Starting in October, SAP is expanding the Stay Certified experience with new ways for certified professionals to demonstrate current knowledge, including AI-powered roleplays grounded in real-world customer scenarios.

What the cloud introduced, AI has only accelerated: constant software updates, new capabilities, and a faster pace of innovation. For professionals working across the SAP ecosystem, keeping pace with that change is becoming an increasingly important part of maintaining their expertise.

For consultants, developers, architects, project managers, and sales and presales professionals, staying current means understanding not only what has changed, but how those changes apply in their work and in the customer situations they encounter.

SAP Certification has evolved alongside this changing technology landscape. As cloud solutions introduced faster release cycles, regular Stay Certified assessments became part of the certification journey, helping professionals keep their knowledge and credentials current.

Building on this evolution, SAP is reimagining the Stay Certified experience. Across more than 100 certifications, certified professionals will have greater choice in how they demonstrate that their knowledge remains current. Alongside a knowledge-based assessment option, learners will be able to complete short, practical, AI-powered roleplays designed around real-world customer interactions.

From a stand-alone assessment quiz to scenario-based roleplays

The evolution of Stay Certified reflects a broader shift already taking place across SAP Certification: moving beyond assessing what someone knows toward validating how they can apply that knowledge.

AI-powered roleplays bring that principle into the annual certification renewal experience.

Rather than only responding to questions about SAP products and capabilities, learners can work through simulated customer interactions built around defined knowledge goals. The scenarios are grounded in content reflecting the latest SAP product releases, helping learners demonstrate applied, up-to-date knowledge. After each assessment, learners also receive immediate, personalized feedback highlighting what went well and where they can improve, specific to the scenario rather than a generic score.

Learners who prefer or require a non-AI pathway will continue to have the option of completing a stand-alone assessment quiz.

Keeping pace with SAP innovation

As SAP products evolve, so does the knowledge required to work with them effectively.

The reimagined Stay Certified approach is designed to keep renewal closely aligned with those developments. Assessments are grounded in content reflecting the latest SAP product releases, helping learners focus on the knowledge and capabilities that have changed since getting certified or the latest certification renewal.

For professionals, this creates a clearer connection between maintaining a credential and maintaining relevant expertise. For customers, this means credentials can continue to reflect hands-on, up-to-date expertise aligned with current SAP product capabilities.

The approach builds on the broader evolution of SAP Certification toward practical, skills-based validation. SAP has expanded certification beyond traditional multiple-choice exams to include practical, performance-based assessments designed to validate how professionals apply their expertise.

Stay Certified now brings more of that same focus on application into the ongoing certification journey, alongside greater flexibility in managing certification renewal. A new 90-day Stay Certified renewal window will allow learners to pass their Stay Certified assessment within the 90-day window, and their certification continues seamlessly based on the original expiry date. Personalized, time-bound reminders will help learners understand when action is required, while improvements within the My Learning section on the SAP Learning site will provide clearer visibility into renewal deadlines and certification expiry.

Bringing hands-on validation to SAP TechEd

SAP is also exploring how other practical learning experiences can play a greater role in staying certified.

At SAP TechEd in Berlin, SAP will pilot an event-based approach that allows eligible learners to fulfill their Stay Certified requirement through participating in on-site, hands-on sessions.

The approach reflects the same principle behind the new roleplay assessments: practical product knowledge counts. Participation in hands-on sessions can be credited toward certification renewal, providing another way for learners to demonstrate current knowledge.

Staying certified in an era of continuous change

Earning a certification represents an important milestone. In a technology environment that changes continuously, however, expertise cannot remain static.

New releases, capabilities, and AI-powered ways of working mean professionals need to continually revisit what they know, understand what has changed, and apply that knowledge in new contexts.

Reimagined Stay Certified brings that principle more directly into certification renewal.

AI-powered roleplays and the hands-on pilot at SAP TechEd expand the ways learners can demonstrate practical, up-to-date knowledge as part of the Stay Certified experience.

As SAP technology continues to evolve, staying certified is about more than maintaining a credential. It is about demonstrating that the expertise behind it continues to evolve, too.

Diana Alexandra Roesner is head of Certification Transformation at SAP.

As artificial intelligence moves beyond providing information and recommendations, enterprise software is becoming more capable of reasoning, making decisions, and taking action across business processes.

It’s a noticeable shift that could fundamentally change how enterprises operate. But according to Manish Sood, CEO of Reltio, an SAP company, and co-author of Agentic Intelligence, it also exposes a challenge companies have wrestled with for decades: fragmented, inconsistent, and poorly connected data.

“There is tremendous enthusiasm around agentic AI right now, and for good reason,” said Sood. “Almost every company is experimenting with it in some form or the other. But there is a very significant gap between ambition and underlying readiness.”

Research conducted by Harvard Business Review Analytic Services underscores that readiness gap: 94% of organizations surveyed are exploring or implementing agentic AI, while only 15% believe their data foundation is truly ready.

“An AI demo can tolerate a lot of imperfections and gaps in the data,” said Sood. “An AI agent operating inside a real business context cannot. The moment we give software the ability to make decisions or to take action, the quality, timeliness, and context of underlying data becomes much more consequential.”

AI highlights legacy data challenges

Sood believes fragmentation, trust, and governance are three recurring barriers when it comes to AI adoption. Because data remains scattered across hundreds or even thousands of enterprise systems, governance models built for traditional enterprise systems must evolve for an environment in which AI agents can initiate actions.

While these are familiar challenges, the speed and autonomy AI introduces is much different.

Historically, humans have compensated for fragmented systems via tapping into institutional knowledge. Employees know which spreadsheet to check, which colleague to call, or which exception to make. AI agents do not inherently possess that organizational context.

“If a human has incomplete information, we can often recognize it, ask another question, or find someone who knows the history,” said Sood. “In comparison, an autonomous agent may simply act.”

The question for enterprises therefore shifts from whether they can build an AI agent to whether they can trust the environment in which that agent operates.

From digital filing cabinets to connected intelligence

Many organizations still operate around what Sood refers to as the “filing cabinet” model. When businesses digitized, individual functions created their own systems for marketing, finance, sales, supply chain, service, and human resources. Moving those systems to the cloud did not necessarily eliminate the underlying silos.

“The intelligence age requires us to move from storing information to connecting that information,” he said.

This connected foundation supports what Sood and his co-author describe as “co-agency,” a new relationship between people and intelligent machines.

Historically, enterprise technology followed a relatively simple model: humans made decisions and machines executed them. AI changes that equation. Machines can contribute speed, scale, pattern recognition, and continuous operation, while people provide judgment, experience, accountability, and an understanding of nuance.

“If the human sees one version of the customer and the agent sees another, you don’t have co-agency; you have conflict,” said Sood.

Turning insight into action

These implications extend beyond technology architecture as agentic intelligence requires companies to rethink strategy, investment, workflows, governance, and the relationship between people and machines. It’s a notable shift that moves from insight to action.

“Insight by itself does not create economic value. Action does,” Sood shared.

For example, predicting that a piece of industrial equipment is likely to fail can provide valuable information. But an intelligent system capable of coordinating maintenance, locating the necessary parts, and scheduling service before the failure occurs can potentially transform that insight directly into a business outcome. In order for this to happen, however, trusted information needs to be available when and where decisions happen.

According to Sood, four responsibilities are necessary for organizations preparing for this environment:

1. Connect critical enterprise data.
2. Contextualize it with relationships, history, policies, and interactions.
3. Operationalize that trusted context at the point of decision.
4. Govern how AI agents act.

“Define where an agent can act, where a human needs to intervene, how decisions are traced, and how systems learn from mistakes,” Sood explained. “The goal isn’t simply to make more data available to AI. The goal is to make the enterprise understandable through AI.”

Building for the intelligence age

As AI models continue to improve, Sood believes competitive advantage will increasingly come from proprietary data, business context, workflows, processes, and feedback mechanisms surrounding them.

Trust will also become more consequential as organizations delegate greater authority to AI. As a result, companies will need confidence not only in what an agent knows, but where its information came from, how current it is, and what boundaries govern its actions.

“The companies that win won’t simply be the companies with the most sophisticated AI,” said Sood. “They will be the companies that create environments in which AI can understand the business, operate with trusted context, and act responsibly.

Within the global manufacturing industry, maintaining a competitive edge requires a delicate balance between driving internal efficiency and fostering strong external relationships. For Applied Materials, a leader in materials engineering solutions for the semiconductor industry, this challenge became the foundation for a strategic finance transformation program, with an SAP Taulia solution emerging as a key enabler.

The journey began in early 2019 with the launch of Agile Finance, an end-to-end transformation initiative designed to support the company’s aggressive growth trajectory, which included a goal to double in size. The initiative was built around three strategic pillars: enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of the finance organization, promoting career fulfillment, and establishing a robust digital operating model. The impact was significant, with the finance function achieving approximately 35% productivity gains in its labor force.

The third pillar—the move to a digital operating model—is where the partnership with SAP Taulia began.

“The SAP Taulia Dynamic Discounting solution was introduced not merely as a cost-cutting measure, but as a strategic tool to transform and digitize the interaction with Applied’s extensive, global supplier base,” Junaid Ahmed, corporate VP, Finance at Applied Materials, says. “We understood that to reap the benefits of digitization, we had to ensure the suppliers were on board. It needed to be a win-win outcome.”

Unprecedented flexibility for suppliers

The program empowers suppliers—thousands of them worldwide—to self-select which approved invoices they wish to discount for early payment. This is not a continuous, all-or-nothing commitment but rather a decision made on an invoice-by-invoice basis. This flexibility allows suppliers to manage their working capital needs with greater precision, taking advantage of early payment during their own critical periods, such as quarter-end or year-end, to help meet their own financial targets.

The system also drastically improves transactional efficiency. Suppliers no longer have to call Applied to track invoice status, approval, or payment date. All this information is available 24/7 in the SAP Taulia solution, reducing resource allocation on both sides and ensuring both reap the benefits of moving to an integrated, digital system.

Strategic benefits for Applied Materials

For Applied, the program is a testament to its focus on balancing efficiency with strong supplier relationships. The philosophy is a “win-win” built on a crucial spread: Applied Materials, as a Fortune 500 company with strong cash flow, has a significantly lower cost of capital than many of its suppliers. By funding the discounts, Applied captures a return—the discount income—while offering its suppliers funding at a rate close to their cost of capital, but with greater convenience.

This relationship-focused approach is critical. Applied’s supplier account managers actively support the program because they recognize its mutual benefit, not viewing it as a finance mandate to push costs onto the supply base.

Furthermore, the “dynamic” nature of the discount rates is a powerful risk mitigation tool. Unlike fixed contractual discounts, the rates can be adjusted in response to global economic changes, such as shifts in interest rates. When interest rates rose after the pandemic, Applied was able to adjust the discount rates accordingly with minimal pushback, as the core proposition remains the valuable spread between the parties’ cost of capital.

The SAP Taulia Dynamic Discounting solution has been rolled out globally, giving all suppliers the opportunity to use it. This has been critical over the last 12 months as many businesses around the globe have been subject to new and often unexpected tariff costs impacting their margin and their liquidity.

“The flexibility of the solution means suppliers can access funds when they need them, which helps them navigate some of the economic uncertainty that many businesses are facing,” Dirk Holoubek, managing director, Finance Shared Services, explains. “2025 saw a 23% increase in usage of the discounts, reflecting the pressures that suppliers are feeling right now on their cash flow.” 

The solution’s capability to drive sophisticated analytics is also a major strategic asset. It helps provide insights into the different costs of capital between Applied and its supplier base. This data allows for targeted outreach and communication, ensuring that the offer of capital support is proactively extended to the suppliers that need it most.

The strategic value of the solution is further cemented by its ownership. The acquisition of Taulia by SAP brings several advantages.

“Trust is really important to both us and our suppliers,” Ahmed says. “For our suppliers to adopt a new solution, they need to know its technology they can rely on in the long term. Being part of SAP creates that assurance in the long-term future of the program.”

Looking forward, Applied Materials is already focused on the next stage of the transformation project: Agile Finance 3.0, which is focused on enabling the organization to become AI-first. The company is deploying a global, organization-wide AI assistant to drive personal productivity, but the strategic application of AI in the supplier management space is even more profound.

AI is expected to transform decision-making enablement by analyzing critical information and communicating effective options. In the future, AI will be able to proactively assess the specific needs and attributes of the supplier base, enabling Applied to address issues more quickly and resolve them earlier. The benefits are already tangible in e-invoicing: AI has made the solution more flexible and “human-like,” capable of reading minor changes in invoice format that would have previously caused electronic errors. This reduced rigidity and increased flexibility are directly contributing to the overall efficiency of the digital operating model.

By leveraging the SAP Taulia Dynamic Discounting solution, Applied Materials has not only digitized a process but also strategically transformed its financial operations, creating a system that is agile, resilient, and focused on maintaining mutually beneficial relationships with its global supplier ecosystem.

Cedric Bru is CEO of SAP Taulia.