the customers we build the future with together,” SAP’s Robinson said.

Looking back – and ahead

Claus Henrich, who is a former board member of SAP AG, looked back on the years of building and growing sovanta as a company: “Since founding sovanta in Germany in 2009, our approach has been to work closely with our customers on real business challenges and turn them into meaningful innovation. That approach has paid off, and bringing it to the U.S. with our sovanta AppHaus Newtown Square is an important next step. I’m proud of what we’ve built and grateful for the trust of SAP and our customers.”

Global innovation support, going broader and deeper

The new location is designed in a creative factory style, reminiscent of the hands-on innovation work that the sovanta team performs with all its customers. Like all other SAP AppHaus Network members, its co-innovation work follows the human-centered approach to innovation.

Thomas Biedermann, global head of SAP AppHaus Network, commended the partner team for opening this new location not far from Philadelphia: ”My heartfelt congratulations to the sovanta team for being the second partner of our global network community to open a second AppHaus location in the U.S. It shows that the innovation approach we share is not only broadly adopted across the globe but also intensified by our partners, going broader and deeper, so to say. We wish you and your customers lots of success!”

Working closer with the American SAP ecosystem

Christian Heinrich explained the advantage as follows: “Establishing the sovanta AppHaus Newtown Square strengthens our presence at the heart of the U.S.-American SAP ecosystem and creates new opportunities to collaborate even more closely with SAP and our customers in the U.S. As part of the SAP AppHaus Network, we can combine proven human-centered innovation approaches with sovanta’s AI and SAP expertise to move from ideas to tangible business outcomes faster. Our SAP AppHaus location is our sovanta Innovation Factory brought to life, where we turn innovation from one-off projects into a scalable, repeatable approach.”

Rolling up our sleeves

“This isn’t just a new location,” Sven Arndt, chief technology officer, sovanta America, said. “It’s a place built around our customers and their challenges. We want to sit down together, understand where AI can create real value, and turn the most promising use cases into solutions that work in practice. I’m excited to welcome our first customers to Newtown Square, roll up our sleeves, and build what’s next together.”

For more information, the new sovanta AppHaus Newtown Square can be found at 3407 West Chester Pike, Newtown Square, PA 19073, United States of America.

Imke Vierjahn is communications lead for SAP AppHaus Network.

See what’s new in the Joule Work mobile app, including AI chat, dynamic Spaces, SSO, expanded languages, and more.

SAP Mobile Start is now the Joule Work mobile app, with a new name, a new icon, and the same workflows users already know. In this walkthrough, see what changed in releases 3.0 and 3.1—and how the app supports work across mobile and desktop.

Release 3.0 introduces two experiences. The Joule Work experience, available for SAP Early Adopter Care customers, brings users into a dynamic workspace where they can express what they want to accomplish and let Joule surface insights, automate routine work, and coordinate AI agents across systems. You’ll see Conversations, an AI chat experience with voice support for quick answers and actions, and Spaces, AI-generated workspaces composed in real time around a specific goal.

The video also covers updates to the SAP Build Work Zone experience, including full-screen Joule conversations, Single Sign-On for trusted web applications, and in-app support configuration. Release 3.1 adds more admin control over support settings, six additional languages, pinned Spaces that sync with the web, language switching for external content, and direct access to favorite and recently used workspaces in SAP Build Work Zone, advanced edition, and SAP SuccessFactors Work Zone.

Chapters
00:00 – Intro: Joule Work mobile app 3.0 and 3.1
00:11 – Release 3.0: New name, same experience
00:33 – Two experiences at a glance
01:00 – Joule Work experience
01:45 – Conversations: AI chat and voice
02:00 – Spaces: AI-generated workspaces
02:25 – SAP Build Work Zone experience
03:16 – Single Sign-On for web applications
03:50 – In-app support configuration
04:05 – Release 3.1 updates
04:17 – New languages
04:31 – Pin your Spaces
04:52 – Work Zone language and workspace updates
05:23 – Learn more

Explore the Joule Work mobile app and SAP mobile apps:
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About SAP:
As a global leader in enterprise applications and business AI, 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: https://sap.to/6054BGuyHg

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Building a resilient, future-ready supply chain is one of the most complex challenges organizations face today. For more than 50 years, SAP has helped organizations navigate supply chain volatility by connecting planning, execution, and business processes across the enterprise. We are proud to share that SAP has been positioned as a Leader in the inaugural Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Supply Chain Management Suites*, a recognition that, in our view, reflects not just where we are today, but the direction we are heading.

Supply chain leaders today operate in an environment where disruptions are constantly changing, customer expectations shift quickly, and the window for effective response keeps shrinking. Organizations need more than digitalization. They need platforms that connect people, processes, data, and business networks—and that turn that connectivity into faster, better decisions.

Our vision: Autonomous Supply Chain Management

The next frontier in supply chain is not just connectivity, it is decision intelligence. At SAP, the Autonomous Enterprise represents our vision for how organizations will run their businesses in the future, with data, business context, policy, and AI reasoning working together so that the right decisions happen faster, more consistently, and at scale, while human judgment remains central.

Autonomous Supply Chain Management is a practical step toward that vision, where people define goals and priorities, AI assistants orchestrate activity across domains, and agents execute the work within governed, end-to-end processes. Enterprises rely on fully autonomous agents to run supply chain processes and decisions within guardrails defined by the organization. Reaction times to disruptions compress from days to minutes. Data collection across organizational silos happens in near real time. Rather than manually collecting and interpreting data, planners receive auto-generated scenarios that are pre-validated and ready for a decision. That speed advantage is transformative.

But the value goes beyond speed. Organizations learn from past decisions and harmonize decision-making across the enterprise, leading to consistently better outcomes over time. AI delivers the greatest value when it is embedded where work actually happens, grounded in deeply integrated processes and trusted data.

Our approach

A truly integrated supply chain platform does more than connect data—it connects decisions. That is the principle that guides how we have built the SAP supply chain management suite, and it is what we believe sets SAP apart.

Our breadth across execution, transactions, business networks, finance, and AI is unique. No other vendor brings together operational systems, trusted business data, and intelligence and orchestration in a single, deeply integrated suite. That breadth matters because supply chain decisions do not happen in isolation—a sourcing decision affects manufacturing capacity, which affects logistics, which affects financial commitments. When those systems are connected, decisions improve across the board.

We organize our platform around three layers. The first is operational systems, including applications such as SAP Ariba, SAP Integrated Business Planning, SAP Digital Manufacturing, SAP Asset Performance Management, SAP Transportation Management, SAP Extended Warehouse Management, and SAP Business Network. These are where supply chain work happens. The second is trusted business data, anchored by SAP Business Data Cloud, which aggregates data from SAP and third-party sources to help give organizations a unified, real-time view across the enterprise. The third is intelligence and orchestration, delivered through SAP Business AI and Joule, our AI engagement layer, which brings together agentic AI, embedded analytics, and network-enabled execution to help organizations move from reactive problem-solving to proactive decision-making.

This architecture helps organizations standardize processes across domains, reduce dependence on fragmented point solutions, and improve coordination from sourcing through final delivery—linking operational, financial, and network outcomes in real time.

Putting innovation into practice

We see demand for capabilities that bring together operational data, business context, and AI-powered insights, and we are actively investing to meet that need. New Joule Assistants are being embedded across planning, manufacturing, logistics, asset management, and supplier collaboration, helping teams act on changes faster and reduce time spent on manual coordination.

Alongside these assistants, we are delivering purpose-built AI agents across supply chain processes, designed to take guided action within defined business guardrails while keeping people firmly in control. These capabilities are becoming available in phases through 2026, aligning with customers’ existing SAP landscapes.

Delivering real results for customers

Ultimately, in our opinion, recognition like this is only meaningful when it reflects real impact for the organizations we serve. Takeda Pharmaceuticals International AG, a global leader in R&D-based biopharmaceuticals, offers a concrete example of what this looks like in practice. Using SAP’s supply chain planning assistant, Takeda has moved from manual root-cause analysis to AI-detected diagnostics and AI-suggested remediation, with automated performance tracking that enables a self-healing supply chain capability.

“AI represents the key enabler for Takeda’s transformation for the future,” said Rebecca Kaufmann, senior vice president and head of Enterprise Platforms at Takeda Pharmaceuticals. “We are combining the SAP industry and technology knowledge with our organizational real-life experience. The supply chain planning assistant will provide us with AI-detected root causes and AI-suggested remediation and also automated performance tracking resulting in a self-healing capability.”

Looking ahead

Supply chains don’t become autonomous overnight. This evolution happens workflow by workflow, expanding automation where it delivers real value, while keeping people firmly in control. Supply chain teams are increasingly looking to spend less time monitoring and firefighting and more time shaping decisions, managing trade-offs, and building resilience.

We are grateful to the many customers, partners, analysts, and SAP teams whose collaboration and insights help shape our products and strategy. While we are honored by this recognition, we view it as an important milestone for us rather than a destination. We remain committed to ongoing innovation that helps organizations transform their supply chains into strategic sources of competitive advantage—and we thank our customers for their trust in that journey.

Devesh Mishra is GM and chief product officer for SAP Supply Chain Management.

*Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Supply Chain Management Suites, Jan Snoeckx, Balaji Abbabatulla, Christian Titze, August 11, 2026.

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally, and MAGIC QUADRANT is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
Gartner does not endorse any company, vendor, product or service depicted in its publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s business and technology insights organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this publication, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Not all business data fits neatly into flat tables. Product catalogs, org charts, and account structures often rely on parent-child relationships that standard data models can’t represent well.