A robodog weaves it way between tables. A small drone purrs overhead. Humanoids pick, pack, and pose for photos. Welcome to SAP’s first Embodied AI Jam.

Last week, SAP customers gathered at the Swiss Smart Factory in Biel, Switzerland, to experience firsthand how robots and SAP software can work together to solve real business challenges.

Embodied AI refers to AI agents that interact with the world through a physical body—enabling machines to autonomously perceive, understand, reason, and act in real environments. By connecting these agents to Joule and SAP Business AI Platform, SAP brings business context into that physical execution: robots that don’t just carry out tasks, but understand the business decisions those tasks serve.

Warehouse automation, asset inspection, and material handling are just some of the business scenarios where embodied AI is beginning to create value. Bringing those scenarios to life requires more than a robot. It requires business context from SAP applications, integration expertise to connect systems and robots, and the right robots to execute the task.

“Generating market interest for embodied AI and transforming it from an exciting technology topic into a practical SAP-connected business value demanded a new format,” explained SAP Switzerland CTO Alexander Finger, who was a key driver behind the event.

Unlike traditional innovation jams, an embodied AI jam requires robots and a space where people can safely work with them side by side.

The Swiss Smart Factory provided exactly that environment for SAP Switzerland to host the event. Bringing together customers, robot manufacturers, system integrators, and SAP’s embodied AI experts created a unique opportunity to move from discussion to hands-on experimentation and real-world use cases.

Viable use cases in days, not weeks

Embodied AI may well be all about hardware and software, but Finger says accelerating progress is ultimately about bringing people together. At the jam, customers and partners were paired with system integrators and robot manufacturers aligned to their business challenges.

While some teams explored how inspection drones could connect to solutions such as SAP Asset Performance Management, others investigated how humanoids could support processes with SAP Digital Manufacturing.

The result was a level of progress that typically takes weeks to achieve.

“Finding where embodied AI creates real business value—and shaping a solution to deliver it—typically takes weeks of distributed back-and-forth,” said Lukasz Ostrowski, head of the embodied AI initiative at SAP. “Three days of dedicated, focused time with customers changed that. We could test ideas, challenge assumptions, and iterate in real time until we arrived at something concrete that neither side could have defined alone. What we learn with each customer like this doesn’t stay with that customer—it shapes how we build for the rest of the industry.”

The physical dimension makes embodied AI tangible

For Finger, embodied AI only becomes meaningful when customers can experience it firsthand.

Seeing a robot perform tasks informed by business processes and objectives makes the potential business value far easier to understand than a slide deck or demo alone.

This is why the Swiss Smart Factory plays such an important role; it provides a safe environment where customers, robot manufacturers, system integrators, and SAP’s embodied AI experts can work and explore embodied AI in action together.

As of January 2027, SAP Switzerland will become a member of Swiss Smart Factory, enabling it to host future embodied AI jams as well as shorter discovery formats like those already used for other AI customer-facing events.

While SAP Customer Experience Labs show customers how SAP applications, data, and AI can solve business challenges, the Swiss Smart Factory adds a physical dimension. It gives customers a hands-on environment to explore how robots can be connected, act in a business context, and create tangible business value.

Bringing embodied AI to more customers globally

“SAP is richer when we talk to customers,” Finger concluded, reflecting on the success of the jam. Beyond the speed with which teams developed use cases and architectural proposals, one outcome stood out: customers left the event wanting to continue the conversation and further explore their embodied AI ambitions with SAP.

As SAP Switzerland expands its offerings of embodied AI events, more customers will be able to experience embodied AI firsthand and explore how robots, SAP applications, and business processes can work together to create value.

Organizations today face increasing pressure to align workforce strategies with rapidly changing business needs. Whether planning for future skills, addressing talent gaps, or improving organizational agility, leaders need more than data. They need clear, actionable intelligence that helps them make informed decisions with confidence. 

As a result, people analytics is evolving from a reporting function into a strategic capability. By connecting workforce, skills, talent, and business data, organizations can gain a deeper understanding of their workforce and anticipate future talent needs.  

This evolution is helping lay the foundation for Autonomous HCM, where connected data and AI-powered intelligence help organizations make more informed workforce decisions. 

People analytics: a cornerstone of Autonomous HCM 

The future of HR isn’t simply about automating processes. It’s about providing leaders with the workforce intelligence needed to align talent strategies with business priorities. Industry research, including the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide People Analytics and Performance-Driven Workforce Planning 2026 Vendor Assessment, points to growing demand for solutions that bring together people analytics, workforce planning, performance data, and AI-powered insights. Together, these capabilities can help organizations move from reactive decision-making to a more proactive and strategic approach to workforce management. For HR leaders, that means spending less time gathering and reconciling information and more time focusing on actions that improve workforce performance, organizational agility, and business results. 

Connecting workforce insights to business outcomes 

At SAP, our vision for Autonomous HCM starts with connecting workforce and business data to create a shared understanding of people, skills, and organizational priorities. Through People Intelligence in SAP Business Data Cloud, organizations can bring together workforce, skills, talent, operational, and business data to gain a more complete view of their workforce, identify emerging opportunities and risks, anticipate future talent needs, and make decisions with greater context.  

This outcomes-based approach helps organizations answer critical questions like: What capabilities exist across the workforce today, and where are critical gaps emerging? What skills will be needed to support future business goals? How can talent be aligned more effectively to strategic priorities? Where are emerging workforce and retention risks? What actions can help improve workforce and business performance? 

From workforce intelligence to workforce action 

SAP is transforming its own approach to people analytics through People Intelligence. By bringing workforce and business information together, leaders can move beyond static reporting and better understand workforce trends, skills needs, and organizational priorities.  

Traditionally, acting on workforce insights has often been a manual and fragmented process. HR teams identify an issue, such as a skills gap or retention risk, and then coordinate across recruiting, learning, workforce planning, and business leaders to determine and execute the appropriate response. While analytics can help surface the problem, turning insight into action frequently requires significant time, effort, and cross-functional collaboration. 

The next evolution is connecting intelligence directly to action. As AI becomes more deeply embedded in workforce processes, organizations can move beyond identifying a workforce challenge to exploring potential responses and acting on approved decisions. For example, workforce intelligence could identify an emerging skills gap, help leaders evaluate different ways to address it, and connect those decisions to actions across hiring, learning, internal mobility, or workforce planning. 

Over time, AI agents will help accelerate this shift by connecting workforce intelligence with the actions needed to address it, helping organizations move more seamlessly from insight and decision to execution. 

The path forward for Autonomous HCM 

People analytics helps organizations understand what is happening. Workforce intelligence helps them decide what to do next. Autonomous HCM helps them act by connecting insights, decisions, and execution. 

The future of workforce management is not just about understanding workforce dynamics, but about helping organizations respond with greater speed, confidence, and precision. By connecting people analytics, workforce intelligence, and AI-powered execution, Autonomous HCM enables organizations to move beyond insight to action, creating a more adaptive, resilient, and business-aligned workforce. 

Learn more 

Explore the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide People Analytics and Performance-Driven Workforce Planning 2026 Vendor Assessment to learn more about the trends shaping the future of workforce intelligence, planning, and decision-making, and why SAP was recognized as a Leader. 

Modern B2B buyers expect seamless experiences across web, mobile, marketplaces, and partner portals. In fact, 84% of B2B buyers say it is important for suppliers to operate across multiple online and offline channels.*

To meet these expectations, organizations must move beyond siloed commerce channels toward a connected autonomous CX model that integrates commerce, order sourcing, fulfilment, and customer support across the full customer journey.

The Advanced Success Plan for SAP Customer Experience supports this shift by accelerating omnichannel capability build-out through outcome-based governance. It helps organizations move from fragmented execution to coordinated operations—enabling consistent cross-channel experiences, aligning commerce with sales and service execution, and improving conversion and repeat purchase through end-to-end alignment.

Reality of B2B buying

B2B buying is rarely linear anymore. Buyers often switch between digital channels, sales teams, and service touchpoints before deciding. Research from McKinsey’s B2B Pulse highlights that buyers typically engage across multiple interaction channels before making a decision.**

This reflects how digital commerce has become a core part of the buying process, with 58% of global B2B retailers selling on at least three e-commerce platforms.†

At the same time, expectations have shifted. Consistency across channels is assumed, digital self-service is often the starting point, and speed and transparency are baseline requirements.

That creates a dual challenge for organizations: improving customer experience while also managing increasing operational complexity behind the scenes.

Convergence of commerce, sales, and service

B2B environments combine complex operations with tightly connected customer journeys. Organizations must manage customer-specific pricing and contracts, large and dynamic product catalogs, multi-step approvals, distributed fulfilment models, and integrations across commerce, ERP, sales, and service systems. Customers, however, do not see this complexity. They experience a single journey, from discovery to purchase, fulfilment, and support, and expect it to feel seamless.

A typical journey may include discovering products online, aligning pricing with sales, placing orders through self-service channels, and resolving issues via service interactions. Expectations for real-time visibility, fast issue resolution, and consistent engagement continue to rise, as highlighted in research such as DHL’s B2B E-Commerce Trends. The same DHL report also shows that 78% of B2B retailers expect website sales to grow over the next three to five years, which reinforces how central digital channels have become.†

Yet many organizations still operate in silos. The result is often inconsistent data, limited visibility across interactions, slower issue resolution, and disconnected customer experiences. This is why omnichannel transformation is not about adding channels, but about connecting commerce, sales, and service into a unified operating flow.

Process excellence as a foundation

As complexity increases, end-to-end process alignment becomes critical. Customers experience outcomes, not systems, and those outcomes depend on how well processes are connected across commerce, sales, service, and fulfilment.

Breakdowns typically occur when sales agreements are not reflected in commerce systems, fulfilment is not aligned with order promises, service teams lack customer context, or data differs across channels. These are not isolated system issues, but symptoms of disconnected processes.

In practice, that can mean a customer sees one price in the portal, a different one in the quote, and another one in the order confirmation. It can also mean service teams have to ask customers to repeat information that already exists elsewhere in the organization. Even when the underlying technology is in place, the experience still feels broken if the process is not connected.

Organizations that invest in process excellence are better positioned to deliver consistent experiences, reduce friction, improve operational efficiency, and scale complex B2B models. Process alignment also makes it easier to respond to change, because teams can adapt faster when the underlying journey is not held together by disconnected handoffs.

Why omnichannel matters

Omnichannel in B2B is not just about offering more ways to buy. It is about making those ways work together. When the customer starts on one channel and finishes on another, the handoff needs to feel natural. If not, the customer experience becomes fragmented very quickly.

That matters because B2B buyers are increasingly comparing their business purchasing experience to the consumer experiences they already know. They expect simple navigation, transparent pricing, reliable order updates, and a service team that understands the full context of the account. In other words, they want the convenience of digital commerce without losing the support and complexity that B2B purchasing often requires.

This is also where many companies struggle. They may have a strong storefront, but weak back-end coordination. Or they may have good sales support, but poor visibility once the order has been placed. Omnichannel transformation closes that gap by connecting the customer-facing experience with the operational processes behind it.

Accelerating outcomes with the Advanced Success Plan for SAP Customer Experience

The Advanced Success Plan for SAP Customer Experience helps organizations accelerate omnichannel capability build-out through outcome-based governance and alignment between strategy and execution.

Rather than focusing only on implementation, the emphasis is on measurable outcomes across the full customer journey. This includes enabling consistent omnichannel experiences, aligning SAP Commerce Cloud, SAP Sales and Service Cloud, and fulfilment processes, managing catalog and contract complexity at scale, improving order sourcing and fulfilment coordination, and strengthening end-to-end process alignment.

The goal is to ensure all capabilities operate as one connected system rather than separate functions.

That becomes especially important in B2B environments where a single transaction can involve multiple stakeholders, custom pricing rules, approval steps, and several systems working together at once. Without clear governance and alignment, even well-designed digital tools can create confusion instead of clarity.

With the right operating model, however, organizations can turn complexity into a strength. They can reduce friction for customers, improve efficiency internally, and create a more reliable buying experience across every channel.

The Advanced Success Plan for SAP Customer Experience includes access to Business Process Best Practices which helps customers understand the end-to-end process flow and best practices for executing business processes across SAP Sales and Service. This service showcases reference processes and bridges the gaps that can occur during rapid implementations of solutions in complex landscapes or when implementation of multiple solutions creates fragmented processes without taking into consideration unique end-to-end view.

Conclusion

Omnichannel commerce and B2B digital transformation are reshaping how organizations engage customers and deliver value. Success depends on connecting commerce, sales, service, and fulfilment into a unified operating model supported by strong end-to-end processes.

Organizations that focus on process excellence and outcome-based governance are better positioned to scale effectively and meet rising customer expectations. The Advanced Success Plan for SAP Customer Experience enables this by connecting strategy to execution and supporting consistent outcomes across the customer journey.

For B2B companies, the real shift is not just digital adoption. It is building a model where channels, processes, and teams work together in a way that feels simple to the customer, even when the operation behind it is complex.

Nikola Stojanovski is a product manager for the Advanced Success Plan for SAP Customer Experience.
Tara Tracey is global product owner for the Advanced Success Plan for SAP Customer Experience.

*Digital Commerce 360, 2025
**McKinsey, 2021
†DHL, 2025

WALLDORF — SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) today announced its financial results for the first quarter of 2026.

At a glance

• Current cloud backlog of €21.9 billion, up 20% and up 25% at constant currencies
• Cloud revenue up 19% and up 27% at constant currencies
• Cloud ERP Suite revenue up 23% and up 30% at constant currencies
• Total revenue up 6% and up 12% at constant currencies
• IFRS operating profit up 17%, non-IFRS operating profit up 17% and up 24% at constant currencies

Christian Klein, CEO:

“We had a strong start to the year, with Current Cloud Backlog growing by 25% and Cloud Revenue up 27% at constant currencies. This performance is supported by our momentum in Business AI as we are already delivering real outcomes for customers today. We are growing faster than the market and are gaining share as customers expand across our Suite and with our AI solutions. At Sapphire, we will show how we are taking the next leap forward.”

Dominik Asam, CFO:

“We delivered a solid start to the year, supported by disciplined execution in revenue and profitability. At the same time, we have remained focused on managing our cost base and maintaining profitability as we navigate an increasingly complex and uncertain macroeconomic and geopolitical environment.”

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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