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These longstanding policies reflect standard practice across the enterprise software industry. In our proposed remedies, we are clarifying how they work as part of our broader commitment to transparency and customer choice. The European Commission’s concerns specific aspects of our on-premise maintenance and support policies; it does not relate to or affect our cloud offerings.
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Every business runs on data, but while companies invest heavily in understanding their customers and their markets, many struggle to access and act on their most valuable data of all: their people data. Without a clear, connected view of their workforce, leaders face difficulty answering fundamental questions, such as do we have the right skills to deliver on our strategy? Where are we at risk of turnover? Do we have the right people in the right roles to optimize production and meet customer demand?
The impact of getting people analytics right is undeniable. According to research from IDC, organizations that prioritize insights models and performance processes rooted in people data are more likely to see meaningful gains across the board: 98% continuously realize stronger employee satisfaction, 90% experience a boost in workforce performance toward strategic goals, and 87% see improved employee retention.
Yet for many organizations, the challenge isn’t recognizing the value of people data—it’s unlocking it. Data lives in silos, systems don’t connect, and insights that could drive strategy often stay buried in spreadsheets or dashboards. And let’s face it—the power of AI rests on data. Without harmonized data in one place, organizations can’t fully tap into AI’s potential to deliver proactive insights, predictive intelligence, and personalized recommendations that drive better business decisions.
Take a data-driven approach to HR and talent management
That’s why SAP announced the People Intelligence package in SAP Business Data Cloud, now generally available, earlier this year. Built on SAP BDC, People Intelligence is an AI-driven application that can bring together people, skills, and business data—from SAP SuccessFactors solutions and beyond—into actionable insights that help leaders make more informed people and business decisions.
At Success Connect at SAP Connect earlier this month, we announced new prebuilt insights in People Intelligence for recruiting, learning, succession, career development planning, and performance and goals management—helping to make it even easier for organizations to translate workforce data into measurable impact.
Turning data into decisions
People Intelligence combines unified data from across the enterprise with AI-driven predictions to help forecast workforce needs, anticipate labor costs and risks, and strengthen workforce planning. And with Joule, SAP’s AI copilot, HR teams can instantly get contextual, actionable answers to critical business questions such as:
What’s the total count of our workforce?
Are employees being compensated equitably across similar roles and demographics?
What are the key skills gaps within my workforce, and what teams are most affected?
What’s the most effective way to acquire high-demand skills?
Too often, workforce data exists in isolation from finance, supply chain, and operational metrics, which makes it nearly impossible to see how people decisions impact business results. People Intelligence can change that. By linking workforce insights to core business data in SAP Business Data Cloud, leaders can understand how talent strategies affect productivity, compliance, profitability, and agility, and they can act in real time.
Building a future-ready workforce
The future of work will be defined by rapid change: accelerating AI adoption, shifting skills requirements, and evolving employee expectations. Organizations that are hamstrung by siloed data or manual analysis will always be a step behind.
People Intelligence helps provide the foundation and insights to move forward with confidence. By harnessing people data with the same rigor as financial or customer data, organizations gain clarity on how skills, roles, and costs are evolving—and the foresight to stay ahead of what’s next.
SAP’s new People & Culture Lounge (P&C Lounge) concept provides all SAP employees access to one-on-one conversations with HR experts. The P&C Lounge complements SAP’s existing digital HR service channels and will be available to all 110,000 SAP employees worldwide by the end of 2025.
With artificial intelligence and digital technologies massively transforming today’s workplace, a crucial question comes to the fore: how can companies maintain focus on the human aspect? Personal contact is indispensable, particularly when it comes to support on people matters. That’s why SAP is deliberately pursuing a balanced approach to providing HR support to its employees: modern technologies and AI provide efficient and smart solutions, but personal consulting remains essential to offering employees worldwide the best possible support.
“The world of work around us is changing at breathtaking speed,” says Dr. Christian Schmeichel, global head of People & Culture Services at SAP. “Currently, we have four generations in our workforce, and naturally this changes the requirements and expectations for HR. The P&C Lounge is designed to address complex questions and issues raised by employees that are better resolved through personal conversations than through the HR ticketing system.”
Comprehensive HR support approach based on multi-tier model
SAP pursues a differentiated approach to employee support, which Schmeichel describes as a “multi-tier model.” Employees can find general HR information comprehensively covered on SAP’s internal portal, while standard requests—such as vacation requests, payroll statements, or certificates—are efficiently handled through self-services and the company’s Shared Service Center. The new P&C Lounge complements these offerings as a new service channel that provides the option for individual conversations when needed. This strategically brings the human factor back to the foreground: “From my perspective, this more personalized consulting approach for complex issues on a company-wide basis was missing. This is the blank spot that we are now strategically filling in our HR service portfolio,” Schmeichel says.
When your people operate at their best, so does your business
Previously, personal HR consulting was primarily available to managers through business partners or advisors. With the P&C Lounge, all employees now have access to individual consulting for more complex questions, from personal team issues to challenging payroll questions to career development.
The process is straightforward: employees can schedule appointments through a booking tool and are matched with the expert most appropriate for their query. The system displays which HR specialist will conduct the meeting and in which languages they provide consultation. “Whenever possible, the conversation takes place in the local language; otherwise in English,” Schmeichel explains. For payroll questions, a payroll expert is automatically assigned; for career topics, a corresponding specialist. Intelligent matching will occur with AI support.
“The HR employees who serve as experts in the P&C Lounge have been thoroughly familiarized with the new approach beforehand,” Schmeichel says. Personal affinity is also important: employees must have genuine interest in this type of work and are specifically prepared for the expected topics.
Optimization in HR through AI
Surprisingly, it was the increasing use of AI that paved the way for this new format. “This works because we have developed a very smart resource allocation concept, combined with modern technology that ensures the right expert is selected for each topic,” Schmeichel explains.
However, AI will do more than just help find the right expertise for each inquiry; it increasingly supports routine tasks in HR, creating more time to invest in personal care and dialogue. The use of Joule, SAP’s AI copilot, provides employees with a central point of contact and helps enable significantly faster and more intuitive navigation through the diverse digital HR services, relieving the burden on both employees and HR teams in daily operations.
Precisely because technologies like Joule increasingly resolve standard inquiries efficiently, personal conversation in complex situations gains additional importance. Schmeichel also emphasizes this development: “In the past, there were already pilot projects designed to enable this direct contact with the HR department. But only now do we have the technical capabilities for smart resource allocation and the corresponding capacity through the strategic further development of our HR business model.”
People centricity as integral pillar of our people agenda
The rollout of the P&C Lounge began in late 2024 with pilot projects in Italy and Japan. “We deliberately chose two culturally very different countries to see how the offering would be adapted in each,” Schmeichel explains. “While in Italy practically all appointments were booked immediately, Japan’s response was initially reserved for the first two weeks. But then the offering was well-received.”
Following the recent rollout in Germany and the United States, the P&C Lounge is now available to all 110,000 SAP employees in over 70 countries. SAP adapts the offering to local conditions. For example, in the United States, due to vast geographical distances, there will be a stronger virtual component, while in other regions primarily in-person meetings are offered.
With the P&C Lounge, SAP positions itself as a pioneer for an HR strategy that places people at the center in the AI age. “In the current transformation- and technology-driven changes to the world of work, we at SAP can position ourselves as an attractive employer—with the human component being put at the center,” Schmeichel explains.
Customer interest is significant: “We currently see great interest in customer conversations to learn more about how SAP deliberately emphasizes and supports the human factor in times of artificial intelligence.”
The P&C Lounge is a perfect example of this approach of meaningfully combining technology and human interaction. “Our ambition with the P&C Lounge is to set new standards for what is possible in global HR support,” Schmeichel concludes. “It’s about the optimal combination of people-centricity and modern technology in a new world of work.”
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As organizations accelerate digital transformation and confront widening skills gaps, external workers—once seen primarily as a cost-containment measure—are now a strategic source of agility, innovation, and expertise, giving businesses the competitive edge they need to thrive in an AI-driven economy.
External talent already represents a significant share of the labor: about 20% in the UK and 40% in the U.S., with projections reaching 50% globally by 2050. This surge reflects the growing demand for specialized skills and flexible cost structures.
A new global study sponsored by SAP and conducted by Economist Impact captures this shift. Drawing on insights from more than 2,000 C-suite executives across industries, the report, “From Cost to Capability: Redefining External Workforce Strategy in 2025,” reveals how the external workforce is evolving from a transactional resource into a core capability that drives adaptability and resilience in the AI era.
The findings underscore a critical imperative: organizations must rethink how they engage talent, integrate technology, and foster collaboration across procurement, HR, and finance to unlock the full potential of external workers.
From cost to capability: a strategic pivot
In 2023, nearly one-third of organizations cited risk reduction as their primary reason for using contingent labor and service providers. By 2025, that number dropped to just 6%. Today, cost efficiency (74%) and access to specialized skills (62%) dominate the list.
Create value where it counts most with smarter spending
Cost efficiency is no longer about short-term savings. It’s about managing broader business risks, from financial exposure to talent scarcity. As Professor David Ulrich of the University of Michigan notes in the report, “To mitigate risk, businesses need to reduce fixed costs, and labor is often a high fixed cost that needs to be seen as a source of growth.”
Leaders increasingly view external talent as a long-term solution for project-based and technology-driven work, especially in fast-moving fields like AI, automation, and data science. Looking ahead, 64% of executives plan to expand their talent networks within three to five years, up from 54% last year—clear evidence that external workforce strategies are becoming integral to workforce planning.
Building a holistic talent ecosystem
Economist Impact’s research points to the rise of holistic talent supply chain management—a model that unites HR, finance, and procurement to forecast talent needs, close skills gaps, and treat the workforce as a dynamic ecosystem rather than a fixed headcount.
This evolution builds on the themes from previous Economist Impact Procurement Imperative reports, where procurement shifted from cost controller to strategic orchestrator of risk, sustainability, and innovation. Forward-looking organizations now embrace “total talent management” models that integrate people, platforms, and partners while aligning culture and communication across internal and external teams.
Breaking down silos and embedding digital tools for real-time visibility will be essential to managing an integrated, skills-based workforce that adapts quickly to business needs—while ensuring external workers feel valued and connected to enterprise goals.
Procurement at the center of workforce transformation
Procurement leaders are moving beyond sourcing and compliance to orchestrate entire talent ecosystems built on governance and collaboration. Yet the function faces challenges: confidence in procurement’s workforce management skills fell from 51% in 2024 to 43% in 2025, reflecting the complexity of its expanded scope.
CFOs and COOs are also taking a more active role, linking external workforce oversight to financial, compliance, and ESG performance. This trend echoes Economist Impact’s “The Resilient Edge: Procurement in an Era of Polycrisis” report, which showed procurement’s remit expanding as risk management becomes central to business strategy.
To succeed, procurement must double down on visibility, digital integration, and strategic alignment. Platforms that unify workforce data—from contingent contracts to skills mapping—will enable teams to balance cost optimization with agility and governance.
AI: driving agility and accountability
Artificial intelligence is reshaping how organizations manage external talent. According to the report, 68% of procurement leaders cite AI proficiency and ethics as their top development priority over the next 18 months. AI can predict workforce needs, automate sourcing, and fill gaps in emerging fields like agentic AI and automation. The payoff: higher productivity and faster decision-making.
But AI also raises a critical questions: who benefits from efficiency gains? How should productivity improvements be measured? Answering these will require new cost models and shared accountability across the enterprise.
As seen in earlier Economist Impact research, AI is once again a catalyst for transformation, redefining how organizations manage, measure, and mobilize external talent.
The external workforce of the future
The evolution of the external workforce underscores a broader truth: agility, capability, and collaboration now define competitive advantage.
Organizations that treat external talent as a strategic asset—integrating governance, data, and culture across internal and external teams—will be best positioned to respond to technological change and seize new opportunities.
To meet these demands, companies are turning to solutions like SAP Fieldglass and SAP Ariba, which help connect procurement and external workforce management. These solutions can deliver the visibility, intelligence, and agility needed to manage today’s dynamic workforce ecosystem.
Gordon Donovan is global vice president of Research, Procurement, and External Workforce at SAP.
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WALLDORF — SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) today announced that Brose, a global automotive supplier, has successfully migrated its central SAP systems to SAP Cloud ERP Private solutions on Amazon Web Services (AWS), marking a major milestone in its digital transformation journey.
In just six months, Brose transitioned its mission-critical systems from internal data centers to the cloud, including complex production processes such as just-in-time and just-in-sequence operations across its global manufacturing plants. The migration was executed without any disruption to customer deliveries, underscoring the robustness of the solutions and the strength of the SAP-Brose partnership.
“This cloud migration makes Brose faster, more flexible, and more resilient—and strengthens our position as an innovative partner for the mobility of the future,” said Stefan Krug, CEO of the Brose Group. “Challenging times in particular show how important digital transformation is. I’m proud of our team’s dedication and the seamless collaboration with SAP.”
The project is considered a reference implementation for the automotive industry and sets a benchmark for future SAP cloud initiatives. Brose’s successful deployment demonstrates how SAP Cloud ERP Private can support high-performance manufacturing environments while enabling scalability and innovation.
“Brose’s rapid and disruption-free migration to SAP Cloud ERP Private exemplifies the power of the cloud to drive agility and resilience in the automotive sector,” said Thomas Saueressig, member of the Executive Board of SAP SE. “This collaboration showcases what’s possible when industry leaders embrace transformation with speed and precision.”
Looking ahead and reinforcing its role as a pioneer in automotive digitalization, Brose will continue to work closely with SAP and other ecosystem partners to strengthen its foundation of SAP cloud solutions to enable the usage of the latest innovations such as business AI.
At the SAP Transformation Excellence Summit in The Hague, the Netherlands, last week, with over 1,500 prospects, customers, and partners in attendance, SAP LeanIX, SAP Signavio, and WalkMe announced a range of new features and products. The theme of the summit, which followed the SAP Transformation Excellence Summit in Austin, TX, in September, was “Power Up.”
The announcements underlined all the ways that SAP’s Business Transformation Management solutions, and the integrated toolchain to which they belong, can empower organizations to develop a scalable and sustainable transformation capability.
Cost optimization, EA standardization, and AI adoption
Companies increasingly look to fund innovation, particularly when it comes to AI, by digging into existing budgets.
At the summits, André Christ, co-founder and general manager at SAP LeanIX, announced new features focused on application TCO (total cost of ownership) to help companies find cost savings across the IT landscape that can be reallocated to more strategic investment. These TCO features include the addition of cost KPIs to the architecture executive dashboard, the ability to enhance factsheets with configurable calculations, and an application TCO view in the application landscape report.
Christ also announced a new approach to target architecture planning in SAP LeanIX, allowing customers to start by diagramming their future state and then modeling backwards. Architects and business leaders thus can get a more streamlined experience, from design to execution, allowing them to make thoughtful, data-driven decisions every step of the way.
To help further facilitate landscape transformation and management, Christ also announced the upcoming release of AI-assisted architecture guidance.
Finally, Christ made several announcements regarding SAP LeanIX’s support for AI adoption and governance. Here, he returned to the AI agent hub in SAP LeanIX Application Portfolio Management announced at SAP Sapphire. Just as SAP LeanIX can serve as the single source of truth for the application landscape, SAP LeanIX can now serve as the single source of truth for AI agents. This begins with the discovery of agents—custom agents, Joule Agents, and third-party agents—and their subsequent tracking and management.
Better navigate constant change by turning business transformation from a project into a core capability
The goal of SAP LeanIX’s agent governance features is to allow organizations to understand what business capabilities agents support, what applications they access, and where they can have the greatest impact. To this end, Christ further announced a new agent radar report and the ability to assess agent adoption through executive dashboards.
As the last announcement with regard to AI, Christ also announced the launch of the MCP server for SAP LeanIX solutions. Model context protocol (MCP) servers are an open-source standard interface that links AI models with enterprise data, helping AI assistants connect to SAP LeanIX workspaces and inventory data. This feature helps organizations leverage AI agents to maintain data and activate AI workflows.
With the AI agent hub and the MCP server, SAP LeanIX can help accelerate the adoption of AI agents while also enabling consistent and scalable governance.
Process excellence, untapped value, and the organization of the future
The summit in Austin also afforded SAP Signavio’s Founder and General Manager, Gero Decker, the opportunity to talk about new features and capabilities in the SAP Signavio portfolio. Just as Christ talked about the ways that SAP LeanIX helps free up resources to fund innovation, Decker focused on the ways SAP Signavio supports organizations in their “quest for value.”
Transformation is not an end in itself. The goal of transforming the IT landscape, processes, and even the overall business is to unlock and realize new value. SAP Signavio has long helped companies find and pursue opportunities for such process improvement and value creation. Now, the AI-enabled transformation advisor, when connected to SAP Signavio Process Insights, can make this even easier by allowing users to use text-based prompts—such as “Can I reduce costs in my sales operations?”—to help generate analysis and recommended next steps.
While improving individual processes in this way can deliver real value, processes don’t run in a vacuum. In order to address this, Decker also announced transformation management capabilities providing visibility into the interconnections and cross-effects between processes.
By allowing customers to better see and understand the impact of transforming processes on one another, SAP Signavio solutions can enable truly holistic, data-driven decision-making.
Decker also addressed agentic AI by introducing a number of Joule Agents that will see general availability in Q1 2026. These agents, which will include a Screen Guide Agent, a Value Case Creation Agent, a Dashboard Analyzer Agent, a Process Content Recommender Agent, and a Workspace Administration Agent, can enable SAP Signavio solutions to help automate repetitive tasks and accelerate content discovery.
A new breed of digital learning technology
SAP completed the acquisition of WalkMe shortly before last year’s summit in Frankfurt, Germany. In The Hague and Austin, WalkMe took the stage as a key player in the Business Transformation Management portfolio.
The big announcement WalkMe shared at the summits focused on a new digital learning offering. By embedding training directly into the applications employees use every day, even when workflows extend across multiple applications, this new solution can empower learning teams to give employees both a comprehensive learning infrastructure and content they need to keep up.
The key capabilities of this solution include: comprehensive training delivery with in-app search and discovery, in-app consumption, and customizable learning portals; intelligent content authoring with AI-first authoring that turns prompts and company knowledge into multi-media, multi-modal experiences; and the ability to curate and expose training in context with flexible conditions and triggers and behavior-based segmentation.
These capabilities come equipped with powerful analytics so you can measure and understand user behavior and engagement as well as assess content performance.
The transformation journey is just beginning
The summits showcased the power of SAP LeanIX, SAP Signavio, and WalkMe as individual portfolios as well as their combined power as the foundation of a transformation capability. The events also highlighted the amazing potential of these solutions to shape the way companies transform into the future.
At a time when AI is disrupting operating models and every function across the enterprise, the summits offered a reminder of the central role SAP can play in this disruption. From funding and managing transformation to enabling the workforce to adapt and excel in a rapidly changing world, this portfolio of tools can give every organization what they need to help address the challenges of today while unlocking opportunity for tomorrow.
Matthew T. Grant is a senior writer for SAP LeanIX and SAP Signavio.
Time is running out for Europe’s automakers to prepare for the new carbon emissions rule. The EU automotive industry, which is responsible for 6% of total EU employment and 7% of EU gross domestic product (GDP), will be heavily impacted by the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM).
The new regulation will require companies to account for carbon emissions on select imported products. For the auto industry, the steel and aluminum categories are especially critical.
Complete automobiles are not currently covered by CBAM, but the automotive sector is among the most exposed because of its dependence on emissions-intensive materials. Components such as body panels, chassis, frames, and battery enclosures rely heavily on imported steel and aluminum.
CBAM is currently in its transition phase and will enter the definitive phase on January 1, 2026, meaning that companies need to track their imported emissions on covered products throughout 2026 and begin purchasing certificates for those imported, tracked emissions in February 2027, with the first report due August 2027.
CBAM costs will add up quickly
The modern passenger vehicle contains around 1 tonne of steel and 200 kilograms of aluminum. Global averages hover around 1.9 tonnes of CO2 emitted per tonne of manufactured steel, and each tonne of primary aluminum produces around 15 tonnes of CO2.
With analysts projecting carbon ETS prices could reach €150 per tonne of CO₂ by 2030, a newly manufactured vehicle could soon be subject to €300 in CBAM certificate costs, assuming manufacturers import 20% of the necessary steel and 54% of the required aluminum, consistent with EU import data. Given that Germany produced 4 million cars in 2024, German automakers and component manufacturers could be on the hook for about €1.2 billion in CBAM certificate purchases in 2027.*
Looking past 2027, the European Commission plans to add categories like chemicals and plastics to the regulation, bringing more auto parts under the CBAM umbrella and making it even more important for European automakers and component manufacturers to solidify their CBAM strategies today.
Build a more compliant, sustainable, and resilient business with SAP Sustainability
CBAM preparations for automakers and component manufacturers
Across the EU automotive industry, companies seem insufficiently prepared for the new phase of CBAM.
This is not completely due to inaction by companies—EU regulators have not yet finalized details of the emissions value calculations methodology or how to verify data. That said, regulators already clarified the scope of companies that must report and the timelines to purchase certificates.
With this information, it’s now crunch time for European automakers and component manufacturers to get ready for the rules taking effect in January 2026. Here’s what they should prioritize.
1. Get familiar with CBAM and evaluate your process
The core elements of CBAM have been defined and companies must act now. If you haven’t done so yet, start by understanding the overall process and requirements.
If you are in scope—meaning you meet the de minimis threshold of either importing more than 50 tonnes of CBAM affected goods per year or 100 tonnes of embedded CO₂ annually—determine which parts of your supply chain are most affected. Identify your top suppliers and imported goods, develop a focused approach for obtaining actual emissions data from those suppliers, and assess the potential financial impact. As more materials come under the scope of CBAM, and as the carbon ETS prices rise, the financial impact will increase in the years ahead. Companies must prepare to meet these new obligations and manage this financial impact.
2. Collaborate with your suppliers
Identify and focus on your most critical suppliers—typically the top 50 to 100—and build a targeted engagement plan while defining an informed approach for the broader supplier base. Consider updating procurement terms to require future data sharing and provide support to suppliers in educating and calculating emissions where needed. Close collaboration will be essential to obtain actual emissions data to avoid the more expensive default values and identify decarbonization potentials.
Accessing trusted supplier data is one of the biggest challenges facing companies today.
While the EU provides mechanisms for data exchange between suppliers and importers, Catena-X, an industry network for the European automotive sector, in combination with third-party data exchange software, offers an alternative to collecting trusted, standardized emissions data. Catena-X enables companies to collaborate and share data in a trusted environment. It brings together manufacturers, technology providers, and suppliers to standardize data sharing processes across the value chain. Beyond data exchange, these networks foster knowledge sharing, allowing members to learn best practices, align on standards, and accelerate compliance readiness collectively.
To participate, companies typically register with the network, adopt certified software that supports standardized data exchange, and begin collaborating with other members. This approach ensures interoperability and automates trusted emissions data collection. Catena-X is actively refining its scope and standards to support CBAM.
3. Find the right technology for your business
Most importantly, you want to find the right technology partner that will streamline CBAM reporting and support the integration of carbon into core financial accounting processes.
The EU CBAM report requires a lot of data, all of which can be requested, filled, and reported automatically using actual emissions values with tailored, ERP-based systems. The SAP Green Token solution can support CBAM declarant reporting by enabling standardized, auditable reporting workflows. The SAP Green Ledger solution will manage the certificate repository and help ensure financial and carbon accounting of CBAM emissions and certificates in alignment with accounting standards like US GAAP and IFRS (planned for H1 2026).
Manual processes, like e-mails and Excel files, are prone to error, do not scale, and will make CBAM compliance time-consuming and resource intensive.
Prepare your systems for CBAM compliance
CBAM is set to reshape material sourcing in the automotive industry by introducing carbon as a cost factor and driving transparency across global supply chains.
The ideal scenario for automakers and component manufacturers is to take decisive actions to decarbonize—such as sourcing low-emissions steel and aluminum, increasing circularity efforts, and optimizing product design to use less CBAM materials—while fully automating CBAM compliance.
Access to accurate data on supply chain emissions—and their financial implications—provides the insights that business leaders need to decarbonize and reduce risk in the years ahead.
The right combination of software tools and industry network collaboration can enable cost-optimized and automated CBAM compliance and deliver valuable supply chain intelligence. SAP Sustainability solutions can deliver measurable ROI by automating data collection and workflows and enabling finance teams to move beyond manual processes toward strategic analysis and action. This helps create a scalable foundation for ongoing carbon cost management while supporting standardized data exchange and collaboration across the value chain.
Start preparing now to ensure your business thrives as the 2026 CBAM definitive phase approaches.
Read the CBAM playbook and watch the CBAM webinar to learn more.
Thomas Janzen is an industry expert at SAP SE.
*This is a back of the napkin calculation to illustrate the potential impact. This is based on data that shows the EU imported 27.4 million tonnes of finished steel products in 2024. The EU consumed about 129 million tonnes. Therefore, we assume imports account for roughly 20% of EU steel use. In 2023, 54% of the aluminum used in the EU came from imports. Using these averages means about 2 tonnes of imported CO2 per vehicle, or €300, assigning 20% of 1 tonne of steel emissions and 53% of 200kg of aluminum emissions.
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The IDC MarketScape vendor analysis model is designed to provide an overview of the competitive fitness of technology and suppliers in a given market. The research methodology utilizes a rigorous scoring methodology based on both qualitative and quantitative criteria that results in a single graphical illustration of each supplier’s position within a given market. The Capabilities score measures supplier product, go-to-market and business execution in the short-term. The Strategy score measures alignment of supplier strategies with customer requirements in a three to five year timeframe. Supplier market share is represented by the size of the icons.
According to the IDC MarketScape, “AI-enabled tools are revolutionizing field service management, transforming reactive operations into predictive excellence.”
SAP was recognized for the following strengths:
End-to-end field service management offering as part of the full enterprise suite: SAP Field Service Management is a fully integrated component of the SAP Business Suite, enabling end-to-end business process execution across planning, logistics, operations, finance, and customer service. It connects seamlessly with core SAP solutions such as SAP S/4HANA, customer experience, asset management, and supply chain management, ensuring that service delivery is fully aligned with enterprise-wide processes. This deep integration eliminates silos, enables real-time collaboration across departments, and supports consistent, efficient service execution across the entire value chain.
AI innovations and generative AI capabilities: SAP Field Service Management is infused with AI and generative AI to simplify and accelerate service delivery. SAP is able to support generative summaries of equipment history, work orders, and past service activities. SAP has established an embedded AI copilot for field service that enables users to execute commands, automate actions, and retrieve context-aware insights using conversational language with the benefit of boosting productivity and responsiveness across the service life cycle. SAP also has a robust auto-scheduling engine designed for complex, high-volume service operations.
Commitment to continuous innovation
Field service organizations face growing complexity, workforce shortages, and rising customer expectations that demand smarter, faster, and more connected service delivery. SAP continues to lead the market by integrating AI-driven insights, intelligent automation, and end-to-end connectivity across its portfolio.
SAP remains focused on enabling customers to:
Boost technician and dispatcher productivity
Drive customer-centric and revenue enabling operations
Reduce operational costs and accelerate complex workflows via intelligent automation and AI
Provide a connected and extensible platform for field service
SAP is proud to be recognized by the IDC MarketScape as a Leader in AI-enabled field service management. We remain committed to helping our customers run their service operations smarter, safer, and faster — combining data, applications, and AI to deliver measurable business outcomes and exceptional customer experiences.
Gartner has named SAP a Leader in the Gartner® 2025 Magic Quadrant™ for Digital Commerce. Now named for the 11th time in a row, SAP remains the only vendor to be consistently positioned as a Leader since 2014.
SAP Commerce Cloud: Deliver AI-enhanced unified commerce experiences that drive profitable growth
The SAP Commerce Cloud solution helps businesses worldwide stay ahead of changing customer expectations with a powerful, future-ready platform that delivers unified commerce through connected data, intelligence, and AI innovation.
Organizations across industries use SAP Commerce Cloud to unlock sustainable growth through personalized commerce at scale.
SAP Commerce Cloud is embedding AI innovations into the tools that employees and customers rely on every day. With AI built into key moments in commerce, the solution and its AI agents help create real business outcomes through faster response times and streamlined touchpoints. Agents like the Shopping Agent and Catalog Optimization Agent bring the vision for a connected, intelligent business suite where applications, data, and AI work together in a continuous, virtuous cycle to anticipate needs, act in real time, and elevate experiences.
Another new innovation also helps support profitable growth: SAP recently launched the SAP B2B Self-Service Portal. Natively integrated with the SAP ERP application, it makes ordering, invoicing, and promotions more intuitive while giving business buyers a positive digital experience.
ARAUCO, a global leader in wood products and furniture, relies on SAP Commerce Cloud as an integral part of managing a complex supply chain. The Chilean forestry company connects customers with on-demand insight into their orders through a self-service portal.
“SAP Commerce Cloud provided us with the tools to create a portal that has exceeded our customers’ expectations again and again,” said Diego Tuleski, director of IT at ARAUCO North America Inc.
Other global leaders are realizing measurable impact as well. Cintas uses SAP Commerce Cloud to streamline complex service orders and improve customer account management. For Nokia, SAP Commerce Cloud helps digitalize and manage complex order processes, making them intuitive experiences through integration with existing ERP applications. Universal Destinations & Experiences delivers favorable guest experiences across theme parks, hotels, and retail with SAP Commerce Cloud, enabling millions of transactions on a single commerce platform integrated with SAP Cloud ERP solutions.
Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Digital Commerce, Aditya Vasudevan, Ant Duffin, Mike Lowndes, Sandy Shen, Jason Daigler, Penny Gillespie, 3 November, 2025. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally, and MAGIC QUADRANT is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
SAP was recognized as SAP Hybris in 2014, 2016 and 2017.
SAP executives speaking at the SAP TechEd event in Berlin this week told their audience of developers, system architects, and technologists that they have a central and vital role in the “agentic AI revolution.”
Advancements in AI agents, data, and platform capabilities equip developers with the tools to drive business transformation
We’re entering a new era, according to SAP Executive Board Member Muhammad Alam, in charge of SAP Product & Engineering: “the era of agentic AI, where AI moves from being just a tool to becoming your trusted teammate.”
Joined on stage by SAP CTO Philipp Herzig and Michael Ameling, president of SAP Business Technology Platform, Alam set the stage during the kick-off keynote, saying: “As developers, you are not on the sidelines of this AI revolution. You are the revolution. And we are here to supercharge you for what’s next.”
Supercharging developers
Together they dismissed suggestions that AI will replace developers. “The truth is that developers aren’t going away,” Alam said. “They are getting supercharged. They’re becoming the architects of smart connected businesses. So, the real question isn’t if we need developers; it’s how fast can we empower them to thrive and lead in this AI-native era?”
Ameling, Alam, and Herzig outlined SAP’s vision and highlighted the integration of AI, data, and intelligent agents to transform business processes and drive innovation. They also emphasized the importance of a unified data fabric and the deployment of advanced AI models and agentic technologies within the SAP ecosystem.
In this new business environment, they noted that every enterprise is becoming a data company and every user experience—from the front line to the boardroom—is becoming AI-driven.
“As developers, you don’t just code anymore,” Alam said. “You also design intelligent workflows and supervise AI agents to shape real business outcomes.” To help developers do this, SAP’s strategy centers on empowering them with applications, connecting them with data, and supercharging them with AI.
SAP BTP is the foundation for AI agents
All this runs on SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP), which serves as the foundation for building and managing AI agents—both SAP built and custom developed. While SAP BTP is the engine, the Business Transformation Management portfolio is the navigator, ensuring technology translates into real business impact. It aligns strategy, process, and people, turning AI-driven potential into sustainable transformation at scale.
First, he said SAP is continuing to make SAP more open. As part of that, he announced SAP Snowflake, which brings the full data and AI capabilities of Snowflake as a solution extension to SAP Business Data Cloud (SAP BDC). This partnership is exactly what joint customers have been asking for, Alam shared.
Second, he said SAP will provide developers with the most context-rich agentic platform, including the most deeply grounded set of ready-to-use agents that developers can customize to their needs. “Today, you’ll hear about creating custom Joule Agents using low-code and pro-code tools with agent builder in Joule Studio as part of SAP Build” Alam said.
“We’re also standardizing AI agent interoperability with the agent-to-agent protocol, allowing your agents to collaborate securely across ecosystems,” he added.
Third, he announced SAP’s first foundation model built specifically for structured business data: SAP RPT-1, pronounced “SAP Rapid One.” “Our relational pretrained transformer delivers enterprise-grade accuracy and scale, outperforming both LLMs and AutoML for tabular AI, which is critical for building reliable high-value agents,” Alam said.
“In short, we’re embracing an open ecosystem, supercharging agents with deep process and data context, and giving you the tools to amplify AI and agents,” he said. As the keynote continued, Ameling and Herzig detailed these and other innovations, explaining how they will help developers work smarter and achieve more.
Michael AmelingPhilipp Herzig
SAP BDC and Snowflake
Ameling expanded on the new partnership with Snowflake, which will bring Snowflake’s fully managed data and AI capabilities to SAP customers. Together with the introduction of SAP BDC Connect for Snowflake, he said this will result in cost savings and simplified data landscapes. “This enables you to integrate SAP and non-SAP data products seamlessly between SAP BDC and Snowflake, so that you can deploy intelligent applications faster and share across your preferred data marketplace.”
Ameling also positioned SAP HANA Cloud as “the database AI was looking for.” With SAP HANA Cloud and SAP BDC, SAP provides the best business data fabric to help address these challenges, he said. “Without SAP HANA Cloud, you would have one database for each and every data representation, which leads to disaggregated data siloes that limit your AI potential. With SAP HANA Cloud, we have all these powerful engines in one integrated, multi-model database.”
Building on this, Herzig emphasized that every business requires a strong data foundation because “AI is nothing without well-organized data…On top of the data foundation sits our AI Foundation that allows you to not only use the latest frontier AI technologies out there in the market, but also to extend SAP’s out-of-the-box AI capabilities and build your own experiences deeply contextualized in your business processes and data.”
SAP pioneers a tabular foundation model
Herzig then explained that SAP RPT-1 was designed to address a crucial problem for developers and enable them to deliver much better predictive capabilities, enterprise-grade accuracy, and scale to business customers.
Until now, Herzig said, “We still had to go back to good old machine learning …to train what we call ‘narrow’ AI models that are specifically made for each [business] task. Therefore, you really had to train a hell of a lot of models.” For example, to solve 10 predictive tasks across 10 different entities like company codes or plants would require training 100 different models.
“What we really want to do is get rid of all these models and just introduce one giant model that only requires a small amount of data to learn from,” he said. That’s what SAP RPT-1 is. “We believe SAP RPT-1 is the most capable predictive foundation model that’s out there today,” he said, delivering much higher prediction quality while being very fast and super-efficient in terms of resource requirements.
Joule, Joule Agents, and AI assistants
The SAP CTO also emphasized that the company is committed to providing developers with the most context-rich agentic platform. He noted that SAP has already shipped 20 Joule Agents across lines of business and will have approximately 40 by the end of the year, and that these agents can leverage more than 2,100 pre-delivered Joule skills. In addition, more than 300 embedded AI scenarios across product lines are available for customers to date, including Joule Agents, growing to 400 use cases in total by the end of the year.
Ameling added: “Our promise is simple: build with intent. You describe the outcome and SAP Build uses AI agents to generate code, logic, and UIs for you, all with seamless access to your applications and data while you stay in the flow… [SAP] Joule for Developers enables vibe coding experiences to make intent-based development simple and intuitive.”
SAP is taking it one step further by providing extensions to work with VS code, Windsurf, Cursor, OpenAI Codex, Claude Code, Cline, and more directly in SAP Build. “You choose a tool, and we meet you where you are,” Ameling said. He also announced that fine-tuned ABAP LLMs with ABAP 1 on AI Foundation will be published in Q4 this year.
SAP is redefining how developers interact with AI through innovations in Joule and agentic AI, but also in terms of physical AI. Herzig welcomed Torsten G. Mueller, Group CIO and COO BPS at Sartorius, to discuss how the partnership between Sartorius, NEURA Robotics, and SAP is bringing to life robots that understand the what, when, and how based on live business context. “This is how we’re really imagining the future, right? Humans and robots working in harmony through Joule, through AI,” Herzig said.
Quantum computing
Looking to the future, Herzig ended the keynote by talking about another “compute paradigm that is still hard to seize”: quantum computing. While he made it clear that SAP is not building a quantum computer, SAP is teaming up with quantum hardware leaders, like IBM—whose Director of Research and IBM Fellow Jay Gambetta joined via video—to help evaluate quantum computing for business processes and applications.
“We believe quantum will join classical and AI compute in your stack, and we’re embedding it into the processes and apps you’re already using, so it just shows up in the workflows of your enterprise,” Herzig said. “And of course, with the cloud, we scale it all. Now, SAP has got you covered, and you’ve got your business covered.”
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