Most customer experience strategies start with the right ambition: understand customers, respond faster, and earn loyalty over time. At SAP Sapphire, we introduced Autonomous CX as a core pillar of the Autonomous Enterprise to make that ambition executable.
SAP Sapphire in 2026: Advancing the Autonomous Enterprise
AI is what brings that ambition within reach. It helps companies act faster, personalize at scale, and engage in new ways. But it is also raising expectations. Every interaction now reflects how well the business runs.
When a customer places an order or asks for help, the experience depends on what happens behind the scenes. If pricing is inaccurate, inventory is uncertain, or fulfillment falls short, the experience breaks.
That is why customer experience is now defined by execution. Customers do not experience systems or intent. They experience outcomes.
Agentic AI can increase speed, intelligence, and personalization. But speed alone does not improve customer experience. It amplifies what is already there. When execution is aligned with process, data and governance, AI drives better outcomes. When it is not, AI exposes the disconnect.
Aligning experience and execution
Autonomous CX brings agentic AI directly into the processes that run the business instead of layering it on top of disconnected systems. It connects AI assistants across marketing, commerce, sales, and service onto a shared business context across SAP CX, SAP Cloud ERP, supply chain, and connected systems. Orders, inventory, pricing, and financials are defined once and used consistently, so decisions are based on live operational reality.
At the center of this shift are AI assistants and autonomous agents. Assistants coordinate multiple agents across end-to-end customer workflows, from discovery to fulfillment, engagement to service, and issue to resolution.
At SAP Sapphire, we highlighted assistants that make this real across the portfolio:
- In marketing, Content Assistant and Campaign Assistant orchestrate intent understanding, content creation, segmentation, optimization, and campaign execution within governance controls.
- In commerce, Merchandising Assistant, Shopping Assistant, and Order Management Assistant connect discovery, conversion, and fulfillment to operational reality.
- In sales, Sales Assistant, Deal Qualification Assistant, and Deal Closing Assistant move sellers from signal to execution.
- In service, Case Management Assistant and Service Management Assistant improve resolution and service quality, with additional assistants purpose-built for self-service, HR service, and accounts receivable workflows.
AI-driven discovery and engagement grounded in business reality
SAP’s collaboration with Google follows the same principle: connect AI-driven discovery and engagement to business execution.
Together, SAP and Google are focused on three priorities: first, applying the latest AI models, including Gemini, to deliver high-quality customer experiences; second, supporting industry standards and open protocols to enable interoperability across ecosystems; third, enabling seamless, personalized journeys across channels and Google surfaces such as Shopping and Gemini.
By combining SAP’s governed business data with Google’s AI capabilities, assistants and agents can connect customer intent from storefronts, search, and AI-driven channels to SAP commerce and order processes. This ensures that what customers see reflects what the business can fulfill.
This is also why SAP is adopting Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) and expanding how SAP product data can power AI-driven experiences wherever customer intent originates. This keeps experiences aligned with pricing, inventory, and fulfillment in real time.
SAP Commerce Cloud innovations
SAP continues to be recognized in analyst evaluations, including the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Digital Commerce, where SAP has been positioned as a Leader for 11 consecutive times.
SAP Commerce Cloud, trusted by the largest enterprises, now extends to mid-market and growing companies on SAP Cloud ERP. The new SAP Commerce Cloud, cloud ERP edition delivers a standardized, end-to-end approach, reducing complexity, leveraging AI natively, and accelerating time to value. It connects discovery through fulfillment via tight integration with SAP Cloud ERP.
For digitally mature organizations, SAP is expanding composable commerce with new and modular cart and checkout services. These services integrate with core processes such as pricing, promotions, loyalty, tax, payments, inventory, sourcing, and order management across SAP and non-SAP touchpoints. This helps organizations modernize their architecture while maintaining end-to-end execution.
SAP is also expanding its ecosystem with Vercel to accelerate storefront development and deployment with optimized performance, scalability, and composable front-end experiences.
In payments, SAP Unified Payment, powered by Adyen, embeds global processing directly into the commerce flow to simplify integration and improve conversion. SAP also continues to enhance its open payment framework with pre-integrated providers, such as Checkout.com and PayPal, giving customers flexible provider choices that are easy to configure and use.
Together, these capabilities reduce total cost of ownership, speed deployment, and make it easier to deliver better experiences at scale.
Sales execution turns insight into action
Customer experience extends into sales execution, where teams need clear next steps and confidence those actions can be fulfilled.
We introduced new SAP Sales Cloud innovations, including field sales capabilities for retail execution processes in consumer goods companies and other field-selling environments. These capabilities provide rich mobile experiences that work offline, making it easier to plan store visits, capture in-store activity, and manage execution in real time.
Sales leaders gain connected insights tied directly to pricing, inventory, and order processes, leading to more consistent execution and better outcomes.
Scaling trusted autonomous service
Autonomous CX is strengthened through partnerships that extend execution while preserving trust and governance.
Our partnership with Parloa combines its agentic AI-driven voice and digital self‑service with service, order, and entitlement data from SAP Service Cloud. AI-driven automation can handle routine interactions with full context, escalating seamlessly and with continuity to service teams when human expertise is needed. This approach helps organizations scale service without breaking trust and ensures customer interactions remain connected to real business processes.
SAP is also expanding its partnership with Amazon to scale AI-driven service across voice and digital channels, enabling faster, more consistent resolution while keeping service execution grounded in real-time business data.
Industry AI in action
We are also showcasing Industry AI scenarios that demonstrate how assistants and autonomous capabilities operate in real business environments.
Autonomous Revenue Growth Management supports trade planning teams and key account managers in consumer products companies that sell through retailers, with applicability to agribusiness and wholesale distribution. Industry‑specific Joule Assistants provide AI‑driven insights across trade planning and execution, helping teams identify growth opportunities, optimize commercial terms and respond more quickly to performance signals. The result is more predictable growth with fewer downstream exceptions.
Unified commerce supports merchandising and operations teams across retail, wholesale, and direct-to-consumer models. Unified commerce connects demand, inventory, and customer data across channels, with Joule Assistants guiding decisions on assortment, pricing, and placement. The result is more consistent execution and faster decisions.
The next phase of customer engagement
Across these innovations and Industry AI scenarios, the pattern is clear. AI delivers value only when it acts on shared, trusted context. When experience and execution stay aligned, speed becomes a source of trust instead of risk.
This is how SAP is approaching the future of customer experience: as a coordinated system where every decision is visible, and every promise can be kept.
Balaji Balasubramanian is president and chief product officer of SAP Customer Experience.
SAP Sapphire in 2026: Discover our bold new vision for how businesses will run from now on
The CX innovations and Industry AI scenarios highlighted here are planned for general availability in Q3 2026.
The capabilities announced as part of SAP’s Autonomous Enterprise run across SAP Cloud ERP, including SAP Cloud ERP Private.
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