WALLDORF— SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) today announced that Nestlé S.A., one of the world’s leading food and beverage companies, has completed its first major upgrade to SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition. This wave covers 112 countries, with more countries in Europe and the Americas to follow soon.
Explore features of the cloud ERP that’s helping mature enterprises worldwide run effectively
The first of three upgrades, this one involved more than 50,000 employees and was completed in under 20 hours. Supported by a standardized technology landscape that enabled minimal downtime, this smooth transition to SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition sets a new benchmark for digital transformation in the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) industry.
A long-time SAP customer, Nestlé since 2000 has used SAP software as its single unified system to manage its global operations and moved to the cloud in 2022. The upgrade to SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition is a strategic leap in its transformation journey to future-proof the company as consumer expectations evolve and new technologies reshape the marketplace.
“We are building a future-ready enterprise—one that works smarter and faster,” said Chris Wright, Nestlé’s head of IT and CIO. “Having a common ERP system as our backbone is already a tremendous advantage for Nestlé. It provides a unified platform and data foundation that allows us to execute end to end across the value chain and have visibility across the entire company and beyond. With the upgrade, we gain new capabilities and insights that will help scale new products faster globally to meet the needs of our customers and consumers, and with AI and automation at scale, we’ll drive efficiency and effectiveness across our value chain.”
With a portfolio that includes global icons such as Nescafé, Kit Kat and Maggi, Nestlé chose to upgrade to SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition to accelerate the rollout of new products and innovations across the group. The upgrade also supports it in making data-driven insights and improving processes to drive efficiency and effectiveness across the company’s business operations to better serve consumers worldwide who rely on its products every day.
“Nestlé’s successful go-live of SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition showcases how scale can be a strategic advantage for innovation,” said Thomas Saueressig, member of the Executive Board of SAP SE, Customer Services & Delivery. “As one of the world’s most recognizable and forward-thinking companies, Nestlé exemplifies how cutting-edge technology empowers global brands to anticipate consumer trends, optimize operations and deliver exceptional experiences at scale.”
The upgrade also provides a robust digital core ready for AI and automation at scale across the company’s value chain, enabling Nestlé to gain real-time data insights for smarter decision-making. By harnessing AI and the Joule copilot at scale across its operations, value chain and product portfolio, Nestlé can personalize consumer engagement and optimize operations with greater agility. This helps ensure it remains responsive to evolving consumer expectations and lays the foundation for a truly omnichannel experience.
WALLDORF — SAP SE today announced its financial results for the third quarter 2025.
At a glance
Current cloud backlog of €18.8 billion, up 23% and up 27% at constant currencies
Cloud revenue up 22% and up 27% at constant currencies
Cloud ERP Suite revenue up 26% and up 31% at constant currencies
Total revenue up 7% and up 11% at constant currencies
IFRS operating profit up 12%, non-IFRS operating profit up 14% and up 19% at constant currencies
SAP updates its 2025 cloud revenue, operating profit and free cash flow outlook
Christian Klein, CEO:
“SAP delivered a great Q3 with strong cloud revenue growth of 27%. We are gaining market share as our customers are adopting solutions across the entire Business Suite, including Business Data Cloud and AI at accelerated pace. For Q4 we are executing against a strong pipeline – which gives us confidence in our accelerating total revenue growth ambition for 2026.”
Dominik Asam, CFO:
“Q3’s strong performance underscores the strength and agility of our model. Through disciplined execution and a sharp focus on profitability and cash flow, we’ve maintained forward momentum despite an uncertain macroeconomic backdrop. We enter the fourth quarter confident in our ability to deliver on our commitments, as reflected by an improved outlook for operating profit and free cash flow.”
The International Trade Classification Agent and Cash Management Agent optimize finance, while the Bid Analysis Agent and Receipt Analysis Agent clarify spending. The Production Planning and Operations Agent, Change Record Management Agent, and Supplier Onboarding Agent handle supply chain logistics. In human resources, the HR Service Agent, People Intelligence Agent, and Career and Talent Development Agent level up your workforce, while customer-facing teams get support from the Digital Service Agent. Finally, the Utilities Customer Self-Service Agent cut service costs, while the Process Content Recommender Agent and Workspace Administration Agent accelerate business-wide transformation and onboarding.
With the growing number of Joule Agents, we want to make it as easy as possible for our customers to engage with AI. That is why we’re introducing Joule Assistants as a grouping concept. This means that the agents are role-aware depending on the user logged onto the system, whereas the assistants will be more abstract, coarse-grained group around a semantically closely aligned set of agents. While Joule manages the tasks, the assistants will initiate sub threads for more targeted conversations when mentioned. If the user becomes lost in the details or does not receive the expected response from the selected assistant, Joule can step in.
Want to learn more? The Innovation Guide has all innovations announced at SAP Connect.
In Q3, SAP received its ISO 42001 certification for AI governance, which means customers get responsible AI systems, such as Joule, SAP AI Core, and more, that can be confidently integrated into their operations. This certification assures that our AI solutions meet the highest industry standards for ethics, security, and compliance, including adherence to regulations like the EU AI Act.
SAP Business AI is fully on track to have more than 400 AI features, including Joule Agents, by the end of 2025 that will deliver unparalleled business value to customers. These features are being built with AI Foundation on SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) and will add to the over 300 existing AI scenarios and 1,900 Joule skills.
Here are some of the highlights from Q3 2025:
SAP Business AI for supply chain is ensuring the entire supply chain runs smoothly while boosting productivity. The new Shop Floor Supervisor Agent proactively manages factory floor disruptions by analyzing issues and recommending actions. AI-assisted mobile execution in SAP Service and Asset Manager lets customers in the field use voice commands for hands-free job documentation. SAP Integrated Business Planning provides clear summaries for complex statistical results and safety stock calculations, to name a few. There is much more to check out about SAP Business AI for supply chain below.
SAP Business AI for finance has always been packed, and this quarter is no exception. We are boosting productivity and simplifying complex tasks through embedded AI. Joule has new capabilities that let customers interactively verify supplier invoices or perform mass updates using natural language. Generative AI explains more core financial processes, including complex costing variants. SAP Document AI automation alleviates more tedious tasks, such as extracting and matching data from incoming quality certificates. There is so much more, so dive into everything SAP Business AI for finance below.
The latest innovations don’t slow down for industries, spend, and procurement. The Booking Agent in Concur Travel is a new personal assistant that simplifies our customers’ trip planning with personalized flight and hotel recommendations. Procurement customers can automate statements of work (SOWs) creation with a new document extraction feature in SAP Fieldglass that pulls data directly from existing files. Finally, the Utilities Customer Self-Service Agent offers a new 24/7 self-service that feels personal and effective across any channel for utility customers. Check out industries, spend, and procurement in detail below.
SAP Business AI for customer experience welcomes new agents that will free up more of employees’ time and boost customer service. The Digital Service Agent supercharges customer support with instant answers to common inquiries, freeing human agents to focus on more complex, high-value interactions. The Catalog Optimization Agent continuously scans product descriptions and translations to identify inconsistencies or gaps in global product catalogs. Get all the details for customer experience below.
With SAP Business AI for IT and developers, customers can build, automate, and analyze faster and more simply than ever. Joule Studio agent builder is at the top of the ticket, as users can now create custom AI agents to automate complex, end-to-end business processes. SAP Analytics Cloud is seeing exciting enhancements, with customers able to generate complex formulas and chart summaries from natural language. SAP Joule for Developers also further accelerates ABAP code generation and testing. There’s so much more, so read on below.
SAP Business AI forbusiness transformation management and SAP Signavio are taking business value to new heights by transforming how business leaders understand customer experience. Customers can now automatically analyze sentiment from unstructured customer feedback and link it to events in their operational processes. My Process Overview in SAP Signavio offers a highly personalized and role-specific experience for understanding processes. Learn more about AI and business transformation management below.
In Q3 SAP Business AI for sustainability is all about simplifying what was once complex: environmental compliance and reporting. AI-powered permit management in SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud extracts requirements directly from PDF documents to make manual effort and the risk of costly fines a thing of the past. SAP Green Ledger uses AI to make sophisticated carbon analysis accessible to all business users through natural language queries. Business users can now effortlessly explore carbon emissions data and its financial impact in natural language. Get more information about AI and sustainability below.
Joule
SAP Joule for Consultants Product enhancements General availability
Consultants leading complex innovation and transformation projects require swift and reliable information to ensure success. SAP Joule for Consultants assists them by providing instant clarity on ABAP code purpose, business logic, and structure, drawing from a model trained on SAP’s exclusive code and vast documentation. SAP Joule for Consultants translates to an up to 14% acceleration in project execution, a 50% reduction in design rework, and an estimated 1.5 hours saved per consultant per day through faster knowledge access and improved code interpretation. Read more about this release in our Q2 2025 highlights.
In Q3 2025, SAP Joule for Consultants has gotten some key enhancements. Consultants can now leverage a new Prompt Guide for quick-start tips and a filterable Prompt Library to browse pre-formulated questions by role or area. The tool’s knowledge base is continually refreshed with the latest SAP Learning journeys and courses, Activate Roadmap content, and now integrates SAP-exclusive, gated-content Knowledge Base Articles (KBA) and SAP Notes. Once Joule provides an answer, the new “Copy Answer to Clipboard” function allows consultants to quickly share the entire response and specific code snippets for seamless integration into other applications.
SAP Joule for ConsultantsKnowledge Based Articles and SAP Notes
SAP Service and Asset Manager AI-assisted mobile execution General availability
Field technicians can now document job details more efficiently using AI-assisted voice commands within the SAP Service and Asset Manager mobile app. This mobile execution feature lets them capture work updates through natural language, which the system instantly converts into structured data, streamlining the job completion process.
By guiding the user and enabling a hands-free experience, this capability delivers a 50%* increase in technician productivity and a 75%* reduction in costs from job completion errors, fundamentally improving data quality and the mobile user experience.
Production supervisors can use the Shop Floor Supervisor Agent to proactively manage and resolve potential factory floor disruptions. The agent helps them quickly understand the severity of an issue, resequencing production orders and reallocating resources to maintain a seamless workflow.
This proactive approach boosts supervisor productivity in handling disruptions by 50%* and reduces unplanned downtime by two percent*, ensuring greater operational efficiency.
SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, product compliance AI-assisted compliance information processing Beta release
Master data specialists in product compliance can leverage an AI-assisted feature in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition to automatically process supplier compliance disclosures. The tool extracts key information, such as regulations and status data, and maps it directly to the corresponding compliance requirements within the system. This automation improves the accuracy of compliance data, reduces the risk of errors that could lead to fines, and allows specialists to focus on strategic priorities instead of manual data entry.
This can reduce organizations’ costs of processing disclosures by up to 90% and environmental management penalties and fines by 67%.
SAP Integrated Business Planning AI-assisted forecast results analysis SAP Early Adopter Care release
Demand planners can dramatically accelerate their forecast analysis using a generative AI summary embedded directly within their planning user interface. This intelligent narrative explains complex statistical details, such as why the best-fit algorithm was chosen, and provides clear recommendations for improving future results.
This enhanced visibility, powered by Joule, boosts planner productivity in analyzing forecasting runs by 25%*, enabling faster and more confident adjustments to the supply chain model.
SAP Integrated Business Planning AI-assisted analysis of inventory optimization results SAP Early Adopter Care release
Inventory planners can now leverage AI-assisted analysis to better understand the key drivers behind their recommended safety stock values. The feature supports root cause analysis by translating complex calculations – such as demand variability, lead time fluctuations, and service levels – into clear summaries of the factors influencing inventory optimization outputs.
This capability accelerates the speed of analysis and boosts confidence in system recommendations, helping to ensure that inventory outcomes are strategically aligned with crucial business goals for working capital management and customer service. Organizations will enjoy a 25%* improvement in inventory planner productivity.
AI-assisted analysis of inventory optimization results
SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition AI-assisted processing of incoming quality certificates with SAP Document AI General availability
Quality technicians can elevate operational efficiency by automating the intake of quality certificate documents. The solution utilizes SAP Document AI to intelligently extract data upon upload, automatically matching it to corresponding system objects to update or generate certificate receipts with minimal manual intervention.
This streamlined workflow accelerates stock release and delivers significant business value, reducing certificate processing time by 70%* and cutting potential revenue loss from associated delays by an equal measure.
AI-assisted processing of incoming quality certificates with SAP Document AI
SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition AI-assisted note corrections for project billing General availability
Billing specialists can enhance the professionalism of their invoices by leveraging the smart notes feature within the manage project billing application. This tool automatically suggests grammatical corrections for notes on time and expenses items, allowing specialists to review and approve changes instead of performing tedious manual edits.
By improving invoice accuracy and speeding up generation, this capability directly reduces the time spent on note corrections by 50%* and helps to shorten customer payment cycles.
SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition AI-assisted explanation of fixed asset key figures General availability
Asset accountants can demystify complex financial data with a new AI-powered feature that explains fixed asset calculations in simple, natural language. This tool lets them quickly comprehend asset valuations, ensure compliance, and answer stakeholder questions rapidly and confidently.
This intuitive approach reduces the effort spent analyzing asset values and responding to inquiries by up to 75%*.
AI-assisted explanation of fixed asset key figures
The supplier invoice verification capability in SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud enables accountants to interact with Joule using natural language to get immediate updates on supplier invoices, such as identifying the current approver or checking a payment status. They can also perform crucial tasks, like releasing an invoice from a payment block or canceling a posted document, without leaving the conversational AI. By providing this direct access to both information and transactional capabilities, the solution drastically reduces time spent on manual searches and boosts the overall productivity of the accounts payable team. The capability reduces the time required to search for invoice details by 60%* and provides a 10%* improvement in overall accounts payable productivity.
Cost accountants working in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition can now use the AI-assisted costing variant explanation for precise, natural language explanations for complex costing variants. This feature helps them quickly understand the logic behind product price calculations, ensuring they can efficiently select the correct parameters for cost estimates.
This intelligent guidance streamlines configuration and troubleshooting, delivering a 66%* reduction in the time needed to set up calculations and significantly increasing efficiency when resolving valuation errors.
Costing variant explanation for Joule with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition
Purchasers managing procurement timelines in SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud can leverage Joule to execute mass updates of delivery dates. When a supplier communicates a schedule change, purchasers can use natural language to identify all relevant purchase order items and apply the new dates in a consolidated action.
This capability eliminates repetitive manual data entry and ensures downstream planning is based on the most accurate information, resulting in an 80%* increase in purchaser productivity for this task.
SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition AI-assisted smart solution for situations in My Home Beta release
Upon logging into SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, business users can now leverage a smart homepage that automatically summarizes key updates and tasks requiring their attention. This feature provides a comprehensive overview of significant changes since the user’s last session, allowing them to identify and act on high-priority items immediately.
By bringing actionable insights directly to the entry page, users can boost productivity and significantly reduce the time spent on daily tasks, freeing them to focus on higher-value activities. Employees will see an up to 46%* reduction in time needed to resolve situations.
AI-assisted smart solution for situations in My Home
SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition AI-assisted smart personalization of My Home for applications Beta release
SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition users can now personalize their homepage by using natural language to find the right applications for their tasks. The AI-powered feature interprets the user’s request and suggests the most relevant app, which can be added directly to the My Home entry page with a single click.
This significantly reduces users’ time searching for tools and helps new users get up to speed more quickly. The personalization costs of My Home are reduced by up to 33%*.
AI-assisted smart personalization of My Home for applications
SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition AI-assisted easy fill Beta release
With the easy fill feature, SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition users can populate business object fields using natural language. This streamlines data entry by allowing users to describe an update in a business-relevant format, which the system then uses to automatically and accurately populate all corresponding fields.
This accelerates the process, improves data accuracy, and ensures all required information is captured, leading to an 80%* increase in speed, enhanced data accuracy, and a significant reduction in business process complexity and user training time.
SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition AI-assisted payment exception analysis and explanation Beta release
Accounts payable accountants using SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition can more efficiently analyze and resolve payment exceptions. The feature provides enhanced tools to search payment logs and view a transparent history of changes made to payment proposals.
This enables users to quickly identify the root cause of an issue, leading to a higher rate of on-time payments and improved transparency for both end-users and auditors. Overall, it will increase the average rate of on-time payments by up to 85%*, reduce the time for analyzing payment run logs from up to one hour to just 10 minutes*, and lower the overall cost of SAP support.
AI-assisted payment exception analysis and explanation
Business travelers can streamline their trip planning with the Booking Agent in Concur Travel. The Joule Agent analyzes individual preferences, company policies, and budgets to deliver personalized flight and hotel recommendations through a conversational interface.
This approach reduces the time needed to book a trip by 11% *and improves user engagement by 50%*. It also increases policy compliance and simplifies the overall booking experience.
Joule with SAP Ariba solutions General availability
Procurement professionals using SAP Ariba solutions, from sourcing experts to casual requisitioners, can now avoid navigational and transactional complexities. Joule integrates with SAP Ariba Sourcing, SAP Ariba Supplier Management, and SAP Ariba Buying, providing intuitive navigation and natural language processing for information access and task completion.
This results in up to 50%* faster informational searches and up to 50%* quicker execution of navigation and transactional tasks, enabling procurement teams to redirect their efforts toward strategic activities and maximize their contribution to organizational goals.
SAP Fieldglass Service Procurement AI-assisted document information extraction General availability
With AI-assisted document information extraction, project managers can streamline the extraction of SOWs from existing files. This helps them reclaim time and eradicate errors during critical migrations. SAP Fieldglass Service Procurement extracts essential SOW details from existing PDFs. This advanced capability shifts the focus for project managers from tedious manual data entry to cultivating stronger collaboration among all stakeholders in the SOW life cycle.
The ultimate benefit is a marked 80%* reduction in the time required for SOW creation, a significant decrease in the risk of costly errors, and an overall improvement in collaborative efficiency.
E-commerce product managers who optimize global product catalogs can use the Catalog Optimization Agent for intelligent automation within SAP Commerce Cloud. This Joule Agent continuously evaluates product descriptions, attributes, and translations to identify and flag inconsistencies or gaps, ensuring accurate and complete information.
This enhancement of merchandising standards improves product discoverability. It drives higher conversion rates, resulting in significant efficiencies, such as a 70% reduction in translation time and a 65% decrease in the time spent adding descriptions per asset.
Customer service and sales teams can enhance their support capabilities by deploying the Digital Service Agent to respond to inquiries in natural language. This Joule Agent leverages a company’s internal SAP business knowledge to instantly provide accurate answers and resolve common issues. The agent integrates with existing business portals and e-commerce platforms through content-rich APIs and uses machine learning to continuously improve its response quality.
This automation frees human agents to focus on complex, high-value interactions, ultimately decreasing support costs, improving overall customer satisfaction, and boosting conversion rates. Organizations can increase sales staff productivity by 50%*, service staff productivity by 50%* for agent-handled tasks, and overall operational performance.
SAP Datasphere AI-assisted semantic generation General availability
Data analysts often spend valuable time manually defining the semantic types for ingested non-SAP data, a necessary but time-consuming preparation task. SAP Datasphere accelerates this process with its AI-assisted semantic generation. The embedded feature automatically recognizes and assigns the correct semantic characteristics to data, allowing analysts to bypass manual preparation and move directly to higher-value modeling work.
This capability reduces the time and costs associated with creating semantics for non-SAP entities by up to 95%* and empowers organizations to derive insights from their data faster.
SAP Analytics Cloud AI-assisted commenting General availability
Within SAP Analytics Cloud, a new AI-assisted commenting feature helps users consume and create commentary. For business analysts, the tool can automatically summarize long comment threads, aggregate comments along a data hierarchy for new insights, and translate the results into the user’s preferred language.
Users can get the help of AI to rephrase their input when authoring comments for improved quality and clarity. This capability dramatically reduces the time needed to analyze qualitative feedback, enabling faster and better-informed decision-making. Organizations will enjoy a dramatic increase in efficiency, with an 80%* reduction in the time required to rephrase business comments, an 80%* reduction in time to aggregate and translate descendant comments, and an 80%* reduction in the time it takes to summarize and translate comments by cell or thread.
SAP Analytics Cloud AI-assisted data actions General availability
SAP Analytics Cloud now assists planning professionals by automatically generating advanced formula scripts from natural language descriptions. Users can write a comment explaining the desired logic, and the AI will create the corresponding script. Conversely, the tool can also analyze an existing script and generate business-friendly comments, greatly simplifying documentation and knowledge transfer.
This dual capability equips organizations with a 75%* reduction in the time needed to author scripts and a 75%* reduction in the time required to create fully documented scripts.
SAP Analytics Cloud AI-assisted chart summary General availability
Users can automatically generate a text summary for any chart using the SAP Analytics Cloud add-in for Microsoft PowerPoint. The feature creates a three-bullet point summary inserted directly into the presentation as editable text with a single click. The summary can be regenerated on demand to ensure it always reflects the latest data in the source chart.
This feature significantly reduces the time spent writing presentation commentary. It improves chart comprehension for the audience, offering an up to 96%* reduction in time for writing and updating a chart summary.
SAP Analytics Cloud AI-assisted calculations General availability
A new AI feature simplifies working with calculations in SAP Analytics Cloud. Users can now generate complex calculation formulas simply by describing what they need in natural language. Conversely, the tool can also take an existing, complex formula and explain its function in clear, easy-to-understand text.
This dual capability cuts the time required to create and understand calculations by 60%*, making the platform more accessible and efficient for all users.
SAP Document AI Embedded edition and workspace General availability
SAP Document AI, embedded edition, automates the entire document lifecycle within enterprise processes. The solution can automatically retrieve documents from sources like email inboxes, extract key information based on predefined templates, and then seamlessly post the data into target systems like SAP S/4HANA. This end-to-end automation accelerates document handling, improves data accuracy, and reduces the delays and value loss associated with manual processing.
SAP Document AI workspace is the central administration hub for managing automated document processing. It provides a comprehensive suite of tools for administrators to define data extraction schemas, orchestrate intelligent workflows, and integrate various input channels. The workspace also includes real-time monitoring and analytics, offering complete transparency and control over performance. Centralizing these functions streamlines the setup and governance of document AI solutions, accelerating deployment and simplifying the management of large-scale document processing. Both will grant organizations a 70% *reduction in document processing time, an 83% reduction in template maintenance, and a 40%* mitigation of the value lost to manual processing delays.
In today’s always-on, digital-first world, customers expect answers now, not “within 16 business hours.” While great support requires human empathy, some issues can be resolved with human-generated knowledge at first contact. This is where instant resolution and self-service tools come in. These tools play a crucial role in building fast, scalable, and modern customer support experiences.
As the first step in a much broader playbook toward a next-gen, agentic case resolution workflow, SAP is launching instant resolution and self-service tools to help make support smarter and more proactive. How do these offerings help in real-world support scenarios?
AI-accelerated instant resolution
Imagine a customer submits a routine ticket about a known error during a routine update. Instead of waiting in a queue, the customer gets an instant response from a specifically trained AI agent with a direct link to a relevant SAP Note or SAP Knowledge Base Article. It’s accurate, contextual, and fast. What’s more, it can reduce ticket volume and free up engineers to handle more complex or urgent problems. As a result, the customer resolves their issue in minutes with no back-and-forth or productivity loss.
Reach further across your business to solve bigger problems with Joule Agents
Take another example of a user uploading logs after encountering a defect. An instant resolution tool like a smart log analyzer can review the data, immediately flag the root issue, and respond to the user with a link to the fix. What you get is near-instant technical diagnostics and zero-escalation resolution.
Instant resolution has clear, real-world benefits in customer support: faster answers, fewer escalations, and a better experience for users. But beyond the promise of speed and convenience, how effective is it really? What does the data tell us about the quality and reliability of AI-driven support at SAP?
Let’s take a look at a few metrics that shed light on the performance of our Auto Response Agent and the value it can deliver.
Agentic AI turns support from reactive to action-oriented, dramatically reducing time-to-resolution while enhancing accuracy. For example, the confidence rate of SAP’s Auto Response Agent is at 80%. In other words, to avoid wasting the customer’s time, this agent can deliver highly relevant solutions with a confidence score of 80%. This is a strong indicator of the quality our AI agents can offer.
First contact resolution (FCR) is a general customer service KPI and indicates that the case is closed after the first interaction either with humans or with AI agents. The FCR rate for cases that are answered automatically by SAP’s new Auto Response Agent is currently at 40%. This is in line with what human interactions achieve.
AI-enabled self-service
Before AI, self-service in customer support was mostly static and manual, like FAQs, basic help articles, and keyword-based search. While these knowledge base articles are extremely helpful, customers had to dig through generic content, hoping to find something relevant, often with little guidance or context. There was no personalization, no real-time assistance, and limited ability to troubleshoot complex issues on their own. It worked for simple problems but often left users turning to human support for detailed answers.
Instead of prompting users to search through static FAQs or documentation, AI dynamically surfaces the most relevant knowledge base articles, fixes, or guided workflows based on issue context, behavior, and history. Instead of a manual hunt, customers can take advantage of an intelligent, conversational experience—often resolving issues before a ticket is even needed. The result? Fewer support cases, faster resolutions, and more empowered customers.
Thanks to SAP’s AI-integrated self-service offerings, we’re able to instantly resolve customer issues four out of the five times they come to us. Structured knowledge and content allows us to build AI and AI agents with high confidence levels. Currently, SAP’s customer support addresses over 82% of issues via self-service.
AI and the evolving role of human expertise
This move to augment auto response with AI isn’t about replacing people. It’s about freeing up people so that they can focus on high-impact tasks that need creative thinking and human insight. SAP’s instant response and resolution are only activated when the system is very confident with its response. Our commitment to the relevant, reliable, and responsible use of AI ensures that there’s no experimentation with customer cases that deserve hands-on attention from engineers and experts.
The road ahead
We move forward with a clear goal to achieve a support system that is faster, smarter, and more human because of its intelligent use of AI, not in spite of it. By augmenting first-touch support with agentic AI, SAP has a blueprint for handling simple and complex issues at all levels of enterprise support.
Stefan Steinle is executive vice president and head of Customer Support & Cloud Lifecycle Management at SAP.
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Soley GmbH and its customer CERATIZIT Group, nominees for this year’s SAP Innovation Awards and winners of the Supply & Demand Chain Executive award earlier this year alongside SAP, have demonstrated a groundbreaking approach to sustainable product portfolio optimization.
Through their innovative implementation of Soley’s Product Mining Platform with SAP’s supply chain management technologies, they prove that sustainability and profitability can go hand in hand.
The challenge: managing complex product portfolios at scale
CERATIZIT Group, a leading provider of hard material solutions for machining and wear protection, faced a challenge common to many modern manufacturing companies: managing a complex product portfolio with over 65,000 products. The company’s Cutting Tool Solutions division needed a solution to balance economic and ecological objectives while maintaining competitive advantage.
Klaus Lupfer, product lifecycle manager at CERATIZIT Deutschland GmbH, explains the company’s motivation: “In addition to the economic perspective on the product portfolio, the ecological aspect was equally important when partnering with Soley. As a company committed to sustainability for years, we are especially excited about the opportunities that the expansion of product carbon footprint data offers.”
Equip your team with AI-enabled supply chain management software
The challenge was not just the product portfolio’s size but also the lack of transparency regarding product performance and sustainability metrics. Employees spent considerable time compiling reports rather than making strategic decisions, while limited insights into critical materials and suppliers prevented efficient phaseout of high-emission products.
AI-powered product portfolio analysis
Munich-based Soley GmbH, a past participant in the SAP.iO program, SAP’s former startup accelerator designed to foster and integrate innovative solutions into the SAP ecosystem, developed an innovative response to this challenge. The Soley Product Mining Platform, available as part of SAP’s extension and add-on solutions, transforms complex product data into actionable insights through three core, AI-driven innovations that enable faster, smarter, and more impactful business decisions.
AI Advisor uses AI to recommend precise actions—for example, suggesting which products should be phased out to minimize carbon footprint without sacrificing margins.
AI Assistant provides an intuitive, natural-language interface that allows users to effortlessly interact with Soley, without requiring deep technical expertise.
AI Detective analyzes data to uncover hidden dependencies and reveal strategic opportunities, such as identifying which configuration options should be eliminated to optimize both profitability and sustainability.
The Soley Product Mining Platform draws data from SAP S/4HANA and SAP Business Warehouse, utilizing SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) as the service layer. SAP Datasphere helps consolidate SAP data and analytics, while SAP Analytics Cloud provides the analytics that form the core of the AI model. This technical architecture enables intelligent data extraction and transformation through SAP Databricks, while massive graph analytics enable complex dependency analysis.
“With these SAP solutions, we’re delivering a true game changer for the sustainability of the high tech and manufacturing industries,” says Ephraim Triemer, shareholder and advisor of Enterprise Accounts at Soley. “For the first time, our customers can go beyond ESG reporting and take real action—driving sustainability while staying laser focused on profitability.”
Seamless SAP integration creates value
By combining CERATIZIT’s Product Carbon Footprint (PCF) data with financial metrics, the Soley Product Mining Platform creates a digital twin that uncovers opportunities, identifies risks, and analyzes product hierarchies, bills of materials, and carbon footprints. With AI-driven intelligence guidance, Soley developers ensure the platform’s capabilities enable decisions and outcomes that improve both profitability and environmental stewardship.
Earlier this year, Dominik Metzger was appointed as president and Chief Product Officer of SAP Supply Chain Management, bringing a renewed focus on resilience, sustainability, and intelligent automation.
“My chief priority is to ensure that we help customers not only respond to disruptions but also proactively prepare and act,” Metzger said. “We can do so by leveraging AI, generative AI, real-time data, and predictive analytics with the power of SAP’s technology. Our vision is to build an autonomous supply chain—connected, contextualized, and collaborative.”
SAP SCM leadership driving transformation
The implementation delivered impressive, measurable results that demonstrate the power of combining AI-driven analytics with SAP technologies. CERATIZIT achieved an 87% implementation rate of suggested measures, driving product sustainability and supply chain optimization. Simultaneously, the company realized a reduction of over 30% in end-of-life “ballast” products with negative carbon footprints while creating 100% transparency in sustainability data across all elements, product sets, and aggregation levels.
The business impact was equally impressive: CERATIZIT recorded a 10% increase in its Earnings Before Interest and Taxes (EBIT) through optimized working capital, a 75% improvement in delivery reliability and resilience, and a 40% inventory reduction within nine months. Return on investment was achieved in less than 12 months.
Alexander Springer, CEO of Soley GmbH, explains the strategic significance: “If you know which products are the most critical to the overall success of your business, you can focus on safeguarding the value chain for those products, taking proactive steps to avoid any potential supply risks.”
A model for sustainable digital transformation
The successful partnership between CERATIZIT, Soley, and SAP demonstrates how modern companies can achieve both economic and ecological goals through intelligent use of data and AI. The combination of proven SAP technologies and innovative analytics solutions creates measurable value for companies of all sizes. For other SAP customers and partners, this example shows that sustainability and profitability need not be opposing forces—with the right technologies and partners, both objectives can be achieved simultaneously.
Global pressures are intensifying, regulations are evolving, and value chains are growing more uncertain. In this complex environment, companies are seeking to manage regulatory, market, and environmental externalities with proactive strategies and strategic action. SAP’s answer is a suite of sustainability solutions that can enable reporting, optimize towards sustainable business transformation, and build resilience against evolving global challenges.
Since 2021, SAP Sustainability Footprint Management has been SAP’s key solution for efficient carbon management. We are excited to share major new updates, both delivered and planned, as the solution evolves into a new phase: one where customers rely on SAP Sustainability Footprint Management as their single source for environmental footprints beyond carbon.
SAP Sustainability Footprint Management is an ERP-centric, AI-enabled foundation to help calculate, analyze, and manage your company’s environmental impacts. Read on for details about changes that enable companies to move beyond carbon reporting and turn sustainability into competitive advantage.
Decarbonize your value chain with ERP-centric carbon management
A single source for scalable footprint calculations, optimization, and reporting
Companies today face growing pressures: meeting evolving regulations and standards, rising investor expectations, high carbon and emissions-related costs, and data insights that flow back into processes like procurement, finance, or strategic planning.
As companies seek to keep up, they need highly accurate footprint data that is grounded in actual business data. Delivered and upcoming updates to SAP Sustainability Footprint Management extend footprint calculations beyond CO2 emissions to include other impact categories, such as land use, energy, waste, and abiotic resource depletion. With insights into more environmental levers, your company can fulfill the most common reporting standards, manage risk, decrease costs, and control externalities.
SAP Sustainability Footprint Management can turn fragmented data into integrated, actionable insights. By leveraging actual business data from SAP Cloud ERP and enriching it with additional sources such as energy flows and supplier information, it helps automate the calculation of accurate, audit-ready footprints at both corporate and product levels. Embedded into core business processes like procurement and finance, these insights enable companies to move beyond compliance-driven reporting toward strategic sustainability that can drive competitive advantage.
Updates to SAP Sustainability Footprint Management extend the same data governance, auditability, and automation to more impact areas. From the corporate level down to individual products, this enables calculations of actual footprints—not just estimates—for numerous environmental factors. Automation and AI capabilities help reduce manual effort, while high data quality can ensure that reporting is detailed and decision-making is well-informed.
One foundation, many environmental levers and business outcomes
Staying competitive in a changing global environment and driving change make it critical to identify ways to reduce costs and invest in AI-based technology. Because SAP Sustainability Footprint Management is deeply integrated with SAP Business Suite, it can enable customers to gain transparency across their entire supply chain—thereby making sustainability actionable and surfacing sustainability insights where decisions are made across the enterprise.
SAP Sustainability Footprint Management is the single source of truth that can be embedded across your operations, turning reporting into business value.
The new phase of SAP Sustainability Footprint Management moves from compliance-driven reporting to steering and value creation. The updates are part of SAP’s vision to transform sustainability data into a catalyst for long-term business value. Our approach to sustainability treats environmental footprint calculations—now with an expanded scope in SAP Sustainability Footprint Management—as a strategic asset that enables businesses to make business decisions like:
Innovating products and services to decrease environmental impact and support a more circular economy
Driving environmentally-sound value chains with better material sourcing and design decisions
Identifying ways to increase resource efficiency, create new revenue streams, and achieve higher margins
Budget and optimize for environmental related costs, like anticipated carbon usage
Building a strategic relationship with suppliers and manufacturers, leveraging sustainability data to drive mutual growth and competitiveness
SAP’s suite of sustainability solutions can enable reporting, insights, and confident decision-making across every process, product, and partner network. Our approach helps bridge the gap between sustainability, finances, and operations. SAP’s portfolio of sustainability solutions is evolving to make sustainability actionable, measurable, and more embedded, powered by AI, trusted data, and deep process integrations.
Listen to the recent Inside SAP S/4HANA Cloud podcast episode to learn how BASF Coatings uses SAP Sustainability Footprint Management to calculate, manage, and reduce environmental impact. Check out other recent SAP Sustainability Footprint Management updates here.
I am proud to share that SAP Cloud ERP has once again been recognized as a Leader in the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud ERP for Product-Centric Enterprises.
Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud ERP for Product-Centric Enterprises
For our customers—manufacturers, consumer goods leaders, and high-tech innovators—this recognition is more than a placement on a chart. We believe it reflects how SAP Cloud ERP is helping enterprises become more agile, resilient, and innovative in a world shaped by supply chain disruption, shifting customer expectations, and the imperative for sustainable operations.
This recognition comes to life in the stories of our customers.
Customer spotlight: FUWO
One example is FUWO, a fast-growing global manufacturer that turned to SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition to unify its operations. By automating dozens of financial and supply chain processes, FUWO shortened its monthly close by nearly half, improved forecast accuracy by 30 percent, and boosted on-time delivery rates by 15 percent.
As Luo Jianyong, director of Business Transformation and IT at FUWO, explained: “SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition has enabled us to automate our process from production to delivery. The resulting agility and efficiency have helped us gain greater trust and more collaboration opportunities with customers worldwide.”
And from a finance perspective, Director Zhao Ziqiu added: “In a market that changes rapidly, real-time data control gives us a critical advantage in decision-making.”
Why this matters now
Cloud ERP today must go far beyond core finance. Product-centric enterprises need end-to-end capabilities to manage design, manufacturing, supply chains, logistics, and sustainability in one integrated system. That’s why SAP Cloud ERP is not only the foundation of the SAP Business Suite, but also the gateway to the world’s largest business network, connecting companies to suppliers, logistics partners, and customers in real time. By extending processes beyond the enterprise, customers can anticipate disruption, improve resilience, and unlock new opportunities for collaboration.
These benefits come even faster with our new SAP Business Suite Suite packages. Out-of-the-box integrations such as SAP Integrated Product Development bring design, manufacturing, and supply chain closer together, reducing time to market while cutting complexity. Combined with SAP Business Technology Platform for integration, data harmonization, and AI-driven insights, enterprises gain the ability to both run intelligently today and continuously adapt for tomorrow.
Source: Gartner
When we speak to customers about SAP Cloud ERP, they appreciate our global network of partners that enable customers to scale, extend, and innovate. They highlight SAP’s strong road map for agentic AI, as well as comprehensive ERP capabilities that go far beyond core finance.
For us, recognition as a Leader is an important milestone, but not the end of the journey. Customers tell us they want deeper industry-specific functionality, simpler pricing, and even greater clarity in roadmaps. We are acting on that:
Industry depth: In 2025 we are delivering expanded capabilities for discrete manufacturing, consumer products, and high-tech.
Clarity and simplicity: With new commercial models, customers gain more predictable and transparent ways to adopt innovation.
Customer experience: Through our “Suite-First” approach, we are simplifying how customers consume innovations across ERP, supply chain, and spend management.
From cloud ERP to the suite
What makes SAP unique is that cloud ERP is not a standalone product, it is the doorway to the entire SAP Business Suite. By connecting processes across finance, supply chain, procurement, HCM and CX, we deliver outcomes that no single application can achieve in isolation. This is where SAP customers gain confidence: with harmonized data, AI at scale, and innovation that spans industries.
Looking ahead
We are proud of this recognition, but even more excited about what lies ahead. Together with our customers and partners, we are shaping the next decade of intelligent, modular cloud ERP – harmonizing data, automating at scale, and innovating across industries.
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 and Magic Quadrant is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
Leadership knows, and the frustration is real: Though the organizations take on different digital initiatives, manual tasks still slow down many processes. Across industries, organizations are still dealing with scanning manual documents, such as invoices, contracts, and forms.
Transform your business with AI-powered document processing
According to a Gartner report, 70 to 80 percent of enterprise information lacks structure. This poses challenges for organizations that must unlock the potential and mitigate the risks of content to ensure data-driven decisions.
Take a simple, one-document example: It can cost up to $30 to process a single purchase order by hand. While this number seems small at first, it grows significantly when thousands of documents are processed every month over the years. And it doesn’t stop there—each manual processing increases the risk of errors and potential loss of hours on the mundane job, hence missed opportunities. This leads to a high cost of running “business as usual” and a drag on innovation.
SAP Document AI: rescue business process
Manually processing documents is not just error-prone; it is also slowing down the response to market shifts, dragging down the creativity of skilled workers, and posing real threats to businesses.
SAP Document AI enables efficient and agile paperless business processes. AI-powered solutions can speed up business document processing by up to 70 percent through automating the extraction, classification, and processing of data—imagine the boost in productivity, agility, and resilience.
This is not only theory. SAP Document AI is enabling leaders to deliver reliable answers because it is grounded in the comprehensive and up-to-date training data of actual quality certificates:
More than 180,000 annotated document pages
Over 105 million annotated characters
28 countries in the data set
More than half a billion unstructured documents processed each year
That is equivalent to approximately 8.5 years of manual information extraction and auditing, now available as a standard SAP cloud product.
Take De Agostini Publishing as an example. With SAP Document AI, the company is now saving around 500 hours per month, and more than 91 percent of purchase order-referred invoices are automatically processed. Read more about De Agostini here.
FRoSTA AG is one of the largest manufacturers of frozen foods in Europe. The company leveraged SAP Build Process Automation together with SAP Document AI, and it takes less than a minute to process an invoice from arrival to posting. Seventy percent of the invoices processed through automation are booked without any touch. What is even more interesting to note is that it took three months from project ideation to the go-live event. Read more about FRoSTA here.
More than 34,000 customers are already using SAP Business AI to transform the way they work.
From procurement and finance to HR and supply chain, SAP Document AI is changing how work gets done. It is natively embedded in SAP’s key platforms, making it easier for leaders to orchestrate truly intelligent workflows.
The road ahead: leading with certainty
Leaders know that change is the only constant. Digitizing more paper is not the future of document management. It’s about using unstructured data to our advantage. Looking at the road map, SAP Document AI will soon be able to handle even more types of documents. Enhancements such as vision-enabled information extraction, custom large language models (LLMs), and prompting are not too far off either.
Executive takeaway
Winning organizations do have one thing in common, and it is not the use of technology. They recognize that people drive business forward. By removing the manual burden, teams can be empowered to focus on what matters most: customers, strategy, and growth.
Leaders owe it to their teams to let them do what they do best, spending their time coming up with new ideas, making plans, and talking to customers. If employees are still buried in paperwork, it’s time to find out how much it really costs to wait. With SAP Document AI, companies can develop the kind of flexibility and strength that today’s markets need.
Learn more about the benefits and new possibilities for business with SAP Document AI.
Rashmi Kumari is a principal solution advisor at SAP.
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SAP isn’t just shaping global business; it’s helping real people and teams turn fresh ideas into solutions that matter. With ERP-centric, cloud-based, and AI-enabled tools, organizations can navigate fast-changing times, spot opportunities, and avoid risks with confidence. The most meaningful innovations go beyond one person’s success. They ripple outward, inspiring others and making a real difference in communities and industries around the world.
This brings us to the 2026 SAP Innovation Awards, the yearly celebration that honors customers using SAP technologies to innovate with purpose and achieve meaningful outcomes. The awards recognize industry innovators and honor the individuals and teams who make transformations happen, amplifying their stories to a global audience.
Recognizing excellence: SAP Innovation Awards overview
Submissions for the 2026 SAP Innovation Awards are now open. Organizations utilizing SAP technologies to tackle real-world challenges are encouraged to submit their innovation stories today, demonstrating how these innovations help solve economic, environmental, and social challenges.
New avenues for growth and innovation
In the past, the SAP Innovation Awards have been described as a tribute to “bold innovators in challenging times.” This is even more true today, given changing global landscapes and the increasing necessity to telegraph—and circumvent—obstacles in advance, combined with the acceleration of AI and other groundbreaking technologies.
The 2026 SAP Innovation Awards have 16 total categories for innovators, with participants encouraged to select one of the following 11 to best describe their submitted transformation:
AI Excellence: For customers that are harnessing SAP Business AI to transform operations, elevate efficiency, and shape the future of work through intelligent automation and smarter processes.
Cloud ERP Champion: For customers that embrace SAP Cloud ERP to transform, future-proof, and unlock new avenues for growth and innovation.
Customer Experience Innovator: For customers that have transformed their businesses with cloud technologies, creating standout experiences that delight customers and fuel growth.
Financial Futurist: For customers that are leveraging our finance solutions to revolutionize financial processes, deliver new business models, optimize working capital, increase efficiency, and reduce risk.
People Experience Pioneer: For customers that are reimagining the employee journey through AI-enabled, cloud-powered transformation, crafting exceptional experiences that inspire and empower their workforce.
Procurement Visionary: For customers that are leveraging our spend management solutions to automate procurement processes and actively manage indirect and direct spend for better control, greater value, more savings, and operational efficiencies.
Services Superstar: For customers that have leveraged our services to accelerate their business goals by enabling organizational learning, increasing user adoption, enhancing productivity, and maximizing the overall value of their SAP solutions.
Supply Chain Catalyst: For customers that are using our supply chain management solutions to build strong, well-orchestrated supply chains. With SAP’s supply chain management solutions, companies can realize increased visibility across their supply chains, improve efficiency and compliance with regulations, and ensure customer satisfaction.
Sustainability Hero: For customers that are harnessing the SAP Sustainability portfolio and the power of connected apps, data, and AI for improved efficiency, streamlined compliance, and business growth for a sustainable and resilient future.
Technology Pathfinder: For customers that have implemented SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) to solve a business problem or unlock an innovative use case that results in a positive, measurable impact on the community or society.
Transformation Impact: For customers that are leveraging SAP Signavio solutions, SAP LeanIX solutions, and WalkMe solutions to generate business value and strengthen their transformation capabilities. These organizations are consistently advancing critical dimensions—such as processes, applications, people, and data—to ensure they remain resilient and well-prepared for the future.
It should be noted that, in 2026, the SAP Innovation Awards will no longer recognize the Partner Paragon category. Details surrounding partner recognition can be found here on the SAP Partner Portal site with more updates expected shortly.
Reshaping the planet
There are five remaining categories, and candidates are automatically entered based on their industry. The “Industry Leader” grouping is focused on customers that are reinventing business or industry models, streamlining operations, engaging customers or serving constituents in new ways, collaborating across ecosystems, and creating meaningful societal or environmental impact. This category is divided into the following areas:
Consumer Industries
Discrete Industries
Energy & Natural Resources
Public Services
Service and Financial Services Industries
A call for submissions, a call to action
Transformative change has become a regular, rather than a sporadic, occurrence. And it is the people on the ground who are not only generating this reframing but using the vast assortment of available tools to make these innovations accessible.
In the tradition of SAP, the 2026 SAP Innovation Awards will highlight those positively shaping business, culture, and the planet. This is your chance to showcase yourself as you help your organization and the world move forward.
As the largest vertically integrated operator in the U.S. cannabis industry, Trulieve needs to be able to track everything “from seed to sale,” said Nicole Zimmerman, senior director of SAP Product Management at Trulieve. “From the time the plants get planted in the ground all the way until they end up in a retail store.”
“We are an agricultural company,” she continued, “but we also have to be able to process the product, so we are simultaneously a manufacturing company and a distribution company because we have to control how things are being moved to all of our stores. And then we are a retail company because we sell it in our stores. We track the entire supply chain.”
Trulieve has been an SAP customer since 2020. It initially chose SAP because its legacy system couldn’t keep up with the company’s growth and demand. “We needed to leverage SAP S/4HANA and the scale it gave us just to be able to keep up with sales,” Zimmerman explained. Today, Trulieve’s SAP portfolio also includes SAP SuccessFactors solutions and SAP Concur solutions.
Trulieve started in 2016, so the company is only nine years old, which gave it the ability to be cloud-native from the start. “We didn’t have any of the legacy technical debt that a lot of other companies may have. That enabled us to have all cloud-based solutions and when new technology becomes available, we’re able to quickly adopt it. That definitely puts us in a position to be able to leverage technology of the future, as opposed to being tied to legacy technology,” Zimmerman said.
That’s important because keeping up with the growth in the marijuana market is top of the agenda for Trulieve, which already operates in multiple states and is a market leader in Arizona, Florida, and Pennsylvania.
“Obviously we want to continue that growth,” Zimmerman said. The biggest catalyst for growth is when states legalize recreational marijuana use, which opens up the entire market for Trulieve’s hand-grown marijuana products. “The big focus for us is scalability and stability in our solutions to make sure we are able to support that growth,” she said.
“SAP enables us to have more insight into our growth and manage production better than any other system that’s out there,” Zimmerman said. And since Trulieve is a publicly traded company, running SAP S/4HANA also helps ensure that Trulieve’s management has access to all the internal controls and other features they need for regulatory and other purposes.
