BUSINESS NEWS - The World Management

14 May

SAP SuccessFactors Innovations Define a New Era of Autonomous HCM

We are entering a new frontier of business, marked by extraordinary possibility and equally high stakes. For HR leaders, that tension is especially acute.

The conversation has moved beyond what AI can do into how it should be applied, placing HR at the center of decisions that will shape people, culture, and business outcomes for years to come.

While we have often talked about the “future of work,” the simple fact is that future is already here. The question is whether organizations are ready to operate differently.

AI requires a fundamental rethinking of how work gets done, grounded in the data, systems, and processes that run today’s organizations. And getting it right starts with one clear principle: humans must remain firmly at the center—not as operators of process, but as leaders of judgement, strategy, and change.

What Autonomous HCM means for HR leaders

At SAP, this is the foundation of our vision for the Autonomous Enterprise, announced at SAP Sapphire in Orlando, where AI assistants can run core HR processes end-to-end, so people are empowered to focus on their most meaningful work while staying firmly in control of outcomes.

Autonomous HCM brings together agentic AI, HR applications, and real business context—grounded in deep process expertise and enterprise-grade governance—to help organizations anticipate workforce needs and respond with greater precision as business priorities change.

With the new HCM innovations announced at SAP Sapphire, we are building on the existing breadth and depth of SAP SuccessFactors with new AI-native functionality that amplifies how HR can help shape the business and elevate what employees are capable of.

Automate work with Joule Assistants

The first shift is automation; not as task replacement, but as a new way of working. A new generation of Joule Assistants, delivered through Joule as SAP’s AI engagement layer, bring this to life by orchestrating agents to execute work end-to-end and support decisions in real-time.

These assistants are not just automating tasks; they are guided by employees to reduce manual effort and support a growing range of HR scenarios:

Payroll becomes proactive, not reactive: The Payroll Assistant coordinates multiple Joule Agents to prepare payroll runs, identify issues early, and guide administrators to faster resolution, shifting payroll from reactive process to proactive execution. Working alongside the Core HR Assistant and Time Assistant, it helps organizations manage employee data, track time and attendance, and pay employees with greater accuracy and less manual work.
Talent acquisition flows more seamlessly end-to-end: The Recruiting Assistant helps keep hiring moving from intelligent matching to interview coordination, providing real-time guidance to recruiters and hiring managers. Once a candidate accepts, the Onboarding Assistant takes over to support a smooth transition for new employees. These new Joule Assistants connect talent acquisition processes between SmartRecruiters for SAP SuccessFactors and the broader SAP SuccessFactors HCM suite.
HR services become faster and more intuitive: The HR Service Assistant helps administrators resolve common HR questions instantly, directing employees to the right next step and reducing service center volume while improving the overall employee experience.

All Joule Assistants announced as part of Autonomous HCM are designed to be available across all of SAP’s deployment models, including SAP Cloud ERP Private, giving organizations flexibility and continued access to innovation.

Put Joule Assistants to work across end-to-end HR processes

Reimagine the workforce with AI-driven planning

As AI becomes part of how work gets done, organizations must rethink workforce planning as a continuous leadership discipline, not a periodic exercise. Today, 62% of C‑suite executives say they are dissatisfied with how well people data connects to business performance, according to SAP research, making it harder to turn strategy into action. The new workforce planning capability within SAP Enterprise Planning supports a shift toward strategic work redesign, inclusive of both agents and people, by helping leaders link workforce decisions directly to HR, business, and financial needs.

This workforce planning capability connects data from SAP Cloud ERP, SAP Fieldglass, and SAP SuccessFactors, creating a unified foundation for workforce decision‑making across employees and contingent labor. Together, this moves workforce planning beyond static models. Leaders gain clear scenario insight and the ability to combine human judgment with AI to align workforce and investment decisions.

At a more granular level, constant change means business and HR leaders are often dealing with organizational changes. The new AI‑enabled organizational modeling for SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central replaces slow, disconnected modeling approaches with an integrated experience that supports scenario planning and impact analysis, enabling leaders to evaluate organizational choices with greater accuracy and alignment. With this approach, leaders can quickly explore alternative organizational structures and understand implications before changes are implemented. Whether adjusting roles, teams, or reporting lines, organizational modeling becomes a practical leadership tool, supporting thoughtful change while maintaining data integrity and minimizing disruption. The result is a clearer, more proactive approach that helps organizations make smarter workforce decisions in a constantly evolving business landscape.

Model organizational changes with built‑in scenario planning and impact analysis

Elevate people through continuous upskilling

When it comes to skills, the rise of generative AI has once again accelerated the pace of change. New jobs are emerging, new skills are required, and processes that have worked for decades are being completely reimagined. The new Workforce Upskilling Assistant delivers personalized, AI-driven learning directly where work happens, in collaboration tools, mobile, desktop and SAP SuccessFactors—helping organizations keep skills aligned with where the business is headed. By orchestrating multiple Joule Agents, it supports content creation and generation, adaptive micro-learning, and reinforcement, enabling leaders and managers to identify critical skill gaps and accelerate upskilling, particularly in fast-moving areas such as AI.

By delivering learning in the tools and channels employees already use, the Workforce Upskilling Assistant turns workforce and business data into timely, bite‑sized learning moments. Rather than relying on scheduled courses or standalone systems, HR learning teams can quickly convert existing content to deliver learning to the right person at the right time.

Deliver personalized, AI‑driven upskilling in the flow of work

A new standard for human-centered Autonomous HCM

SAP’s Autonomous Enterprise vision sets a new standard for how HR leads in an AI-driven world, one where AI assistants and agents take on the work of coordination, so people can focus on leading and shaping outcomes. As AI becomes embedded into how work runs, HR is uniquely positioned to guide what matters most, moving from coordinating processes to guiding decisions, building resilient teams, strengthening trust, and ensuring the workforce is ready for what’s ahead.

That is the promise of an Autonomous HCM platform: human expertise elevated by AI, delivering meaningful impact for both people and the business.

Learn more about how SAP is delivering Autonomous HCM by catching the replay of the HCM Innovation keynote at SAP Sapphire Virtual.

Dan Beck is general manager and chief product officer for SAP SuccessFactors.

14 May

BUSINESS NEWS

Why AI Raises the Stakes for Customer Experience

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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.

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.

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.
Gartner does not endorse any company, vendor, product or service depicted in its publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s business and technology insights organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this publication, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
Gartner and Magic Quadrant are trademarks of Gartner, Inc., and/or its affiliates.

14 May

BUSINESS NEWS

SAP Unveils Business AI Platform to Power the Autonomous Enterprise

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SAP CEO Christian Klein delivered a bold new vision for the company and its customers yesterday that will enable them to become autonomous enterprises and use agentic AI accurately, securely, and at scale.

In his kickoff keynote at SAP Sapphire Orlando, Florida, Klein and other SAP Board members detailed how SAP plans to bring agentic AI to the world’s most critical business workflows so that humans and AI can meet the accelerating demands of global business profitably, strategically, and safely.

“Today I’m super proud to launch our new SAP Business AI Platform, which forms the basis for our vision of the future of business: the Autonomous Enterprise, where agents run the business and you can focus on what truly matters,” Klein said.

Enterprise AI is at an inflection point, Klein told his 30,000-strong in-person and virtual keynote audience, and SAP is in a unique position to deliver what customers need to turn their businesses into autonomous enterprises.

14 May

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BUSINESS NEWS

A Symphony of Partnership to Ring in the Era of the Autonomous Enterprise

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SAP partners attending Partner Summit at SAP Sapphire in Orlando got a sneak peek into a moment in history: the launch of the Autonomous Enterprise.

During our event keynote, I took time to preview this exciting new venture, which was formally announced at SAP Sapphire, alongside our CEO and chairman of the Executive Board, Christian Klein.

We explored how the Autonomous Enterprise is SAP’s new north star and vision. It’s the future of business where AI transforms how people work and processes run.

Building on the Suite-as-a-Service foundation established last year at SAP Sapphire, SAP is reinventing itself for AI-native operations that move customers from point-solution AI to enterprise-wide autonomous operations.

With this launch, we’re also re-framing some of the misconceptions and hesitations that we know our customers have about AI.

AI isn’t technology for technology’s sake; it’s about driving outcomes, like real-time intelligence, automated end-to-end workflows, and continuous improvement—all important aspects that AI can deliver.

SAP partners are SAP’s force multiplier to bring the Autonomous Enterprise to life, expanding reach, credibility, and adoption. To help SAP partners evolve their practices to align with this vision, we also announced significant new investments in the partner ecosystem during the event.

SAP Business AI partner-led adoption program

The Partner Summit at SAP Sapphire in Orlando included the launch of a new offer that funds partners who activate, extend, build, and deploy SAP Business AI for customers. The SAP Business AI partner-led adoption program is a significant opportunity for partners to guide their clients to unlock the potential of SAP Business AI Platform.

At SAP Sapphire, SAP Executive Board Member and Chief Operating Officer Sebastian Steinhaeuser commented on our need to deepen our partner investments: “SAP pledges €100M to our partner ecosystem today to fast forward AI adoption and accelerate our customers path to the Autonomous Enterprise. Partners are able to tap into this fund when they support our customers in the adoption and consumption of SAP-delivered agents as well as by working with them to extend agents and build custom agents on our SAP Business AI Platform.”

The program has four packages:

Adoption: AI Assistant activated and deployed
Launch: Joule Studio partner-built custom agent or workflow/pro-code application
Performance: Joule Studio partner-built custom agent and workflow/pro-code application
Enterprise: Minimum of three Joule Studio partner-built custom agents and workflow/pro-code application

SAP will actively nominate customers with potential for this program. Partners can also reach out to SAP with their suggestions. If the customer qualifies, SAP will approve the proposed services, and the SAP partner will execute a statement of work with the customer and share the required documentation with SAP for funding.

SAP Business AI and data validated partner program

This new program distinguishes partners that demonstrate a holistic approach to SAP Business AI and data along with deep expertise and close alignment with our SAP Business AI and data strategy. Built on the foundation of the existing Competency Framework for the SAP PartnerEdge program and enhanced by SAP Business AI and data requirements, this designation signals to customers that these partners are capable and genuinely invested in delivering the full promise of the Autonomous Enterprise, including guidance with autonomous domain blueprint adoption and building agentic scenarios on SAP Business AI Platform.

Partner agent race to SAP TechEd

Building on the strong momentum of the partner agent race to SAP Sapphire, in which partners submitted more than 680 agents, SAP is inviting partners to join the next chapter of the program. Partner agent race to SAP TechEd spotlights enterprise-grade, secure, scalable, production‑deployed AI agents in live environments, built on SAP Business AI Platform.

For the partner agent race to SAP TechEd, agents must be:

Developed with Joule Studio and deployed to SAP Business AI Platform runtime
Deployed on SAP Business AI Platform using SAP Cloud SDK for AI and AI Foundation

Extensions of SAP-delivered agents must also be created with Joule Studio, and agents that only integrate via direct APIs or integration services for SAP BTP are out of scope for this project. SAP encourages partners to begin preparing eligible agents as soon as the timeline, evaluation criteria, and other details are released in the coming weeks.

End-to-end partner enablement strategy

SAP is introducing a structured enablement path that takes partners from awareness to action. SAP has combined large-scale enablement and market recognition programs to scale the partner ecosystem for the Autonomous Enterprise and SAP Business AI Platform.

The enablement plan includes a deep-dive Autonomous Enterprise curriculum for sales, presales, consultants, and developers. Partners can take advantage of hands-on workshops, regional innovation days in priority markets, and Hack2Build sprints focused on agent-based use cases. Dedicated Autonomous Enterprise and SAP Business AI Platform pages on SAP Partner Portal provide all the information partners need for success, regardless of where they are in their AI journey.

SAP will deepen this enablement strategy with the upcoming “AI era powered by the Autonomous Enterprise” learning, covering SAP Business AI Platform, Joule Studio, and more for learners who want hands-on platform experience. SAP will also host live webinars connecting partners directly to the Autonomous Enterprise narrative, platform strategy, and key commercial updates. Partners can find additional curated learning and enablement content on the Partner Zone at learning.sap.com.

A soundtrack for the future, a symphony of success

Closing out our keynote for Partner Summit at SAP Sapphire in Orlando, we underscored how critical our partners are to this moment.

Our focus is to enable partners to adopt and extend the Autonomous Enterprise and SAP Business AI Platform, accelerating ecosystem‑led growth in support of SAP’s AI‑first strategy. Our goal is ambitious: We want to see every SAP customer enjoy an AI experience with SAP in the next year. Let’s get them on the cloud and toward our vision.

Together, we’ll keep pushing the tempo, layering innovation, and building the soundtrack for the Autonomous Enterprise, ultimately creating a symphony of success for our customers.

Karl Fahrbach is chief partner officer of SAP.

14 May

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BUSINESS NEWS

Business Transformation Management Helps Lay the Foundation for the Autonomous Enterprise

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At SAP Sapphire this week, SAP shared a clear point of view on where enterprise transformation is headed: toward an autonomous enterprise, where AI doesn’t simply support work but actively reshapes how work gets done.

The autonomous enterprise reflects a fundamental shift in how organizations operate using real‑time intelligence to guide decisions, orchestrate processes end to end, and continuously adapt as conditions change. AI becomes embedded into the fabric of the enterprise, helping every function operate with greater speed, resilience, and confidence.

The foundation of the autonomous enterprise is the SAP Business AI Platform, which infuses AI with the process knowledge, data, and governance organizations depend on.

Business Transformation Management solutions from SAP help power the SAP Business AI Platform by bringing together insights and enterprise knowledge that have long been fragmented and isolated in silos.

Business Transformation Management solutions from SAP help deliver the promise of the autonomous suite. Here’s how.

SAP Agent Hub: Command center for agentic governance

Now available, the SAP AI Agent Hub helps organizations discover, inventory, govern, and evaluate AI agents across the enterprise landscape. In fact, it’s already being used by 150 companies with over 100, 000 agents under management. SAP AI Agent Hub acts a system of records for all AI agents, large language models (LLMs), and Model Context Protocols (MCP) servers.

In the context of SAP Business AI platform, SAP AI Agent Hub underpins the governance pillar, ensuring organizations can deploy and manage AI agents safely and at scale.

In addition to the enterprise architecture context that SAP LeanIX provides, along with an MCP server giving agents access to architecture data, SAP AI Agent Hub enables enterprise architects to apply proven governance practices, such as mapping to business capabilities, to the entire agentic landscape. The addition of basic agent mining capabilities supported by SAP Signavio provides visibility into the behavior of AI agents, their conformance with policies, and their business impact.

From the standpoint of the Autonomous Enterprise, the insight the hub provides is not only necessary, it’s critical.

New AI capabilities

The new Enterprise Architecture Assistant from SAP LeanIX is supported by several new agents, including two highlighted here. The Enterprise Content Research Agent draws on internal business content to enrich architecture data, while the Enterprise Architecture Web Research Agent scans the web for relevant vendor and application information.

These enhancements are part of a broader set of AI capabilities in SAP LeanIX. The solution now makes it easier to create surveys, automate tasks, perform calculations, and plan target architectures. In addition, significantly improved semantic search enables Claude, AI co‑pilots, and other agents to seamlessly access and work with enterprise architecture data.

In SAP Signavio Process Transformation Suite, we redesigned SAP Signavio Process Modeler with an AI-first architecture, modernized user experience and deeper integration with SAP Autonomous Suite. SAP Signavio also introduced the Process Transformation Assistant to enable business users to conduct sophisticated process analysis through natural language prompts. The assistant can identify high-impact opportunities for agent deployment, accelerating the time from question to decision and providing context-aware process insights to anyone.

Looking ahead to a new paradigm

Despite the rapid pace of change brought about by agentic AI, we are still in the early days of this technological revolution. To succeed and continue to ride the wave of innovation, companies need to aggregate and organize their procedural knowledge about how they operate. This knowledge is often fragmented across many structured and unstructured sources—such as process models, application logic, documents, and chats—to create a coherent view of how the business s runs.

This foundation enables agents to understand and act within the business context. In turn, agents will continuously contribute back, enriching and evolving this knowledge repository over time.

At SAP Signavio we call this storehouse “company memory.” Company memory, comprised in part of process atoms, captures all the knowledge of operational practices, business rules, preferences, and more so that it can be accessed by agents as needed to check conformance and change behavior.

To enable the Autonomous Enterprise, you need to capture the tribal wisdom and unstructured knowledge your company depends on to operate today. That is what process atoms and a centralized company memory, accessed and updated by agents, do for you. In the future, it’s hard to imagine how any enterprise will succeed without the context, learning, and guidance that company memory delivers.

Business transformation never stops

As our research has shown, business transformation is continuous. That’s why you need a capability in place that allows for planning, managing, and realizing value from every transformation you undertake.

This year at SAP Sapphire , we talked about all the ways our solutions support this capability as well as all the ways our solutions continue to evolve in the era of the autonomous enterprise, allowing you to adapt, innovate, and thrive into the future.

Get started today

Learn more about Business Transformation Management solutions from SAP here
Learn more at the upcoming SAP Transformation Excellent Summit here
Get more information on SAP LeanIX here.
Get more information on SAP Signavio here

Andre Wenz is chief product officer of SAP Signavio.
Dominik Rose is chief product officer of SAP LeanIX.

14 May

BUSINESS NEWS

Accelerate the Autonomous Enterprise with SAP Business Data Cloud

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This week at SAP Sapphire Orlando, we announced SAP Business AI Platform, infusing AI with the process knowledge, data, and governance organizations depend on.

SAP Business Data Cloud (SAP BDC) is the data foundation of that platform, the business data fabric that anchors universal business context, serving as the trusted knowledge core for every enterprise application and agent.

The future of agentic organizations will be driven by AI with the deepest organizational knowledge. That future doesn’t start with AI models; it starts with whether your data foundation can give agents the business context they need to act autonomously.

Today, we are introducing innovations that move organizations closer to becoming an autonomous enterprise.

Turn all your data into business outcomes

A business data fabric architecture ensures every agent, application, and decision draws from the same trusted business context. And today, we are introducing new business data fabric capabilities that bring multi-model, unified master data, and embedded governance to your agentic foundation.

SAP HANA Cloud natively available in SAP Business Data Cloud: SAP HANA Cloud is now a core component of SAP Business Data Cloud. As the AI database for SAP BDC, SAP HANA Cloud provides a unified in-memory engine for agents to reason across transactional, analytical, and multi-model workloads such as spatial, graph, and vector. In practice, this means agents can navigate relationships across customers and suppliers, analyze geographic dependencies, or perform semantic search in real time. And because every workload runs on a single in-memory engine with native workload management, inference time drops dramatically, lowering TCO and improving the predictability of AI costs. With SAP HANA Cloud, SAP Databricks, and SAP Snowflake, SAP Business Data Cloud delivers intelligent compute for every data and AI workload.
Reltio in SAP Business Data Cloud: With the completed acquisition of Reltio, SAP is bringing multi-domain master data management capabilities directly into SAP Business Data Cloud, helping customers unify, cleanse, and harmonize data across SAP and third-party sources. Reltio’s AI-based entity resolution identifies and merges related records into a single, consistent view of business entities. Low-latency delivery and Model Context Protocol support enable real-time, multi-agent workflows across your data landscape: a procurement agent, for example, can assess supplier risk and trigger action almost instantly using trusted, real-time data. Together, this becomes a golden record system of context that Joule Agents use to deliver faster time-to-value for business AI.
SAP Master Data Governance natively available in SAP Business Data Cloud: Unified master data is only as valuable as the governance applied to it. To ensure data is AI-ready, governance must shift from regulator to value accelerator. SAP Master Data Governance is now a core component of SAP Business Data Cloud, governing master data and policies across your business data fabric. This results in embedded AI governance that accelerates agent deployment, ensuring every agent operates on data products that are verified and aligned to your business policies.
SAP AI Core integration with SAP Business Data Cloud: SAP is introducing deeper integration between SAP Business Data Cloud and SAP AI Core, enabling AI models to be grounded directly in trusted business data, semantics, and governance. Batch inference can now be embedded into business-ready data products, continuously enriching the data that powers Joule with predictions, classification, and AI outputs.

“This is where SAP Business Data Cloud fits into the vision: not as a centralized system, but as an enabler of cultural change through its unique capabilities. These capabilities allow teams to preserve mission-critical business context across financial and non-financial data.”

Jannie Affeld, VP Finance Systems and ERP, Google

Transform outcomes with Joule Agents

SAP is bringing agentic AI directly into the business data fabric through Joule Agents, introducing new capabilities that streamline data management, analytics, and planning through a conversational experience:

Data product search and creation: Joule Agents simplify how users discover and create data products. With natural language prompts, users can identify relevant SAP and third-party data sources, perform joins and transformations automatically, and apply business context and governance policies.
Automated planning and analytical modeling: Joule Agents enable data modelers and planning teams to generate analytical and planning models using AI. By defining dimensions, granularity, and data sources, users can automatically create models aligned with best practices. Teams can also initiate planning cycles, manage versions, and apply calculations without deep technical expertise.
Easily surface business insights: Business users can ask complex analytical questions in natural language and receive context-aware insights across lines of business. Powered by governed data products in SAP Business Data Cloud and SAP Knowledge Graph, Joule understands relationships, processes, and business logic to deliver more accurate and complete answers without requiring manual exploration.
SAP Analytics Cloud story generation: Joule accelerates SAP Analytics Cloud story creation by transforming data models, queries, and business context into dashboards and visualizations automatically. Users can continue the conversation, drilling into KPIs, identifying drivers, and exploring trends in a single workflow.

Extend context across your open data ecosystem

Last year, we introduced SAP BDC Connect, a capability to share data and metadata with zero copies, preserving meaning across every cloud and platform. We are excited to announce SAP BDC Connect for Amazon Athena, continuing our promise of openness and choice.

This enables SAP data products to be discovered and consumed directly within AWS without replication or loss of context. As a result, teams can build analytics, applications, and AI agents faster while ensuring they operate on trusted, governed business data.

Together with existing partners across Snowflake, Databricks, Google BigQuery, and Microsoft Fabric, SAP Business Data Cloud delivers a connected, open data ecosystem so organizations can extend business context across their entire landscape with zero copies.

General availability is planned for H2 2026.

“Compute can happen anywhere, data can stay at the source when needed, but business context is managed once, centrally, in SAP Business Data Cloud.”

Malin Persson, CIO at Ericsson

Get started today

Build your trusted foundation for agentic AI with SAP Business Data Cloud.

Irfan Khan is president and chief product officer of SAP Data & Analytics.

14 May

BUSINESS NEWS

Announcing New Joule Studio for Enterprise Scale Agentic Development

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SAP has held a long-standing mission to help organizations turn ideas into innovation faster, continually evolving our technology to give developers and business users the tools they need to build what’s next.

From application development to automation, integration, and now agentic AI, we have pushed forward so organizations can move faster, solve bigger challenges, and create with confidence.

At SAP Sapphire, we’re taking a giant step forward in making that mission a reality.

I’m thrilled to announce Joule Studio, a bold new, fully managed offering that empowers enterprises to build and manage the full life cycle of AI agents, applications, and workflows. Joule Studio brings SAP Business AI Platform to life, empowering organizations to build agents that are natively grounded in live business data, end-to-end processes, and rich business semantics that already exist across your SAP landscape.

Let’s look at what users can accomplish with Joule Studio.

13 May

BUSINESS NEWS

The Future of the Enterprise Is Autonomous

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A simple question about a purchase order used to cause frustration, burn time, and waste money.

Employees at LC Waikiki, a global fashion retailer with tens of thousands of employees, had to navigate multiple systems to piece together data across sales and procurement. Answering a single question could take up to 10 minutes.

Today, they just ask Joule. What used to take 10 minutes now takes about three seconds, driving a 70% increase in operational efficiency and a 50% reduction in manual errors.

Using capabilities in Joule Studio, LC Waikiki partnered with SAP and NTT DATA Business Solutions to build a custom AI-driven experience that dynamically interprets user requests, applies role-based context, performs the necessary queries, and connects data across systems to present a complete view in one place. It then links people directly to the relevant transaction.

At SAP, stories like these inspire our vision for the enterprise in which AI transforms how people and processes work—one where people set the direction and AI executes. We call it the the Autonomous Enterprise.

In the Autonomous Enterprise, decisions are grounded in real-time intelligence, workflows are automated end-to-end, and AI proactively improves every function while empowering people to do their best work.

The Autonomous Enterprise also provides fully governed AI you can trust, so you can achieve more. Making this a reality for companies is critical because AI is now essential to how all work gets done. It is increasingly involved in decisions that carry financial, operational, and regulatory consequences.

Joule: One place to direct the entire business

In the Autonomous Enterprise, Joule Work, announced at SAP Sapphire, is the next step in the evolution of how people engage with and execute end-to-end business processes. Joule Work is a dynamic workspace that adapts to intent, keeps people focused on outcomes, and delegates execution to AI.

Through Joule Work, you can say goodbye to manually coordinating work across multiple applications and interfaces. Instead, tell Joule what you want to accomplish. Joule Assistants with role and process context will coordinate teams of Joule Agents to surface the right insights and automate routine work across departments and systems. Rather than static, disjointed systems, you get workspaces that pull together information and menus from various systems that fit your specific needs, in real time.

Joule Work is available now to customers in the SAP Early Adopter Care program. SAP Early Adopter Care program for the Joule Work desktop app is planned for Q2 2026; general availability for both is planned for H2 2026. The Joule Work mobile app is generally available now.

We also announced that Joule’s bi-directional Agent-to-Agent (A2A) capabilities will be generally available in Q4, enabling third-party agents to securely call on Joule Agents and act within enterprise processes, extending interoperability in both directions across SAP and non-SAP environments. Agents built in Joule Studio will natively support A2A protocols, enabling interoperability and scalability for multi-agent execution.

SAP Autonomous Suite: The operational core of the modern enterprise

While Joule Work empowers every individual to do their best work and expand their impact, the SAP Autonomous Suite transforms how entire business functions, or “autonomous domains,” work.

SAP Autonomous Suite spans five domains: finance, spend, supply chain, human capital management, and customer experience. These domains will operate as a single system, so workflows and agents run across functions without fragmenting into separate tools, separate data, or separate decisions. This approach allows AI recommendations to reflect your full operating reality.

With SAP’s integrated suite of business applications and industry-leading business data, AI in the Autonomous Enterprise is grounded in the specifics of how key business functions actually work. This foundational context for transformative AI outcomes is where SAP’s unique experience comes in. For decades, we have been trusted to run our customers’ most important functions. SAP Autonomous Suite infuses our deep knowledge of business processes into your AI, along with the data context and operational guardrails it needs to be truly effective and reliable at enterprise scale.

Each organization is also unique. Over time, your business has defined how your work gets done. These are the rules, workflows, and how systems respond when something unexpected happens, like a failed transaction, so processes don’t break. In the Autonomous Enterprise, AI delivers its greatest value by respecting these boundaries, turning your unique ways of working into a true advantage.

At SAP Sapphire, we announced new Joule Assistants and Joule Agents, spanning the domains of the Autonomous Enterprise, to help organizations move from managing work to directing outcomes. These new assistants and agents will roll out through the end of this year.

SAP Business AI Platform: The foundation of the Autonomous Enterprise

The SAP Business AI Platform turns the vision of human-led, AI-driven business operations into something enterprises can build and run. It enables them to move from AI experimentation to execution by grounding agents and applications in real business context that governs it all at enterprise scale.

At the center is Joule Studio, a fully managed environment that empowers enterprises to build and manage the full lifecycle of AI agents, applications, extensions, and workflows. Intent-based development capabilities allow people to describe what they need in natural language. A Joule Agent then generates structured requirements, specifications, code, and test artifacts grounded in SAP process and data context.

Developers can work within the tools they already use, including VS Code and MCP-enabled toolchains, and choose their preferred agent frameworks, such as LangGraph, AutoGen, and LlamaIndex.

Through deep integration with the SAP Knowledge Graph, SAP Business Data Cloud—and the new SAP Domain Models trained on SAP code, customer data, metadata, and business processes—Joule Agents reason over real, semantically rich enterprise data rather than generic knowledge. SAP Domain Models are available through the SAP Early Adopter Care program, with general availability planned for Q3 2026.

Speed and governance, no longer a tradeoff, are built into the SAP Business AI Platform. At SAP, we believe that corporate governance—including approval flows, compliance processes, identity management, and the ability to audit decision-making—must carry into how AI is deployed, updated, and scaled. Joule Studio runtime provides a secure, production-ready, fully managed environment for deploying agents, helping organizations meet compliance standards while reducing infrastructure complexity.

An enhanced SAP AI Agent Hub also provides a vendor-agnostic command center to discover, inventory, and govern SAP and non-SAP AI agents and MCP servers across the enterprise. Integration with SAP Signavio and SAP LeanIX further embeds governance and architecture transparency into the development process.

The SAP AI Agent Hub leverages enterprise-wide process intelligence to continuously track where AI agents are creating value and can proactively surface where they can deliver even more, because we believe AI needs to remain accountable for outcomes in addition to uptime. SAP AI Agent Hub is generally available, with additional capabilities rolling out through 2026. See release timelines in the SAP Sapphire Innovation News Guide.

Empowering everyone to solve business challenges with AI

We are making the Autonomous Enterprise a reality because at SAP, we believe that companies of all sizes need far more than marginally better AI models or the latest bolt-on solutions. They deserve AI-driven outcomes that increase innovation, revenue, and margins.

The Autonomous Enterprise is what brings our vision to life: AI grounded in your data, connected across your most important processes, and governed to fit how your business runs.

Brenda Bown is chief marketing officer for SAP Business AI.

13 May

BUSINESS NEWS

SAP and Palantir Enhance Partnership with AI-Supported Data Migration Tooling to Accelerate Enterprise Cloud ERP Transformation for Autonomous Enterprises

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Partnership opens new pathways for enterprise data migration with SAP AI-supported tooling complemented by Palantir’s AIP for data migration scenarios to simplify an expedite digital transformation for SAP customers, with Accenture as a co-innovation partner for joint customers

This year at SAP Sapphire, SAP and Palantir announced an expansion of their strategic partnership focused on delivering new data migration capabilities designed to help enterprise customers succeed in the AI era and realize SAP’s vision of the Autonomous Enterprise.

The enhanced partnership is designed to facilitate joint customers’ cloud migrations, with the most complex data migration scenarios moving quickly, securely, and confidently through their business transformation journeys.

AI embedded across the migration life cycle

The expanded partnership builds on SAP’s broader agentic migration strategy, uniting SAP’s deep expertise in enterprise applications and SAP Business AI with Palantir’s AIP to deliver AI-driven data migration capabilities that accelerate timelines, secure cost efficiencies, and fundamentally transform how organizations operate. SAP customers can now leverage Palantir’s AIP for data migration scenarios alongside the agent-led toolchain from SAP, which includes business transformation tools and the new migration and modernization assistants to accelerate their transformations to SAP Cloud ERP.

“To turn the vision of the Autonomous Enterprise into reality, organizations need trusted partners to help them transform their core operations and unlock the power of business data and AI,” said Christian Klein, CEO of SAP SE. “Together with Palantir, we are enabling customers to move to the cloud with speed and confidence through complementary capabilities that accelerate innovation across the enterprise.”

“We are proud to partner with SAP and Accenture to bring the power of advanced AI and data migration to the world’s most important operations. This partnership is designed to help customers realize the full value of their data, accelerate cloud migrations and AI adoption, and build more resilient and efficient operations,” said Alex Karp, co-founder and CEO of Palantir Technologies.

Accenture as global strategic services partner

Accenture plays a key role in bringing this joint effort to life as the first global strategic services partner for this initiative, helping their clients translate these capabilities into large-scale business-led programs. Together, SAP, Palantir, and Accenture can help joint customers identify acceleration opportunities across SAP and non-SAP systems sooner, achieve faster time-to-value, and drive continuous innovation by fundamentally redefining the approach to SAP Cloud ERP migrations.

By embracing AI from day one, organizations can automate migration analysis, planning, remediation, testing, and impact assessment—moving from tracking project timelines to creating measurable business value at every stage.

“In today’s world, speed to value is critical for our clients,” said Julie Sweet, chair and CEO of Accenture. “We are excited to co-innovate with SAP and Palantir to help our clients accelerate their journey to ERP modernization with SAP, which is the foundation for reinventing core operations and using AI to achieve new performance frontiers.”

New SAP-validated deployment options

SAP is making Palantir AIP for data migrations scenarios available as an SAP Endorsed App on the SAP Store, and soon as an SAP Solution Extension, establishing a trusted, SAP-validated path for accelerating complex data migrations, including migrations to SAP Cloud ERP. The new SAP Solution Extension unites SAP’s deep expertise in mission-critical business processes and semantically rich data with Palantir AIP to securely accelerate data migrations for SAP customers. With the new offering, customers can gain faster insights and more intelligent, data-driven business outcomes.

Together, SAP and Palantir are redefining SAP data migrations, including ERP modernization through complementary solutions, transforming a traditionally complex migration process into an effort that enables faster value realization.

Availability

Palantir AIP for data migration scenarios is now available as an SAP Endorsed App on the SAP Store. The SAP Solution Extension is planned to be generally available to SAP customers in Q3 2026.

Jan Gilg is a member of the Extended Board of SAP SE.

13 May

BUSINESS NEWS

SAP Unveils the Autonomous Enterprise

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The company introduces a unified SAP Business AI Platform, deepening partnerships with Anthropic, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft, NVIDIA and Palantir

ORLANDO — At SAP Sapphire in 2026, SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) introduced the Autonomous Enterprise to help enhance the world’s most critical business workflows, so that humans and AI work together to meet the accelerating demands of global business profitably, strategically and safely.

“For the mission-critical processes of our customers, ‘almost right’ just isn’t good enough,” said Christian Klein, CEO of SAP SE. “By uniting SAP Business AI Platform with SAP Autonomous Suite, we anchor AI agents in the business processes, data and governance so they can deliver accurate, compliant and secure outcomes, unlocking new sources of revenue and meaningful cost savings.”

The Autonomous Enterprise includes a unified AI platform for building, contextualizing and governing agents, an autonomous suite that executes core business operations and a new user experience that redefines how people work with enterprise software.

Introducing SAP Business AI Platform

SAP Business AI Platform is a new foundation for building and deploying enterprise AI grounded in real business context. SAP Business AI Platform now unifies SAP Business Technology Platform, SAP Business Data Cloud and SAP Business AI into a single, governed environment.

At its core is the SAP Knowledge Graph solution, which gives AI agents a structured map of business entities, processes and relationships across a customer’s SAP landscape. Joule Studio is SAP’s AI-first solution for building enterprise agents, applications and agentic workflows. Developers can build using the no-code, pro-code and AI frameworks of their choice on SAP-managed infrastructure that is secure, scalable and optimized for enterprise AI.

Deploying SAP Autonomous Suite Across Every Business Function and Industry

Building on this foundation, SAP also introduced SAP Autonomous Suite, which enables SAP’s existing business applications with AI agents capable of running processes from start-to-finish.

The suite will deploy more than 50 domain-specific Joule Assistants across finance, supply chain, procurement, human capital management and customer experience. These assistants will automate end-to-end processes by orchestrating a subset of over 200 specialized agents to execute precise tasks. For example, the new Autonomous Close Assistant can compress the financial close process from weeks to days by automating journal entries, reconciliation and error resolution across the entire process.

SAP also launched Industry AI, expanding its deep industry portfolio through seven autonomous solutions that will enable start-to-finish industry processes and embed sector-specific process logic, data models and regulatory requirements. At SAP Sapphire, SAP showcased its work with European energy giant RWE to leverage Industry AI, helping reduce unplanned downtime across its offshore wind turbines. With SAP’s Autonomous Asset Management scenario, AI agents are designed to analyze data from thousands of past incidents, identify the likely root cause and generate pre-filled work orders with the right tools and proven fixes from other sites.

Designing the Autonomous User Experience

The company also revealed Joule Work, redefining how users engage with SAP software. Instead of navigating individual applications and entering data across several screens, users will now interact primarily with Joule. By describing a desired business outcome, Joule will orchestrate the right combination of workflows, data and agents to get it done.

Joule Work goes beyond conversation, proactively surfacing relevant insights and automating routine tasks behind the scenes so work moves forward even when humans aren’t actively steering it. It will be available on desktop, mobile and voice across SAP and non-SAP systems.

Accelerating the Customer Journey Toward Autonomy with €100 Million Infusion

SAP evolved its customer and partner programs to help accelerate the organization’s journey to the Autonomous Enterprise. To catalyze adoption, the company has launched a €100 million fund for SAP partners to help customers deploy SAP-built AI assistants and agents. The fund is also available to partners that extend or build new partner agents on the new SAP Business AI Platform using Joule Studio.

SAP has enhanced its RISE with SAP and SAP GROW offerings to accelerate AI adoption. Both include access to the Joule Assistants portfolio; RISE with SAP customers will have three assistants activated within their first year, while SAP GROW customers receive full portfolio access at onboarding. SAP S/4HANA on-premises and SAP ERP Central Component (SAP ECC) customers are not excluded: those that commit to transitioning the majority of their current landscape to SAP Cloud ERP gain access to select AI scenarios, bridging the gap between their current landscape and their cloud destination

SAP also introduced new agent-led transformation tooling that can reduce ERP migration efforts by more than 35 percent, driving faster and more predictable projects by automating system analysis, code remediation, configuration and testing at scale.

Lastly, SAP announced a full slate of strategic partnerships across each category:

Platform and suite partnerships include Anthropic, with Claude among the foundation models SAP’s AI platform will leverage to power Joule agents across HR, procurement and supply chain; Amazon Web Services, bringing zero-copy data integration between SAP Business Data Cloud and Amazon Athena; Google Cloud and Microsoft, enabling bidirectional agent-to-agent interoperability between Joule and external agent frameworks; Mistral AI and Cohere, delivering sovereign model options on SAP’s cloud infrastructure; n8n, providing visual AI workflow orchestration inside Joule Studio; NVIDIA, whose OpenShell provides the trusted secure runtime for Joule Studio; and Parloa, bringing AI agents into SAP Service Cloud to handle customer interactions with full access to business data and service processes.
Implementation partnerships include Palantir and Accenture, partnering on complex data migration scenarios, and Conduct for AI-powered cloud ERP migrations.

Learn more in the SAP Sapphire 2026 Innovation News Guide.

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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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