Procurement and finance leaders are facing a nearly impossible mandate. Cost control is no longer enough.

They are expected to manage risk, ensure compliance, and deliver strategic value, all while navigating talent shortages and increasing operational complexity. And most are doing it without the end-to-end visibility they need.

Workflows are disconnected, decision-making is reactive, and policies are inconsistently enforced. I have heard this from customers across every industry and, frankly, it is a problem that traditional approaches to procurement technology haven’t fully solved.

That’s what makes this moment different. At SAP Sapphire, we introduced the Autonomous Enterprise, a fundamental shift in how businesses operate, with AI assistants and agents powering end-to-end execution at scale, with governance built in. Critically, this isn’t just about adding AI features to existing tools. It is about moving from AI in applications to AI on applications—intelligence that works across your entire landscape, not just inside individual products.

Autonomous Spend Management: From concept to reality

Autonomous Spend Management is a core pillar of the Autonomous Enterprise vision, designed to address the fragmentation that holds procurement and finance teams back. By applying agentic AI across procurement, travel, expenses, and external workforce processes, we’re creating continuity where disconnection exists today—intelligent systems that orchestrate activities, connect context, and surface the right insights at the right moment.

What this means for the people doing the work is equally significant. When AI handles routine execution, decision-makers get time and clarity back. They can intervene earlier, with better information, and focus on more strategic work that actually moves the needle.

To bring this to life, we are introducing a new set of Joule Assistants, AI-powered teammates designed to support procurement and spend management across the full life cycle:

• Category Management Assistant: Analyzes spend patterns, delivers market intelligence, and helps build sharper category strategies
• Sourcing Assistant: Manages the entire sourcing life cycle, from drafting RFPs and bids to recommending negotiation strategies
• Supplier Management Assistant: Provides comprehensive oversight of the supply base, from intelligent classification to continuous multi-dimensional risk monitoring
• Contract Assistant: Streamlines contract authoring, flags renewal opportunities, and connects supplier selection through to contract execution
• Requisition Assistant: Guides users to the right buying channel, auto-fills fields, and uses advanced trade-off analyses to help maximize volume discounts
• Buying Assistant:Helps professional buyers identify spend leakage, surface optimal suppliers, and automate order consolidation
• Receiving Assistant: Auto-creates goods receipts and service entry sheets and guides users through quality tracking so nothing falls through the cracks
• Invoicing Assistant: Handles invoice capture, duplicate detection, and payment proposals so finance teams can close faster with fewer errors
• Services Procurement Assistant: Manages the full SOW life cycle from creation through compliance tracking
• Travel Assistant: Simplifies trip planning with pre-spend estimates, streamlined approvals, and built-in compliance guidance
• Expense Management Assistant: Automates expense reporting, capturing details, flagging errors, and keeping everything compliant

The Autonomous Spend Management capabilities run across our cloud ERP application portfolio, including SAP Cloud ERP Private, for end-to-end coverage across business processes and systems.

Why connected processes are critical

Connection is just as powerful as intelligence, and that conviction runs through everything we  announced this week. AI can only do so much if the underlying processes are still fragmented.

In next-gen SAP Ariba Buying, new Joule Agents support purchasing and policy management through a more intuitive, persona-driven experience, guiding users toward compliant, contract-linked options while improving catalog management and document traceability. Deeper integration with SAP S/4HANA Private Cloud Edition and SAP ERP Central Component means these capabilities work with existing ERP investments, not around them.

SAP Ariba Contracts now brings contract creation, approvals, and compliance tracking into a single unified workspace. AI-assisted drafting lets teams create contracts using natural language, while centralized visibility into terms, pricing, and key dates keeps data consistent and connected to downstream procurement processes.

We also introduced a new Joule Agent in SAP Ariba Intake Management to automate how procurement requests are captured and routed across SAP and non-SAP systems. And expanded supplier evaluation capabilities in SAP Ariba Supplier Lifecycle and Performance let teams segment performance data by geography, business unit, or category – with insights feeding directly into 360-degree supplier profiles to inform sourcing and procurement decisions.

Expanding visibility into services spend and supporting adoption

Nowhere is the need for connected processes more apparent than in asset-intensive industries. In oil and gas, mining, and utilities, external workers can make up 40% of the workforce, yet most organizations are still managing them through manual processes and disconnected systems. The risks are real: expired certifications, overpayments, and poor visibility into work billed versus work actually done.

New SAP Fieldglass capabilities address these challenges by bringing together the full contractor life cycle, from the moment a worker arrives on site through to final payment. Organizations can now automate time tracking, verify worker credentials and safety requirements before granting site access, maintain tighter controls over equipment, and dramatically reduce the manual effort involved in invoicing.

We’re also using AI to accelerate SOW creation by automatically recommending worker roles based on the SOW description and historical buyer data, which reduces manual setup and improves consistency from the start. And to support adoption, WalkMe Premium is now integrated with SAP Fieldglass and SAP Ariba, providing in-app guidance for tasks such as creating statements of work, approving timesheets, and hiring candidates.

The future of spend management

Autonomous Spend Management marks a fundamental shift from managing processes to delivering business outcomes. From chasing cost savings to actively shaping resilience, margin, and growth. From reacting to events to anticipating them.

The real strategic implication is this: Spend does not happen in isolation. Every contract and invoice has a downstream effect on financial performance. When those decisions are made in context—with AI connecting procurement, supply chain, and finance—the enterprise doesn’t just run more efficiently, it runs as one system.

That’s what we are building, and what we announced this week marks a significant step forward.

For more details on this week’s announcements, see the SAP Sapphire Innovation News Guide. For more details on the latest updates in travel and expense, please refer to the SAP Concur Fusion 2026 announcements.

Etosha Thurman is co-business lead and chief marketing officer for SAP Finance & Spend Management.

At the SAP Transformation Excellence Summit in The Hague, the Netherlands, last week, with over 1,500 prospects, customers, and partners in attendance, SAP LeanIX, SAP Signavio, and WalkMe announced a range of new features and products. The theme of the summit, which followed the SAP Transformation Excellence Summit in Austin, TX, in September, was “Power Up.”

The announcements underlined all the ways that SAP’s Business Transformation Management solutions, and the integrated toolchain to which they belong, can empower organizations to develop a scalable and sustainable transformation capability.

Cost optimization, EA standardization, and AI adoption

Companies increasingly look to fund innovation, particularly when it comes to AI, by digging into existing budgets.

At the summits, André Christ, co-founder and general manager at SAP LeanIX, announced new features focused on application TCO (total cost of ownership) to help companies find cost savings across the IT landscape that can be reallocated to more strategic investment. These TCO features include the addition of cost KPIs to the architecture executive dashboard, the ability to enhance factsheets with configurable calculations, and an application TCO view in the application landscape report.

Christ also announced a new approach to target architecture planning in SAP LeanIX, allowing customers to start by diagramming their future state and then modeling backwards. Architects and business leaders thus can get a more streamlined experience, from design to execution, allowing them to make thoughtful, data-driven decisions every step of the way. 

To help further facilitate landscape transformation and management, Christ also announced the upcoming release of AI-assisted architecture guidance.

Finally, Christ made several announcements regarding SAP LeanIX’s support for AI adoption and governance. Here, he returned to the AI agent hub in SAP LeanIX Application Portfolio Management announced at SAP Sapphire. Just as SAP LeanIX can serve as the single source of truth for the application landscape, SAP LeanIX can now serve as the single source of truth for AI agents. This begins with the discovery of agents—custom agents, Joule Agents, and third-party agents—and their subsequent tracking and management.

The goal of SAP LeanIX’s agent governance features is to allow organizations to understand what business capabilities agents support, what applications they access, and where they can have the greatest impact. To this end, Christ further announced a new agent radar report and the ability to assess agent adoption through executive dashboards.

As the last announcement with regard to AI, Christ also announced the launch of the MCP server for SAP LeanIX solutions. Model context protocol (MCP) servers are an open-source standard interface that links AI models with enterprise data, helping AI assistants connect to SAP LeanIX workspaces and inventory data. This feature helps organizations leverage AI agents to maintain data and activate AI workflows.

With the AI agent hub and the MCP server, SAP LeanIX can help accelerate the adoption of AI agents while also enabling consistent and scalable governance.

Process excellence, untapped value, and the organization of the future

The summit in Austin also afforded SAP Signavio’s Founder and General Manager, Gero Decker, the opportunity to talk about new features and capabilities in the SAP Signavio portfolio. Just as Christ talked about the ways that SAP LeanIX helps free up resources to fund innovation, Decker focused on the ways SAP Signavio supports organizations in their “quest for value.”

Transformation is not an end in itself. The goal of transforming the IT landscape, processes, and even the overall business is to unlock and realize new value. SAP Signavio has long helped companies find and pursue opportunities for such process improvement and value creation. Now, the AI-enabled transformation advisor, when connected to SAP Signavio Process Insights, can make this even easier by allowing users to use text-based prompts—such as “Can I reduce costs in my sales operations?”—to help generate analysis and recommended next steps.

While improving individual processes in this way can deliver real value, processes don’t run in a vacuum. In order to address this, Decker also announced transformation management capabilities providing visibility into the interconnections and cross-effects between processes.

By allowing customers to better see and understand the impact of transforming processes on one another, SAP Signavio solutions can enable truly holistic, data-driven decision-making.

Decker also addressed agentic AI by introducing a number of Joule Agents that will see general availability in Q1 2026. These agents, which will include a Screen Guide Agent, a Value Case Creation Agent, a Dashboard Analyzer Agent, a Process Content Recommender Agent, and a Workspace Administration Agent, can enable SAP Signavio solutions to help automate repetitive tasks and accelerate content discovery.

A new breed of digital learning technology

SAP completed the acquisition of WalkMe shortly before last year’s summit in Frankfurt, Germany. In The Hague and Austin, WalkMe took the stage as a key player in the Business Transformation Management portfolio.

The big announcement WalkMe shared at the summits focused on a new digital learning offering. By embedding training directly into the applications employees use every day, even when workflows extend across multiple applications, this new solution can empower learning teams to give employees both a comprehensive learning infrastructure and content they need to keep up. 

The key capabilities of this solution include: comprehensive training delivery with in-app search and discovery, in-app consumption, and customizable learning portals; intelligent content authoring with AI-first authoring that turns prompts and company knowledge into multi-media, multi-modal experiences; and the ability to curate and expose training in context with flexible conditions and triggers and behavior-based segmentation.

These capabilities come equipped with powerful analytics so you can measure and understand user behavior and engagement as well as assess content performance.

The transformation journey is just beginning

The summits showcased the power of SAP LeanIX, SAP Signavio, and WalkMe as individual portfolios as well as their combined power as the foundation of a transformation capability. The events also highlighted the amazing potential of these solutions to shape the way companies transform into the future.

At a time when AI is disrupting operating models and every function across the enterprise, the summits offered a reminder of the central role SAP can play in this disruption. From funding and managing transformation to enabling the workforce to adapt and excel in a rapidly changing world, this portfolio of tools can give every organization what they need to help address the challenges of today while unlocking opportunity for tomorrow.

Matthew T. Grant is a senior writer for SAP LeanIX and SAP Signavio.

Top photo copyright: Christian Palm