An Economist Impact study sponsored by SAP found that 89% of procurement professionals feel confident in their ability to leverage AI to drive efficiency and productivity. This finding highlights the urgency of the challenge and the optimism around AI’s potential to strengthen resilience.

In times of uncertainty, spend is one of the levers companies can actively control. Leaders are expected to deliver not only savings, but also resilience, sustainability, and risk-aware processes.

At SAP Connect, we introduced several new AI capabilities to bring more automation, deeper integration, and smarter insights across our spend management solutions. These innovations are focused on improving outcomes: reducing risk, strengthening supply chains, increasing productivity, and freeing people to focus on higher-value work. They ensure spend continues to fulfill its elevated role as a driver of business growth and resilience while helping customers stay ahead of evolving demands.

Next-gen SAP Ariba brings deeper AI integrations and new AI assistants in Joule

SAP is rolling out the next generation of SAP Ariba solutions for source-to-pay to automate the power of procurement, improve cost savings, ensure compliance, and build supply chain resilience. Next-gen SAP Ariba is the world’s most modern source-to-pay solution designed to power the future of procurement.

The first AI-native source-to-pay suite redefines what is possible today and sets the course for the future. With businesses facing ever-present change, our customers can take advantage of a solution that’s built to endure — intelligent, integrated, and scalable. The capabilities delivered as part of next-gen SAP Ariba will empower businesses to tackle today’s challenges and excel in the future.

Next-gen SAP Ariba is built on SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP), and has a completely redesigned user experience, embedded analytics, and seamless integration with SAP Cloud ERP public and private applications.

The advanced capabilities and benefits of next-gen SAP Ariba solutions offer the following:

• Accelerated value realization: Faster adoption with intuitive interfaces and guided workflows
• Deeper insights: Actionable analytics that translate into tangible savings and operational improvements
• Empowered teams: A more productive experience for procurement professionals

Next-gen SAP Ariba capabilities will be rolled out starting in Q1 2026.

SAP also introduced new agentic and generative AI capabilities across the SAP Ariba suite to help organizations optimize productivity and decision-making. Planned for release in Q1 2026, a new Joule Agent for bid analysis automatically compares supplier bid data, including total cost, to give procurement teams insight and recommendations for award decisions.

SAP also added three AI features to the SAP Ariba procurement portfolio:

• AI supplier-response summary will use Joule to help review, analyze, and summarize supplier responses to questionnaires, helping procurement specialists make more informed decisions. This is planned to be generally available in Q1 2026. 
• Joule for simplified invoice creation will help employees outside accounts payable to easily submit invoices from SAP Cloud ERP for processing with minimal input. The feature will be generally available in Q4 2025.
• Intelligent contracting will use Joule to automatically extract key information, generate summaries, and search historical contracts for discrepancies and compliance issues. This feature will be generally available in Q4 2025.

As part of the broader SAP Ariba portfolio, SAP Ariba Intake Management is now globally available. The solution provides a single-entry point for all procurement requests to simplify intake, improve compliance, and give employees full visibility into status updates. With Joule, users can easily submit requests or follow guided steps, while the system orchestrates processes across SAP and non-SAP systems.

Learn more at our upcoming webinar, Simplify Procurement Intake with AI-Guided Orchestration, on November 20, 2025. Register here to see how organizations can streamline intake processes and drive meaningful results.

New AI enhancements in SAP Fieldglass connect the right external talent to the right roles

New AI enhancements to the SAP Fieldglass portfolio make it easier to match potential external workers with available positions by automatically analyzing role descriptions to determine the skills required for each position.

The new skills-based hiring feature automatically analyzes role descriptions to determine the skills required for each position, reducing the time to source potential candidates by up to 50 percent. By accelerating candidate matching, organizations can count on a faster, more cohesive, and efficient hiring process.

This feature is generally available and works in conjunction with existing AI features, including resume analysis and job description creation.

SAP Concur and American Express Global Business Travel make business travel easier, smarter and more impactful for organizations everywhere

SAP Concur announced a strategic alliance with American Express Global Business Travel (Amex GBT). Complete by SAP Concur and Amex GBT is a co-developed solution that will combine booking, servicing, payments, and expensing into one experience with AI at its core. The solution will benefit from SAP Concur and Amex GBT technology and business travel expertise. Complete customers will also have access to Amex GBT’s unmatched marketplace, software, and services via Complete, offering greater incentives and cost savings.

Smarter AI for travel and expense management in SAP Concur

We also introduced new AI capabilities for SAP Concur that will streamline reporting, strengthen fraud prevention, and simplify travel planning, helping organizations better control costs while improving the employee experience.

These innovations include:

• The Receipt Analysis Agent, a newly embedded Joule Agent in ExpenseIt, will go beyond basic receipt scanning, automatically completing missing information, determining expense types, and verifying vendor details, even for unknown vendors, to deliver accurate results without iterative learning. General availability for these features is expected for Q4 2025.
• Verify, the automated expense-audit service from SAP Concur now features an AI-generated receipt checker that flags receipts likely created by AI or online generators, helping auditors stop fraudulent claims. The service is currently generally available.
• A new pre-spend planner tool uses generative AI to estimate trip budgets based on policies and itineraries, while also providing relevant travel advisories to keep travelers informed. General availability is planned for early 2026 and Concur Expense customers can take advantage of the pre-spend planner at no extra cost. It will be available to Concur Travel customers later in the first half of 2026

Partnerships and integrations

SAP Concur has enhanced its integration with Uber for Business to further automate how ride and meal expenses are processed, providing better visibility to executives and business users. Ride and meal receipts are automatically routed into Concur Expense, with detailed tax, tip, and itemization data, resulting in cleaner data, fewer manual corrections, and faster reimbursement.

Looking ahead

SAP’s latest innovations across procurement, external workforce, and travel and expense help customers achieve positive outcomes such as cost savings, reducing risk, strengthening supply chains, creating value, improving productivity, and freeing people up to do higher-value work.

Etosha Thurman is chief marketing officer for SAP Finance and Spend Management.

Finance professionals have proven their resilience through volatility, from shifting interest rates to evolving regulatory landscapes, putting intense pressure on leaders to make faster and smarter decisions.

However, the pace of change has made traditional approaches, like best-of-breed point solutions, no longer sufficient to help finance teams keep up.

That is why the future of finance technology should act as an orchestra, not disjointed soloists.

Finance teams require a unified experience where applications, data, and AI work seamlessly together. With SAP Business Suite, these elements come together as one orchestra, enabling finance to operate in harmony and deliver outcomes that point solutions alone cannot achieve. This means not only faster close and stronger liquidity, but also tighter compliance and credible plans that hold up under change.

To strengthen collaboration across finance and bring innovation to the CFO’s office, SAP unveiled Joule’s next stage as the AI force at the center of SAP Business Suite’s value creation. A new generation of role-aware assistants in Joule are designed to partner with people in their specific business roles by tapping into the right agents behind the scenes for the job. For finance professionals, SAP introduced the next round of automation support using agentic AI.

SAP is embedding AI-powered reasoning directly into finance processes to automate routine work and elevate the strategic role of finance with the following new agents:

• The Accruals Agent will calculate accruals and deferrals based on system data and present the accountant with a proposal for review, along with a detailed explanation of the calculation logic.
• The Cash Management Agent will automate daily bank statement reconciliation tasks and recommend opportunities for optimization.
• The International Trade Classification Agent will reason over product characteristics and trade regulations and act to classify goods for international shipping, recommending customs tariff numbers and commodity codes

By bringing automation to critical but repetitive finance processes, these agents underscore SAP’s commitment to equipping the office of the CFO with AI-driven innovation that strengthens resilience in an increasingly complex business environment.

Finance as the conductor of the enterprise

The role of the CFO has expanded far beyond closing the books or reporting quarterly earnings. Today, finance teams are expected to bring together data, processes, and people from the entire business to enable seamless collaboration.

With SAP’s AI-first, suite-first approach, applications and data flow seamlessly, allowing finance leaders to coordinate business operations with confidence. This unified foundation ensures that insights are not siloed, but instead shared across the enterprise, enabling faster and smarter decisions.

Take working capital management, one of the biggest pressure points for finance leaders: A recent Economist Impact survey of 480 CFOs found confidence levels were strong in almost all areas, including revenue, profit, and customer retention, but only 36 percent felt confident in their ability to achieve working capital targets. SAP Business Suite can help organizations meet their targets by automating manual work and enabling actionable decisions — all by leveraging dynamic, autonomous, and action-oriented solutions in SAP Business Suite.

When an organization manages incoming receivables, outgoing payables, as well as cash and inventory within SAP, that connected experience creates data that provides real-time visibility into liquidity through SAP Business Data Cloud.  That data fuels SAP Business AI to analyze situations, recommend actions, and even resolve issues like disputed invoices automatically, which would otherwise slow the cash collection process. And with the integration of Joule and intelligent agents, SAP Business AI not only automates, it senses, reasons, orchestrates, and acts — turning insights into outcomes that free capacity and accelerate the business.

As AI agents take on more of the behind-the-scenes work, finance professionals can step fully into their role as the conductor of the enterprise. They can guide strategy with foresight, aligning every function in harmony and shaping outcomes that extend far beyond revenue or cost goals.

CFOs and their teams can then move beyond reactive decision-making toward shaping strategy in real time. This will position their office as a driver of growth, resilience, and innovation.

Looking ahead

SAP is laying the foundation for a new era of autonomous finance, where routine processes are automated, insights are delivered in real time, and finance teams are empowered to focus on strategy and growth.

These innovations mark just the beginning of SAP’s commitment to helping businesses navigate an increasingly complex financial landscape with agility, intelligence, and confidence.

Lawrence Martin is chief product officer and head of Public Cloud Engineering at SAP.
David Imbert is head of Finance Product Marketing at SAP.

New intelligent applications and open ecosystem
partnerships turn insights into action across the enterprise

As enterprises move toward an AI-driven future, the role of data has never been more critical. Yet much of that data remains locked in silos — spread across teams, clouds, and legacy systems.

This fragmentation creates a “context gap,” where information is technically available but disconnected from the business meaning that makes it actionable. For example, sales and marketing teams may share a common view of pipeline, but without linking it to product feedback or process bottlenecks, AI models trained on that data miss the full business context. The result is inconsistent insights, slower decision-making, and a stalled cycle of AI, data, and applications. 

SAP Business Data Cloud closes this gap. By harmonizing enterprise data wherever it resides and preserving its business context, it provides the foundation for intelligent applications and reliable AI.

At SAP Connect, SAP is bringing this vision to life with the next wave of innovations: SAP Business Data Cloud Intelligent Applications 

Four new intelligent applications in preview

Building on the momentum for intelligent applications established at SAP Sapphire, SAP is now opening a restricted public preview of four intelligent applications designed to transform decision-making across finance, procurement, supply chain, and revenue operations.

Finance Intelligence gives CFOs and finance teams real-time AI-powered analysis of liquidity by harmonizing SAP and third-party data and suggesting key actions to implement. Leaders can forecast cash flow instantly as well as detect liquidity risks using AI trained on live receivables and payables with external credit data such as Moody’s for richer customer risk assessment. With Joule and generative AI agents automating routine finance tasks, finance teams can shift their focus from reporting on the past to actively steering the future. 

Spend Intelligence provides organizations with a single, comprehensive view of enriched and classified spend data. Built-in AI and advanced analytics uncover patterns, anomalies, and opportunities for cost savings, while collaborative features connect finance, procurement, HR, and supply chain teams for better alignment. Through native integration with SAP source-to-pay solutions, spend data continuously informs operational workflows, improving decision-making, enhancing control, and strengthening enterprise resilience. 

Supply Chain Intelligence equips operations leaders with the context to make faster, more impactful decisions. By combining SAP data with external signals such as weather, regulatory updates, and market shifts — along with insights from millions of partners in SAP Business Network — businesses can leverage the power of AI to understand and take action on key supply chain issues and drive optimization. This comprehensive intelligence helps anticipate disruptions, evaluate supplier risks, and orchestrate decisions seamlessly from prediction to execution, ensuring more resilient and agile operations. 

Revenue Intelligence transforms fragmented customer touchpoints into unified, actionable insights. By linking individual customer behaviors with enterprise-wide operations, it helps revenue leaders see which accounts to prioritize, when to intervene, and how to optimize customer investments. Unlike CRM-only tools, Revenue Intelligence connects front-office engagement to back-office execution, empowering organizations to maximize growth opportunities and strengthen customer relationships with a complete view of the business context.

SAP Business Data Cloud Connect

Beyond intelligent applications, SAP is strengthening its open data ecosystem with SAP Business Data Cloud Connect, giving customers unprecedented flexibility to work with trusted data wherever it resides. With secure, zero-copy sharing, customers can bring SAP data products directly into their existing data platforms, eliminating duplication, reducing transformation efforts, and extending the reach of SAP’s business data fabric.

The first partners adopting this capability include Databricks (generally available) and Google (now in public preview), enabling real-time, bi-directional access to semantically rich SAP data products in environments customers already use.

With SAP Business Data Cloud Connect for Databricks now generally available, organizations can accelerate analytics and AI initiatives with greater speed, less friction, and full confidence in the integrity of their data.

SAP is committed to rapidly expanding this partner ecosystem so that, no matter where enterprise data resides, customers can connect it with trust, governance, and business context. 

Why it matters

Together, these announcements reflect SAP’s vision for the intelligent enterprise — where applications don’t just analyze, but act. By combining trusted data, open connectivity, and embedded AI, enterprises can shorten decision cycles, reduce integration complexity, and align intelligence directly with business outcomes.

For organizations operating across hybrid environments and complex data landscapes, these innovations make it easier than ever to turn insights into action and deliver measurable impact.

This week at SAP Connect, customers can experience this vision firsthand through live demos, real-world case studies, and discussions with SAP leaders, partners, and peers. It’s an opportunity to see how SAP Business Data Cloud is redefining decision-making today and shaping the future of the intelligent enterprise.

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

The future of work isn’t inching forward, it’s rapidly accelerating. AI is transforming productivity, agentic systems are reshaping decision-making, and skills-first strategies are redefining how organizations grow.

According to new research from SAP, employees using AI are saving 75 minutes a day — time that’s being reinvested into innovation, connection, and impact. 

But with economic volatility, shifting regulations, and a global skills crunch, organizations face a critical challenge: how to connect their people and their business in ways that drive agility, resilience, and growth. This isn’t just a moment of change; it’s a moment of unprecedented possibilities.

Unlocking new possibilities with SAP SuccessFactors

SAP SuccessFactors is powering that transformation with trusted intelligence, operational strength, and innovations that turn disruption into advantage. With over 10,000 customers worldwide, we are privileged to work with the world’s leading brands and help them guide their people and their organizations through change. 

The SAP SuccessFactors HCM suite is a robust offering that connects all the pieces for an organization’s people strategy — from core HR and payroll, to talent acquisition and talent management, to people analytics, and beyond. SAP Business AI is infused across our HCM suite, and SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) enables our customers to expand and extend to meet their needs. 

We are constantly investing in our solutions based on market signals, ensuring our customers have the tools they need to stay at the forefront of innovation. 

Today at Success Connect at SAP Connect in Las Vegas, we announced the latest innovations designed to elevate the employee experience, optimize operations, and deliver actionable workforce insights. 

Elevating the employee experience  

New Joule Agents  

Agentic AI is redefining the employee experience and transforming the way work gets done by automating routine tasks, accelerating decision-making, and unlocking new levels of productivity. Joule, SAP’s AI copilot, is embedded into enterprise-wide applications to deliver real-time intelligence and automation through a simple conversational interface.  

Joule currently supports 80 percent of the most-used tasks in SAP systems, and we are continuously expanding its capabilities. Joule is available in 11 languages, and next month the first HR-focused Joule Agent — the Performance and Goals Agent — will be generally available, with many more to follow. This agent is designed to empower managers to lead high-impact performance conversations by providing tailored insights, goal progress updates, and personalized talking points.

We’ll continue to release new agents that will continue to work behind the scenes to make managers, employees, and HR teams more efficient. Today, we announced the next four agents, available in SAP SuccessFactors in the first half of 2026: 

• The Career and Talent Development Agent, which automates succession planning and helps managers identify and develop future leaders
• The HR Service Agent, which serves as a direct point of contact for employees and reduces the amount of time HR staff spend answering routine questions
• The Payroll Agent, which helps employees better understand their pay by combining paycheck details with time data, enabling intelligent “explain pay” scenarios such as highlighting unexpected overtime and suggesting follow-up actions
• The People Intelligence Agent, which connects the People Intelligence Insight application in SAP Business Data Cloud with Joule and SAP SuccessFactors, allowing managers and HR teams to ask questions in their own words and receive intuitive, accessible workforce analytics

Introducing the workforce knowledge network

Building on these new capabilities, we are also introducing a workforce knowledge network, a first-of-its-kind integration that brings third-party content from industry experts directly into Joule, delivering enhanced insights for employees.  This is a major step forward in enabling agent-to-agent interaction in order to deliver the most relevant information in one seamless experience.

Content from leading HCM industry experts from G-P (Globalization Partners) and The Josh Bersin Company will flow directly into Joule. These integrations allow Joule to ingest third-party content and interact with various agents so employees can receive guidance that is grounded in real-world insights and trusted research.

For example, HR leaders can access G-P Gia, an HR agent developed by G-P, directly within Joule, providing access to expert global employment guidance. Additionally, they can ask Joule, “What are best practices for hiring engineers in a high-cost location?” and Joule can respond with research-backed insights and recommendations provided by Galileo, a trained AI agent developed by The Josh Bersin Company, with over 6,000 users across more than 800 companies.

“Joule offers a revolutionary technology to speed and simplify the lives of every business person,” said Josh Bersin, CEO of The Josh Bersin Company. “We are very excited to connect Galileo, a leading AI agent for HR, to all SAP users and give them deep insights into all their human capital decisions.” 

Optimizing Operations

Innovations in Core HR

Operational strength is the backbone of every great employee experience; it enables scale, consistency, and confidence, especially in times of change. That is why we continue to invest deeply in core HR.

With localization support across 104 countries and usage in 179, SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central remains the industry’s most trusted foundation for global HR operations. And today we have announced that it’s getting even stronger:

• New SAP SuccessFactors Workforce Scheduling
  Early adopter January 2026
  This new solution enables shift planners and supervisors in manufacturing and production to create smarter schedules aligned with real-time business demand and required skills, reducing administrative burden, helping to prevent costly overstaffing and understaffing, and maintaining compliance.
• New enhanced time-off capabilities in SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central
  Generally available next month
  This enhancement allows our customers to meet country-specific and complex leave regulations in markets including but not limited to Australia, Germany, and the U.S., helping them stay compliant while simplifying processes for managers and employees.
• SAP SuccessFactors Enterprise Service Management
  Generally available now
  Announced earlier this year, our new HR service delivery solution extends the power of core HR by automating workflows, streamlining service requests, and freeing HR teams to focus on high-value, strategic work.

Delivering best-in-class insights

People Intelligence

Operational excellence lays the groundwork, but true transformation happens when data becomes insight. That is where People Intelligence in SAP Business Data Cloud comes in. Initial capabilities in People Intelligence announced at SAP Sapphire in 2025 are now generally available. People Intelligence transforms people, skills, and business data into actionable, AI-driven insights that help HR and leaders make better, more strategic decisions for the business and its people.  

At Success Connect, we unveiled additional prebuilt insights for recruiting, learning, succession, career development planning, and performance and goals management. People Intelligence continues to expand, with more prebuilt insights for rewards and recognition, benefits, time management, and onboarding planned for May 2026. 

SmartRecruiters

SAP is also advancing the way organizations attract, recruit, and hire top talent. Last month, we acquired SmartRecruiters to build the future of AI-driven talent acquisition. At Success Connect, we showcased how this move strengthens our vision. By combining the scale of SAP SuccessFactors, the power of SAP Business AI, and the expertise of SmartRecruiters, we’re delivering an intelligent, end-to-end global hiring solution that simplifies recruiting and ensures every hire is aligned to business and workforce goals.

Where innovation meets impact 

Innovation in HR has entered a new era that is defined by connection. By uniting people, processes, and intelligence, organizations can move beyond incremental change to unlock unprecedented possibilities for impact, agility, and growth. With continuous advancements in AI, a trusted global foundation, and intelligence-driven insights, SAP SuccessFactors is helping organizations meet today’s challenges head-on and shape the future of work with confidence.

To catch our Success Connect keynote replay and learn more about the latest innovations in SAP SuccessFactors, register for SAP Connect Virtual on October 9.

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

Disruption has been the defining backdrop of global supply chains. Over the past decade, organizations have demonstrated remarkable resilience — navigating a global pandemic, shifting trade policies, and geopolitical conflicts.

At the same time, there is a huge opportunity to entirely re-think supply chains with AI and agentic workflows as the powerful transformation agents of the next decade. The lesson is clear: companies that invest in AI-driven applications and reliable data and re-think processes maintain continuity and customer trust, while others risk prolonged shocks, lower service levels, increased cost, and lost revenue.

Today at Supply Chain Connect at SAP Connect, we are building on the phenomenal momentum of AI-driven supply chain transformations with innovations designed to help supply chain leaders not just endure disruption, but transform it into an opportunity for resilience and growth.

Introducing SAP Supply Chain Orchestration

In today’s dynamic market, foresight and a reduced time-to-recover are everything. Business leaders must know where their products are, which suppliers or sub-suppliers are at risk, and how to respond with confidence. Yet, visibility gaps often leave organizations blindsided.

SAP Supply Chain Orchestration is a new AI-centric solution built to detect potential disruptions early, contextualize risk to a company’s unique supply chain configuration, apply intelligent impact analysis, and trigger AI-driven actions across planning, logistics, procurement, and manufacturing. Soon, supply chain stakeholders will be supported by powerful Joule assistants that leverage AI agents to strengthen supplier compliance, increase customer service, and reduce revenue exposure.

What sets SAP Supply Chain Orchestration apart is its foundation on SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP). The solution integrates data from SAP Business Network and SAP Business Data Cloud, providing a comprehensive view across every tier of the supply chain. These multi-tier insights help turn external and internal risk signals into prioritized actions, boosting operational efficiency, compliance, and customer satisfaction.

Set to be available in the first half of 2026, SAP Supply Chain Orchestration is the next step toward a future where businesses can anticipate global shifts before they escalate with a severe business impact.

Advanced AI capabilities and unified scenario simulations optimize supply chain planning

SAP is enabling its customers to reimagine supply chain planning to become faster, smarter, and more connected with SAP Integrated Business Planning (SAP IBP). This evolution of the product combines intelligent automation, a harmonized data model, and AI-driven capabilities to enhance forecasting, streamline processes, and help planners focus on critical decision making.

A harmonized planning area now supports both time-series and order-based planning, allowing users to move seamlessly among strategic, tactical, and operational levels, which ultimately enables seamless telescopic planning. New harmonized scenario simulations reveal the impact of alerts and risks to orders across all planning horizons. Embedded AI strengthens forecasting and inventory management, while characteristic-based planning adds right-fidelity supply planning to optimize stock and capacity matching for critical industries such as fashion retail, high-tech, life sciences, or consumer products.

The new Configurable Planner Workspace provides a unified interface where planners can monitor performance, simulate scenarios, and act immediately — guided by Joule, SAP’s copilot, which delivers contextual assistance and actionable insights from forecasts, supply plans, and multi-echelon inventory.

AI capabilities are currently in beta mode and planned for general availability in Q2 2026, while all other enhancements are now generally available.

New Joule Agents accelerate decisions and automation across the supply chain

SAP introduces three new Joule Agents for supply chain management, designed to automate critical, time-consuming tasks and empower teams to focus on strategic decision-making. These agents embed AI-native automation directly into SAP Cloud ERP, SAP Cloud ERP Private, and SAP Business Network workflows, reducing manual effort and minimizing errors.

• Production Planning and Operations Agent: Automates prerequisite checks for releasing production orders, validates material, capacity, and scheduling, and can recommend workarounds or release orders instantly – shortening order-to-delivery cycles and reducing costs. General availability is planned for Q1 2026.
• Change Record Management Agent: Supports product managers and engineers by reasoning over problem reports and change requests, recommending next steps, and initiating changes, which improves governance, traceability, and decision speed. General availability is planned for Q2 2026.
• Supplier Onboarding Agent: Streamlines onboarding in SAP Business Network by reasoning over supplier details, orchestrating invitations, validating data, and handling escalations, which enables procurement teams to scale faster while focusing on strategic supplier development.

With these agents, SAP is embedding intelligence deeper into day-to-day supply chain workflows, accelerating decisions where they matter most.

Upgrading SAP Business Network to meet customer needs

Global commerce is more interconnected than ever, but too many organizations still operate with fragmented procurement and logistics processes. SAP is introducing upgrades to SAP Business Network, the world’s largest B2B platform, facilitating over US$6.3 trillion in annual commerce across 190 countries.

• Availability on SAP BTP: SAP Business Network now runs on SAP BTP, providing a modern data foundation and enabling organizations to coordinate deals at scale. It connects easily across SAP and third-party systems, introduces a unified global directory with guided onboarding, and offers workflow customization through SAP Build. Joule integration will be available in January 2026, bringing embedded AI to analytics, automation, and approvals across the network.
• Network-centric integration across the business suite: Rolling out later this year, SAP Business Network will support end-to-end value streams with SAP Cloud ERP, SAP Ariba, SAP Fieldglass, and SAP Transportation Management. This will accelerate dispute resolution, improve emissions tracking, and enable AI-assisted navigation.
• Simplified supplier data access: By Q4 2025, users will be able to search for suppliers directly from their ERP interface, eliminating manual onboarding. Buyers will gain faster access to new vendors, reducing activation costs and expanding visibility.

Together, these innovations enhance SAP Business Network with intelligence, reach, and usability — delivering embedded AI, seamless business suite integration, and ERP-native supplier discovery.

SAP launches new logistics management solution

SAP is announcing SAP Logistics Management, a new cloud-native solution designed to complement operations of large distribution centers with capabilities to support smaller, local, and regional warehouses. This will help establish multi-tier distribution networks that strengthen resilience and increase delivery speed.

Fully connected to SAP Cloud ERP Private and SAP Business Network for Logistics, the solution centralizes inventory, shipments, and partner coordination. Unlike standalone tools, it extends ERP capabilities directly to satellite warehouses, drastically reducing manual tasks and ensuring consistency across networks.

Built-in AI capabilities guide operational decisions, eliminating silos and strengthening collaboration across logistics ecosystems. SAP Logistics Management will be available in Q1 2026.

Doehler, a global producer of technology-driven natural ingredients for the food, beverage, and nutrition industry, will leverage the solution in its warehouses to manage its production sites, samples and spare parts.

“SAP Logistics Management is set to deliver lean process automation and accelerated transformation for most of our more than 50 production sites, sampling operations and technical warehouses,” said Dr. Michael Merget, Chief Operating Officer of Doehler Group. “We see its powerful, integrated AI capabilities not as an add-on, but as the core intelligence that will define the future of our logistics.”

Looking ahead

Resilient, intelligent, and collaborative supply chains are no longer aspirations — they are necessities. Together, these innovations reflect SAP’s vision for a fully orchestrated supply chain. The next generation of supply chain technology will empower businesses to detect disruptions early, harness data at scale, and consistently exceed customer expectations. By leading with intelligence and foresight, companies can transform crises into opportunities and position themselves to thrive in a world defined by uncertainty.

For more details on all announcements made this week, please refer to the SAP Connect Innovation Guide.

Dominik Metzger is president and chief product officer for SAP Supply Chain Management.