Imagine a customer moving effortlessly through their journey from marketing through discovery, purchase, and fulfillment.

They see a personalized ad, explore a product through an AI assistant, respond to an offer in their inbox, and open your app expecting everything to simply work. They expect relevance, continuity, and immediacy across every interaction in their entire journey.

Instead, they hit friction:

• They’re asked to repeat information they already shared.
• Promotions don’t reflect inventory availability.
• Fulfillment updates arrive late or not at all.
• And when support is needed, no one has the complete picture.

These are not isolated breakdowns. They are systemic customer experience failures.

In the era of agentic AI, those moments compound quickly. Customers now assume brands understand who they are, what they need, and what is happening in real time, and they expect businesses to act on that intelligence instantly across the entire customer journey.

The agentic era is accelerating this shift dramatically.

This goes beyond surfacing insights or recommendations. Agentic AI systems are increasingly capable of planning, reasoning, decision-making, and coordinated action across networks of agents. AI is fundamentally reshaping how customer experiences are created, delivered, and optimized in real time.

But it also exposes a fundamental truth: when AI moves faster than your data, systems, and processes, it reveals everything that’s broken.

That tension—between rising customer expectations and disconnected CX reality—is exactly what SAP and Google Cloud are solving together with SAP Customer Experience.

The customer experience reality: ambition outpacing execution

Most organizations want to deliver seamless, connected experiences, but they struggle to operationalize those moments.

According to SAP research, 78% of businesses say AI will be essential for retaining customers in 2026. Yet fewer than two in five share their customer data across CX (37%) or CRM (39%) platforms.

This is an enterprise operations problem, and its impact is felt across the entire CX business. And when these touchpoints are disconnected, the customer feels it first. And by the time the company feels that friction, it may be too late to win that customer back.

A new model for customer experience built on trusted enterprise data

SAP Customer Experience plays a key role in the expansion of SAP and Google Cloud’s partnership to enable a fundamentally new approach to CX—one that connects data, AI, engagement, and commerce in real time.

“Agentic customer experience starts deeper in the stack than the customer ever sees—in the quality of the data, the way processes run, and the strength of the platform underneath. With SAP and Google Cloud, we’re building that foundation together, so AI moves beyond insight to action. This delivers continuous, intelligent experiences with the control, context, and execution required at enterprise scale.”

Muhammad Alam, Member of the Executive Board of SAP SE, SAP Product & Engineering

SAP Commerce Cloud endorses Universal Commerce Protocol: powering the next era of agentic commerce

As digital commerce enters the age of AI-driven experiences, a new standard is emerging to reshape how consumers discover and purchase products.

The Universal Commerce Protocol is an open standard designed to enable AI agents to manage the entire shopping journey, from product discovery to checkout and even post-purchase support.

Unlike traditional commerce integrations that rely on fragmented APIs and bespoke connections, UCP creates a shared language for retailers, payment providers, and AI systems. This allows intelligent agents to interact directly with commerce platforms, dramatically simplifying how products are surfaced, evaluated, and purchased.

In essence, UCP transforms commerce from a series of disconnected steps into a unified, agent-driven experience.

SAP Commerce Cloud, long known for powering enterprise-grade digital commerce for global brands, is now aligning with this new paradigm. As part of the growing UCP ecosystem, SAP plans to work with Google to enable its customers to participate in AI-native commerce experiences that extend beyond traditional storefronts and help its merchants’ products be discovered and purchased across the Gemini app and Google Search, including AI Mode.

“Our goal with UCP is to build an open, trusted standard for the future of AI-driven commerce,” said Ashish Gupta, VP/GM, merchant shopping at Google. “Having a leader like SAP endorse the protocol is critical as we work toward bringing seamless, secure agentic commerce to everyone.”

For merchants, this means dramatically lower integration costs, faster onboarding into new AI-driven channels, and the ability to reach new customers beyond their storefront experiences.

In addition, SAP Commerce Cloud will leverage Google Gemini capabilities to power a Shopping Assistant that brands can deploy directly to their own customers. This enables organizations to offer a real-time, AI-driven shopping experience across their digital touchpoints. The Shopping Assistant engages shoppers through chat, voice, and text to help them discover products, answer questions, and turn intent into transactions.

Unlike traditional storefront interactions, the Shopping Assistant can create a persistent, conversational experience that follows the customer across the shopping journey, continuously refining recommendations and guiding decisions in real time.

It can also curate creative ideas—such as themed outfits or complete event concepts—by intelligently combining products based on customer requests. By unifying behavioral signals, real-time inventory, and promotional intelligence, it can increase conversion rates, improve average order value, and ensure every recommendation is both relevant and fulfillable.

SAP Engagement Cloud and Google Cloud: how agents work together for marketing

This new expanded partnership comes alongside another historic milestone for SAP and Google Cloud, announced earlier this year. A fundamentally different approach to marketing execution is now offering marketers a new model for engagement that is built on trusted enterprise data.

By combining customer data and real-time signals like inventory, orders, and fulfillment status with operational truth, marketing teams can now build, launch, and optimize personalized customer engagements, grounded in business context and executed at scale through an autonomous multi-agent framework.

At the heart of this partnership:

• SAP Business Data Cloud (SAP BDC) connects semantically rich data across the enterprise with AI to help enable real-time insights and drive personalized interactions grounded in business context. This includes SAP Business Data Cloud Connect for Google BigQuery with bidirectional, zero-copy data access and built-in enterprise-grade governance and security.

• Google BigQuery unlocks real-time signals across the Google ecosystem, such as geolocation, weather, ad engagement, and rich analytics, for AI-driven segmentation, personalization, activation and analytics.

• SAP Customer Experience solutions can provide the real-time behavioral context: customer profiles, transactions, orders, service interactions, and consented engagement data.

• SAP Engagement Cloud can activate enterprise data, AI insights, and predictions through intuitive tools and AI agents to help securely orchestrate real-time, personalized interactions across the entire customer life cycle.

Why this partnership matters

The collaboration between SAP and Google reflects a broader shift in how commerce and marketing teams operate.

For commerce leaders:

• From search to agents: Consumers are no longer just searching. AI agents are acting on their behalf, making decisions, and completing purchases.
• From channels to ecosystems: Commerce is moving beyond owned channels into distributed, AI-powered environments like search, assistants, and chat interfaces.
• From integration to interoperability: Open standards like UCP eliminate the need for one-off integrations, enabling scalable participation in the AI economy.

With UCP, AI agents can seamlessly access product catalogs, manage carts, process payments, and handle post-purchase workflows, all without forcing retailers to rebuild their infrastructure.

For marketing leaders:

• From prompt to performance: Agentic intelligence becomes operational where business goals, enterprise signals, and marketing processes direct AI agents, translating into real customer interactions and automated lifecycle journeys.
• From manual to generative: Advanced generative capabilities powered by Google Gemini models, such as Nano Banana 2, introduce new agentic skills that help marketing teams dynamically generate messaging, imagery, and campaign variations.
• From dark data to unified data context: With every interaction grounded in business context and continuous engagement signals, messages become truly dynamic. Text messages can turn into immersive conversations with Google Rich Communication Services (RCS) and advertising creative and offers can continuously evolve.

Agents collaborate across SAP and Google Cloud to personalize, activate, and continuously optimize campaigns in real time across engagement channels and media networks.

“With this partnership, SAP and Google Cloud bring together connected AI and a unified data foundation to create real-time understanding of the customer and business context. This enables organizations and CX teams to move from fragmented interactions to continuous, intelligent execution—embedding AI into end-to-end processes and unlocking meaningful gains in productivity, speed, and business impact.”

Jan Gilg, Global President Customer Success & Americas, Member of the Extended Board

Unlocking new value for enterprises

For SAP Commerce Cloud customers, this partnership can unlock several strategic advantages:

• Increased discoverability in AI-driven shopping experiences
• Faster time-to-market through standardized integrations
• Ownership of customer relationships, even in third-party AI environments
• Future-proof architecture aligned with emerging commerce standards

As AI continues to compress the distance between intent and transaction, accessibility to agents becomes just as important as visibility in search results. In this new model, success in commerce is no longer defined by storefront experience alone—it’s defined by how effectively your products, data, and systems can be accessed, interpreted, and transacted on by AI agents.

For SAP Engagement Cloud customers, this partnership unveils a new network of interoperable AI agents, grounded in enterprise data and shared context across SAP and Google. Organizations can achieve measurable outcomes, including:

• Faster speed-to-market through autonomous campaign and content generation
• Lower operational overhead by eliminating manual execution steps
• Always‑on optimization that continuously improves performance
• Higher ROI through relevant, timely, and consistent engagement at scale

Marketers can spend less time managing workflows and more time shaping strategy, creative direction, and customer value.

“What matters is delivering real value to our customers. As customer experience becomes more agentic, organizations need to move faster, stay connected, and operate consistently across every interaction. By bringing commerce, marketing, and service together, we help our customers reduce complexity, respond more quickly, and deliver more relevant experiences that strengthen engagement and drive sustainable growth.”

Manos Raptopoulos, Global President Customer Success Europe, APAC, Middle East & Africa and Member of the Extended Board SAP SE

The future of AI-driven commerce and marketing: what this means for your CX strategy

The partnership between SAP and Google for marketing and commerce marks a foundational shift toward what many are calling an agentic revolution—a world where AI doesn’t just assist CX teams and shoppers but actively participates in the buying process and shapes their customer experience.

For enterprise CX leaders, the message is clear: success in this new era will depend on how well your commerce and marketing platform can communicate with AI agents. With SAP and Google Cloud, SAP Customer Experience is positioning itself—and its customers—to thrive in that future.

Business transformation is tough. Adapting the way you work in response to AI advances, supply chain disruption, seismic political shifts, and more can often draw focus and resources away from actually doing the work itself.

The other key characteristic of business transformation: it’s not going away.

Organizations that ignore the need for change find themselves constantly on the back foot, unable to take advantage of new opportunities, and in an endless loop of reactivity.

But even those businesses that know they need to change fall into a common trap: treating “transformation” as a project, something to be ticked off the list as “completed,” never to be thought of again. Until the next system-wide shock, that is.

Transformation as a capability

The organizations best placed for success are those that avoid both these approaches. They succeed by building their transformation muscle—the capacity to run multiple transformations, consistently and concurrently.

Let’s be clear: for modern enterprises, change is not something that happens as a time-limited or even clearly definable event. Change is much closer to an operational reality, something so intrinsically connected to how businesses work that it can’t be separated from decisions, processes, and all the other elements that allow an organization to function.

“Most enterprises run four or more transformations a year. Building a repeatable transformation capability you can strengthen over time makes all the difference,” Dee Houchen, chief marketing officer for SAP LeanIX and SAP Signavio, says. “The capacity to adapt and transform is not just a competitive edge, it’s a basic business requirement. And so, knowing where your transformation strengths and weaknesses lie is critical to ensuring your business can function effectively in today’s complex environment.”

In other words, effective business transformation is just as important to the way a company works as any other aspect you could name. Organizations with the skills and knowledge to transform repeatedly and at scale, and to flexibly apply those skills and that knowledge in different contexts, will be those that survive and thrive.

So how can you determine whether your business has the right transformation muscles?

Assessing your capability

SAP has created a quick and easy online tool that can measure your organization’s transformation capability as it stands right now, so you can make the right decisions to build your business for the future.

Grounded in recent Forrester research assessing levels of business transformation management maturity around the globe, the tool uses this data as a baseline to assess transformation capability across five domains: strategy and leadership, applications and technology, process, data, and people.

Using self-reported information about your business, the tool can take less than 10 minutes to benchmark your capability against peers, as well as pinpoint strengths, gaps, and execution risks. But this is not simply a static information-gathering exercise. The tool can set your baseline, helping determine where your organizational strengths and weaknesses are. It’s up to you to take the next steps.

“The real value of this tool lies in using it to unlock value in your business,” Houchen says. “The baseline is important, but it’s the targeted, actionable recommendations that can really strengthen your transformation capability.”

“The tool provides recommendations across critical areas like executive commitment, strategic planning, technology modernization, process optimization, data management, and organizational culture—and some you can already start putting in place,” Houchen adds. “Within a matter of months, you can build a robust, repeatable transformation capability, or, if you’re more advanced already, continue to strengthen that capability and start to expand the possibilities for value-adding through transformation.”

Building your capability

The transformation maturity assessment tool can also go beyond organizational recommendations and can even provide insights on how you can best improve your underlying approach—the transformation mindset that can help drive future success. The tool can help you explore critical components like:

• The role of strategic commitment in enabling transformation
• Opportunities to modernize your technology foundation
• How processes support value-driven execution
• The best ways to manage transformation data
• How organizational culture supports empowerment and adaptability

“Using this tool helps ensure your readiness to navigate the complexities of modern business, turning business transformation from a project into a part of the operational fabric of your organization—a repeatable, scalable competitive advantage,” Houchen says.

Try the business transformation capability assessment tool for yourself.

Lucas de Boer is a marketing execution senior specialist at SAP.

The SAP Partner Awards showcase top-performing partners that have excelled in helping customers bring out their best.

SAP has restructured the award recognition to provide more meaningful distinction, reflect our partners’ essential contributions, and ensure all award categories align to the Partner Ecosystem Success strategy. The newly created SAP Partner Awards replace previous recognition programs, including the SAP Pinnacle Awards, the SAP Global LoB Partner Excellence Awards, and the SAP Regional Partner Excellence Awards.

SAP partners are an essential extension of our team, driving success throughout the Customer Value Journey and helping our customers bring out their best. We rely on our partners’ unique industry expertise, implementation methodologies, and complementary solutions to meet the specific needs of customers, especially as they transition to the cloud and embed artificial intelligence (AI) into their business practices.

To exemplify our ongoing commitment to partners, our new awards framework continues the tradition of rewarding outstanding achievements and excellence. These awards recognize significant partner contributions in market units, regionally, and, most prestigiously, at the global level.

We are pleased to announce the 2026 SAP Partner Awards – Global winners. Only 23 partners are recipients of this esteemed award. These influential partners have illustrated the ability to help customers thrive through innovative services, products, and solutions.

The 2026 SAP Partner Awards recognize 50 categories globally and are based on performance from January 1, 2025 to December 31, 2025. As in previous years, selections were determined using system-generated data on core weighted metrics and key performance indicators. A steering committee of global SAP representatives then viewed, vetted, and ranked the achievements according to internal criteria aligned with SAP’s communicated business strategies.

Recipients will be celebrated during SAP Partner Summit and SAP Sapphire and will be invited to exclusive networking opportunities with peers and SAP leadership. These partners will also receive a communication package to help promote their success. To further amplify this achievement, SAP will list winners on its website for a year and through its communication channels to maximize global exposure to prospects and customers.

Congratulations to the 2026 winners. We look forward to applauding your success at SAP Partner Summit and SAP Sapphire.

Karl Fahrbach is chief partner officer at SAP.