BUSINESS NEWS 2 - The World Management

23 June

Why So Many Wanted to Visit the SAP Experience Center at SAP Sapphire

The SAP Experience Center brought the “new SAP” to life at SAP Sapphire. It guided visitors through the story of a major sporting event—from early planning to game day—and ended with a special souvenir.

Andreas Wendel is very pleased with the outcome: a total of 11,200 visitors explored the SAP Experience Center at SAP Sapphire Orlando and Madrid. The self-contained exhibit drew customers, partners, SAP employees, media representatives, and analysts alike. Across the two identical centers, visitors also joined 123 guided tours.

“The rush of visitors was so great that, in Orlando, the line at times wrapped all the way around the center, which covers roughly 1,000 square meters,” says Wendel, head of Innovation Experience Services at SAP.

So what was inside the oversized box in the middle of the show floor? What were visitors willing to wait more than an hour to experience?

Sports create an emotional connection

“This year, our task was to bring the Autonomous Enterprise to life,” Wendel says. “It’s a highly technical topic, and we talk a lot about artificial intelligence, agents, and Joule Assistants.” The team wanted to make tangible what CEO Christian Klein and other members of the Executive Board of SAP SE introduced in the keynote and what was demonstrated in sessions.

Planning began six months before SAP Sapphire, supported by experts from Strategy, Development, and Product Marketing. Over time, more partners, customers, and service providers joined the effort. Wendel estimates that close to 100 people contributed to the concept.

As the narrative thread, the team chose a major sporting event and the theme “From Competition to Collaboration”—a timely fit with the world’s largest soccer tournament taking place across the United States, Mexico, and Canada this year. “With so many technology discussions at SAP Sapphire, sports is a topic that resonates with people emotionally,” Wendel says. “We used a sports event to show how SAP solutions help plan and deliver an event of that scale.”

“For spectators, it’s an experience. But for a mega-event to run smoothly, all equipment and technologies around a stadium must work,” he adds. “We showed how Autonomous Asset Management helps ensure the infrastructure performs on the day of the event.”

A players’ tunnel, pipelines, and a robodog

Let’s take a tour of the SAP Experience Center with Wendel. We enter through a players’ tunnel and arrive in a skybox overlooking an imagined stadium for a major international soccer tournament. The first stop, “Plan the Game,” focuses on the big picture and shows how SAP brings AI, data, and applications together to orchestrate every aspect of a major sporting event.

Wendel explains how SAP solutions support the planning phase: “We show how customers can use our finance and planning solutions well ahead of the event. Agents and Joule Assistants help identify developments early and take action to stay within budget.”

His colleague Pranav Avadhanula, solution advisor for Finance and AI, demonstrates this with a real-world scenario. On a large screen, visitors see how Joule Agents can identify the best providers for the event’s security concept in Mexico and simulate different scenarios—including currency fluctuations between the Mexican peso and the U.S. dollar.

The next station, “Build the Stage,” highlights the work that happens behind the scenes before fans cheer. Modernizing a stadium requires precise planning, budget discipline, and seamless execution. SAP helps orchestrate everything—from staffing and travel to procurement—enabling the venue to be ready on time and on budget, supported by Autonomous Spend, Autonomous HCM, and Autonomous Project Delivery.

Another room focuses on applications that are invisible to visitors—but critical. One scenario in particular stands out and was likely the most frequently filmed by visitors: a dog-shaped robot from partner Boston Dynamics moving along a series of pipelines, automatically detecting leaks with sensors. Once identified and analyzed, the system triggers a digital repair order for the maintenance staff responsible.

“What resonates strongly is that we don’t just show digital solutions,” Wendel says. “We also demonstrate how embodied AI and robotics can support operations in the future—ideally through customer use cases. These physical elements make SAP solutions tangible and help reduce complexity.”

Another popular highlight is the “Hall of Fame,” where key customers are honored with their own trophies. “In Orlando, we had a tour with a customer. When employees saw their trophy, they cheered and took photos like at a Champions League final. That really showed how much detail went into the experience—it was simply incredible.”

More than just a jersey

The visit concludes in the fan shop. Under the theme “Monetize the Moment,” it demonstrates how organizers can generate revenue through merchandise. Visitors scan their SAP Sapphire badge and order a personalized jersey in one of two colors.

They then watch as a machine printed the jerseys with their chosen name and number. A humanoid robot from partner Aimbo Robotics sorts the finished items onto shelves. Despite high demand, jerseys are ready for pickup about two hours later.

The twist: the jerseys include an NFC chip. “If you tap your phone to it, you can access all SAP Experience Center content again,” Wendel explains. “So it’s not just a jersey—it extends the experience beyond the event.”

Wendel emphasizes that while the SAP Experience Center was built for SAP Sapphire, its elements are reused at other events or in one of the numerous permanent SAP Experience Centers. Parts of the setup are also stored for reuse. “Sustainability is very important to us,” he says.

Hard to top

The many months of preparation and the long evenings in the exhibition hall in the run-up to SAP Sapphire clearly paid off. Asked about the feedback, Wendel concludes: “Our concept makes SAP’s full portfolio and industry strength tangible. This year, many people told us: ‘Last year was already great, but you managed to top it.’ And that’s not easy.”

Experience SAP innovation firsthand

SAP Experience Centers bring innovation to life through real business scenarios, interactive showcases, and industry-specific storytelling. Across 31 locations worldwide, SAP connects applications, data, and AI to help turn complex business challenges into tangible solutions.

Interested customers and partners may explore SAP Experience Centers online, book a tour, or get an impression of SAP AppHaus.

This article was first published on the SAP employee portal.

22 June

BUSINESS NEWS

Innovation Beyond the Sky: How Airbus Is Redefining the Future of Flight

by tempuser_259461997 0 Comments

At a recent gathering of SAP innovators, a powerful message emerged from one of the world’s aerospace leaders: the sky is not the limit anymore, but space itself. Innovation is not a destination; it’s an endless journey.

Few companies embody that philosophy better than Airbus.

Innovation is not a department

“We are living at a remarkable crossroads in history. For decades, the sky was simply a place we traveled through. Today, it has become a testing ground for the future of humanity,” said Nicolas Jourdan, senior strategist at Airbus SAS. He was speaking at the TAC Insights conference for SAP Energy and Utilities in Toulouse, the operational headquarters of the company.

At Airbus, the mission goes far beyond manufacturing aircraft. It’s about designing systems that connect cultures, advance technology, protect the planet, and extend humanity’s reach into space.

“For us, innovation is not a department. It’s a way of thinking. It means asking ‘What if?’ when others say something is impossible,” said Jourdan. “It’s very simple. Innovation is about creating value for someone, somewhere, at a moment in time—and sustaining it over time.”

While this may sound simple, it requires challenging the status quo. It means embracing cultural change, taking calculated risks, and accepting failure as part of learning.

Legacy of breakthroughs

In 1970, Airbus entered an aviation market dominated by giants like Boeing, McDonnell Douglas, and Lockheed. They didn’t compete by being similar, but by being fundamentally different. The company has consistently challenged conventional thinking in aviation.

At a time when experts believed twin-engine aircraft couldn’t safely cross oceans, Airbus proved them wrong with the A300 revolution, forever changing long-haul aviation.
When most aircraft required a three-person crew, Airbus redesigned the cockpit to automate the flight engineer’s role. Despite resistance, the two-pilot cockpit became the global standard.
Replacing analog dials with digital displays transformed how pilots interact with aircraft; glass cockpit innovation made flying safer and more intuitive.
Airbus introduced digital flight controls, replacing mechanical systems with computers. Fly-by-wire technology increased safety and enabled flight envelope protection and more efficient operations. What once looked like a video game controller is now industry standard.

One of Airbus’s most impactful innovations is cross-crew qualification, meaning pilots can transition between aircraft models—from the A319 to the A350—with minimal additional training. This reduces costs for airlines and improves operational flexibility.

“Innovation isn’t always flashy. It’s mostly about making complex systems simpler and more human-friendly,” Jourdan reminded his audience.

Running the factory

Airbus builds big sections such as the fuselage, the wings, and the tail in different places. The sections are then shipped to one factory for assembly and testing in the Airbus Beluga, an oversized cargo aircraft developed especially to transport large components between production sites across Europe. Altogether, this process can take up to 12 months, especially for wide body aircraft.

The company uses SAP ERP systems, including SAP S/4HANA, to manage core business functions. It also uses SAP Manufacturing Execution directly on the factory floor and assembly lines, as well as SAP Integrated Business Planning to plan production, manage supply chain complexity, and optimize resource usage.

“SAP and Airbus have a long-term partnership,” Jourdan said. “Without SAP, our systems would not be as efficient as they are. We’re in continuous development.”

Future scenarios

When it comes to pioneering new horizons, Airbus doesn’t rely solely on internal expertise but regularly explores unconventional approaches with external thinkers. These exercises help identify blind spots, validate strategy and understand societal and environmental shifts

To maintain both an inside and an outside-in perspective, Airbus created Skywise, an aircraft data analysis engine platform which acts as a digital brain, connecting aircraft, operations, and maintenance systems. A data platform for airlines and aircraft operations, it collects vast amounts of data into one system. It then performs predictive maintenance increasingly supported by AI to detect patterns and predict failures before they happen in order to prevent delays, failures, and expensive repairs.

Airbus’s future strategy is built on three transformational pillars:

Decarbonization: The aerospace industry faces mounting pressure to reduce emissions. Airbus is tackling this head-on by exploring hydrogen-powered aircraft, sustainable aviation fuels, blended wing body designs, and fully electric propulsion concepts. Their goal is to launch the world’s first zero-emission commercial aircraft.
Digital transformation: To enable fully connected ecosystems, Airbus is developing satellite-based connectivity networks, smart cabin and cargo systems,. and real-time operational data platforms. This enables better decision-making, reduced costs, and improved passenger experiences.
Automation and autonomy projects: Projects like DragonFly are pushing the boundaries of pilot assistance and automation. Future capabilities include automatic emergency landing, weather-independent operations, and advanced navigation systems. The goal is not to replace pilots, but to enhance safety and efficiency.

Beyond Earth

From orbit to deep space, Airbus is helping shape humanity’s next frontier. The company plays a key role in searching for life on Mars together with the European Space Agency using the ExoMars rover. It also collaborates with the European Service Module for NASA’s Artemis program missions and is helping to develop satellite systems enabling global communication and climate monitoring.

Often, new ideas are met with skepticism, cultural resistance can slow adoption, and mistakes are inevitable. Airbus embraces this reality and considers it part of the process.

“The biggest challenges of our time—climate change, global connectivity, and space exploration—cannot be solved by one company or even one industry. Decarbonization alone depends on energy providers, governments, infrastructure developers, and airlines and manufacturers. It’s a shared responsibility,” Jourdan concluded.

22 June

BUSINESS NEWS

Less Back-and-Forth: How SAP Store Private Offers Simplify How You Buy and Sell

by tempuser_118422762 0 Comments

Enterprise software marketplaces have fundamentally changed how software gets bought and sold. What used to require months of vendor outreach, in-person meetings, and parallel e-mail negotiations can now start—and often end—inside a single platform.

The numbers reflect the shift. B2B e-commerce sales expanded 16% by 2024 to US$2.64 trillion, with direct digital channels and marketplaces seeing the strongest growth. Sellers on B2B technology marketplaces have been able to grow revenue by 10%–15%, with many closing deals worth over $1 million in ACV through these platforms. SAP Store is already part of this momentum, supporting more than 50,000 transactions, representing roughly 30%–35% of SAP sales volume, and giving partners access to more than 440,000 SAP customers across over 200 countries.

But here’s where the marketplace model runs into its limits: most enterprise deals aren’t straightforward enough for a standard checkout button.

Negotiated pricing. Custom contract terms. Procurement reviews. Regional tax requirements. Bank transfer requirements. Delayed start dates. Sixty-nine percent of B2B buyers would complete transactions of $500,000 or more without in-person interaction, but those same high-value deals involve complex approval workflows, payment terms, and stakeholder sign-offs that a flat “Buy Now” experience simply can’t handle. When a deal doesn’t fit the standard flow, it typically gets pushed outside the platform entirely—back into e-mail threads, separate negotiations, and disconnected systems that no one has full visibility into.

That’s the problem private offers on SAP Store help solve.

Instead of forcing complex deals out of the platform, customers can request a private offer directly through SAP Store, negotiate terms with the partner, and close the transaction inside the same environment where they found the solution. The deal stays connected, trackable, and consistent—from discovery to signature.

19 June

BUSINESS NEWS

How AI Powers Customer Experience in Travel and Transportation

by tempuser_4085427917 0 Comments

When talking about travel and transportation, there is only one thing a business should focus on: the end-to-end customer journey. Excellence in experience is what to strive for from the very first point of interaction to the destination.

Travelers nowadays have very strict requirements. From booking a ticket to arriving at a destination, they expect fast, convenient, and prompt assistance when they face issues along the way. No matter how perfectly a system is designed to meet needs, there will always be situations that can’t be avoided. Delays, confusing booking systems, long customer service wait times, and much more create frustration for travelers.

AI is reshaping how the travel and transportation industry is doing business. It delivers more avenues to provide customer care aside from the typical communication channels such as e-mail, short messaging services, and social media. AI provides smarter, faster, and more personalized customer experiences, leading to happier customers and therefore growth in revenue for the business. AI is no longer optional, it is now becoming a necessity.

Beyond tickets and timetables: how AI orchestrates the customer journey

Previously, travelers preferred travel agents over booking apps, relied on printed tickets, and valued personal service and human interaction. However, mobile apps for bookings, check-ins, and payments are now widely used. Travelers also expect real-time updates and personalized recommendations that provide seamless, end-to-end experiences.

SAP delivers an ecosystem that can provide the tools needed to meet these expectations. Using SAP Service Cloud, organizations can manage cases, complaints, and information requests efficiently. AI can respond within seconds, unlike traditional customer service processes that rely on manual handling of support tickets. AI-powered chatbots can also manage a high volume of customer conversations simultaneously. Here is an example integration strategy:

Intelligent selling services for SAP Commerce Cloud

Intelligent selling services for SAP Commerce Cloud are AI-powered services that leverage machine learning and artificial intelligence to help deliver personalized customer experiences and optimize booking strategies. These services help analyze customer booking patterns, provide contextual data across customer touchpoints, and offer recommendations that can lead to increases in revenue.

Travel accelerator

The travel accelerator for the SAP Commerce solution is an industry-specific solution designed to enable travel companies to deliver omnichannel digital traveler engagement through SAP Commerce Cloud. For customers that already have an existing SAP Commerce Cloud solution, they can use the travel accelerator to help tailor it for travel business demand. It can provide real-time information to offer personalized customer experiences and reinforce customer loyalty.

Loyalty management program through integration

Organizations may need a system to reward customers for coming back, like earning points, perks, or special treatment when you repeatedly book with the same travel company. For this, an integration to a loyalty management program, either SAP Customer Loyalty Management or a third-party solution, can be used.

The way forward

The Advanced Success Plan version for SAP Customer Experience solutions can help you achieve your business goals. As a starting point, we can create a service engagement plan that provides a tailored approach to meeting your KPIs. During this phase, we also deliver sessions to help you set up SAP Sales Cloud, SAP Service Cloud, and SAP Commerce Cloud while working to ensure that travel and transportation industry best practices are followed.

With AI capabilities available across every solution, you can now categorize your customer base based on travel behaviors and patterns, as well as perform sentiment analysis on customer reviews and support tickets. The Advanced Success Plan can serve as a strategic partner in helping achieve AI objectives. Our experts, backed by deep industry knowledge, can provide guidance on the most effective path forward.

To deliver services that are aligned with each customer’s specific goals, we have organized our offerings into four phases: implementation, pre-go-live, post-go-live, and continuous improvement.

Implementation

During the implementation phase, our focus is on providing adoption guidance to help set up the solutions, from front-end applications to back-end systems. We work alongside the team to establish core capabilities needed for a successful implementation and to help ensure the solution is aligned with business requirements.

This includes, but is not limited to, application user management, key user extensibility, the SAP CX AI Toolkit, integrations, security considerations, and other essential platform capabilities. Our goal is to help build a solid foundation that supports scalability, maintainability, and future growth while enabling teams to get the most value from the platform.

Pre-go-live

In the pre-go-live phase, our focus is to validate and safeguard the solutions that have been built throughout the implementation. The goal is to make sure systems are configured correctly, performing as expected, and ready at go-live.

This includes conducting detailed reviews of business configuration settings, evaluating system performance, validating integrations, reviewing security and user access setups, and assessing analytics and reporting capabilities. We also help identify potential risks, gaps, or areas for optimization before launch, working to ensure issues are addressed proactively.

In addition, we work with teams to confirm readiness across key functional and technical areas, helping ensure that testing has been completed successfully, critical business scenarios have been validated, and the solution is aligned with operational requirements. Performing an adoption checkpoint during this phase helps reduce risk, improve system stability, and support a smoother go-live experience.

Post-go-live

During the post-go-live phase, we work closely with the team to help ensure that recommendations and best practices identified throughout the implementation have been properly configured and are delivering the intended results.

As users begin working in the production environment, new questions, opportunities for optimization, and minor challenges often emerge. During this stage, we provide continued guidance and support to help address those items, whether they are related to business processes, system configuration, integrations, extensibility, analytics, or overall solution adoption.

Our functional and technical experts remain available to review issues, provide recommendations, and help navigate any areas that require additional attention. We also help identify opportunities for further improvements and knowledge transfer, working to ensure the organization is well-positioned to maintain, enhance, and scale the solution over time.

Continuous improvement

Finally, as part of the continuous improvement phase, we help stakeholders remain informed about new innovations and enhancements introduced through SAP release cycles. By staying up-to-date with the latest capabilities, the team can continue to maximize the value of the solutions and drive ongoing business success.

Tara Tracey is global product owner of the Advanced Success Plan at SAP.
Geoffrey Arado is product manager for SAP Customer Experience.

18 June

BUSINESS NEWS

The Autonomous CX Revolution Elevated by Google

by tempuser_4229273019 0 Comments

Imagine a customer moving effortlessly through their journey from marketing through discovery, purchase, and fulfillment.

They see a personalized ad, explore a product through an AI assistant, respond to an offer in their inbox, and open your app expecting everything to simply work. They expect relevance, continuity, and immediacy across every interaction in their entire journey.

Instead, they hit friction:

They’re asked to repeat information they already shared.
Promotions don’t reflect inventory availability.
Fulfillment updates arrive late or not at all.
And when support is needed, no one has the complete picture.

These are not isolated breakdowns. They are systemic customer experience failures.

In the era of agentic AI, those moments compound quickly. Customers now assume brands understand who they are, what they need, and what is happening in real time, and they expect businesses to act on that intelligence instantly across the entire customer journey.

The agentic era is accelerating this shift dramatically.

This goes beyond surfacing insights or recommendations. Agentic AI systems are increasingly capable of planning, reasoning, decision-making, and coordinated action across networks of agents. AI is fundamentally reshaping how customer experiences are created, delivered, and optimized in real time.

But it also exposes a fundamental truth: when AI moves faster than your data, systems, and processes, it reveals everything that’s broken.

That tension—between rising customer expectations and disconnected CX reality—is exactly what SAP and Google Cloud are solving together with SAP Customer Experience.

The customer experience reality: ambition outpacing execution

Most organizations want to deliver seamless, connected experiences, but they struggle to operationalize those moments.

According to SAP research, 78% of businesses say AI will be essential for retaining customers in 2026. Yet fewer than two in five share their customer data across CX (37%) or CRM (39%) platforms.

This is an enterprise operations problem, and its impact is felt across the entire CX business. And when these touchpoints are disconnected, the customer feels it first. And by the time the company feels that friction, it may be too late to win that customer back.

A new model for customer experience built on trusted enterprise data

SAP Customer Experience plays a key role in the expansion of SAP and Google Cloud’s partnership to enable a fundamentally new approach to CX—one that connects data, AI, engagement, and commerce in real time.

“Agentic customer experience starts deeper in the stack than the customer ever sees—in the quality of the data, the way processes run, and the strength of the platform underneath. With SAP and Google Cloud, we’re building that foundation together, so AI moves beyond insight to action. This delivers continuous, intelligent experiences with the control, context, and execution required at enterprise scale.”

Muhammad Alam, Member of the Executive Board of SAP SE, SAP Product & Engineering

SAP Commerce Cloud endorses Universal Commerce Protocol: powering the next era of agentic commerce

As digital commerce enters the age of AI-driven experiences, a new standard is emerging to reshape how consumers discover and purchase products.

The Universal Commerce Protocol is an open standard designed to enable AI agents to manage the entire shopping journey, from product discovery to checkout and even post-purchase support.

Unlike traditional commerce integrations that rely on fragmented APIs and bespoke connections, UCP creates a shared language for retailers, payment providers, and AI systems. This allows intelligent agents to interact directly with commerce platforms, dramatically simplifying how products are surfaced, evaluated, and purchased.

In essence, UCP transforms commerce from a series of disconnected steps into a unified, agent-driven experience.

SAP Commerce Cloud, long known for powering enterprise-grade digital commerce for global brands, is now aligning with this new paradigm. As part of the growing UCP ecosystem, SAP plans to work with Google to enable its customers to participate in AI-native commerce experiences that extend beyond traditional storefronts and help its merchants’ products be discovered and purchased across the Gemini app and Google Search, including AI Mode.

“Our goal with UCP is to build an open, trusted standard for the future of AI-driven commerce,” said Ashish Gupta, VP/GM, merchant shopping at Google. “Having a leader like SAP endorse the protocol is critical as we work toward bringing seamless, secure agentic commerce to everyone.”

For merchants, this means dramatically lower integration costs, faster onboarding into new AI-driven channels, and the ability to reach new customers beyond their storefront experiences.

In addition, SAP Commerce Cloud will leverage Google Gemini capabilities to power a Shopping Assistant that brands can deploy directly to their own customers. This enables organizations to offer a real-time, AI-driven shopping experience across their digital touchpoints. The Shopping Assistant engages shoppers through chat, voice, and text to help them discover products, answer questions, and turn intent into transactions.

Unlike traditional storefront interactions, the Shopping Assistant can create a persistent, conversational experience that follows the customer across the shopping journey, continuously refining recommendations and guiding decisions in real time.

It can also curate creative ideas—such as themed outfits or complete event concepts—by intelligently combining products based on customer requests. By unifying behavioral signals, real-time inventory, and promotional intelligence, it can increase conversion rates, improve average order value, and ensure every recommendation is both relevant and fulfillable.

SAP Engagement Cloud and Google Cloud: how agents work together for marketing

This new expanded partnership comes alongside another historic milestone for SAP and Google Cloud, announced earlier this year. A fundamentally different approach to marketing execution is now offering marketers a new model for engagement that is built on trusted enterprise data.

By combining customer data and real-time signals like inventory, orders, and fulfillment status with operational truth, marketing teams can now build, launch, and optimize personalized customer engagements, grounded in business context and executed at scale through an autonomous multi-agent framework.

At the heart of this partnership:

SAP Business Data Cloud (SAP BDC) connects semantically rich data across the enterprise with AI to help enable real-time insights and drive personalized interactions grounded in business context. This includes SAP Business Data Cloud Connect for Google BigQuery with bidirectional, zero-copy data access and built-in enterprise-grade governance and security.

Google BigQuery unlocks real-time signals across the Google ecosystem, such as geolocation, weather, ad engagement, and rich analytics, for AI-driven segmentation, personalization, activation and analytics.

SAP Customer Experience solutions can provide the real-time behavioral context: customer profiles, transactions, orders, service interactions, and consented engagement data.

SAP Engagement Cloud can activate enterprise data, AI insights, and predictions through intuitive tools and AI agents to help securely orchestrate real-time, personalized interactions across the entire customer life cycle.

Why this partnership matters

The collaboration between SAP and Google reflects a broader shift in how commerce and marketing teams operate.

For commerce leaders:

From search to agents: Consumers are no longer just searching. AI agents are acting on their behalf, making decisions, and completing purchases.
From channels to ecosystems: Commerce is moving beyond owned channels into distributed, AI-powered environments like search, assistants, and chat interfaces.
From integration to interoperability: Open standards like UCP eliminate the need for one-off integrations, enabling scalable participation in the AI economy.

With UCP, AI agents can seamlessly access product catalogs, manage carts, process payments, and handle post-purchase workflows, all without forcing retailers to rebuild their infrastructure.

For marketing leaders:

From prompt to performance: Agentic intelligence becomes operational where business goals, enterprise signals, and marketing processes direct AI agents, translating into real customer interactions and automated lifecycle journeys.
From manual to generative: Advanced generative capabilities powered by Google Gemini models, such as Nano Banana 2, introduce new agentic skills that help marketing teams dynamically generate messaging, imagery, and campaign variations.
From dark data to unified data context: With every interaction grounded in business context and continuous engagement signals, messages become truly dynamic. Text messages can turn into immersive conversations with Google Rich Communication Services (RCS) and advertising creative and offers can continuously evolve.

Agents collaborate across SAP and Google Cloud to personalize, activate, and continuously optimize campaigns in real time across engagement channels and media networks.

“With this partnership, SAP and Google Cloud bring together connected AI and a unified data foundation to create real-time understanding of the customer and business context. This enables organizations and CX teams to move from fragmented interactions to continuous, intelligent execution—embedding AI into end-to-end processes and unlocking meaningful gains in productivity, speed, and business impact.”

Jan Gilg, Global President Customer Success & Americas, Member of the Extended Board

Unlocking new value for enterprises

For SAP Commerce Cloud customers, this partnership can unlock several strategic advantages:

Increased discoverability in AI-driven shopping experiences
Faster time-to-market through standardized integrations
Ownership of customer relationships, even in third-party AI environments
Future-proof architecture aligned with emerging commerce standards

As AI continues to compress the distance between intent and transaction, accessibility to agents becomes just as important as visibility in search results. In this new model, success in commerce is no longer defined by storefront experience alone—it’s defined by how effectively your products, data, and systems can be accessed, interpreted, and transacted on by AI agents.

For SAP Engagement Cloud customers, this partnership unveils a new network of interoperable AI agents, grounded in enterprise data and shared context across SAP and Google. Organizations can achieve measurable outcomes, including:

Faster speed-to-market through autonomous campaign and content generation
Lower operational overhead by eliminating manual execution steps
Always‑on optimization that continuously improves performance
Higher ROI through relevant, timely, and consistent engagement at scale

Marketers can spend less time managing workflows and more time shaping strategy, creative direction, and customer value.

“What matters is delivering real value to our customers. As customer experience becomes more agentic, organizations need to move faster, stay connected, and operate consistently across every interaction. By bringing commerce, marketing, and service together, we help our customers reduce complexity, respond more quickly, and deliver more relevant experiences that strengthen engagement and drive sustainable growth.”

Manos Raptopoulos, Global President Customer Success Europe, APAC, Middle East & Africa and Member of the Extended Board SAP SE

The future of AI-driven commerce and marketing: what this means for your CX strategy

The partnership between SAP and Google for marketing and commerce marks a foundational shift toward what many are calling an agentic revolution—a world where AI doesn’t just assist CX teams and shoppers but actively participates in the buying process and shapes their customer experience.

For enterprise CX leaders, the message is clear: success in this new era will depend on how well your commerce and marketing platform can communicate with AI agents. With SAP and Google Cloud, SAP Customer Experience is positioning itself—and its customers—to thrive in that future.

18 June

BUSINESS NEWS

From Weeks to Minutes: How SAP Store Is Changing Enterprise Software Procurement

by tempuser_3041654114 0 Comments

There is a version of enterprise software buying that sounds modern: a business team identifies a need, finds a solution, evaluates it quickly, buys it, and gets access. The whole thing takes just a couple of days.

The technology to do this better has been around for a while, but the habits haven’t caught up. That version exists—many organizations just aren’t using it yet.

What still happens most of the time: the team finds the tool, sends an email to IT, copies procurement, waits for a vendor quote, chases someone for budget approval, gets the contract sent to legal, and follows up three weeks later to ask where things stand. Somewhere in that chain, someone is managing a spreadsheet no one else can find.

This is not a niche problem. Companies relying on spreadsheets and email-based workflows experience significantly higher error rates, longer processing times, and limited visibility into spending patterns, and those inefficiencies compound the longer they go unaddressed. Meanwhile, 67% of B2B buyers now say they prefer a rep-free buying experience. They want to research, evaluate, and buy on their own terms, not wait for someone to send them a PDF.

The gap between what buyers expect and what many procurement processes actually deliver is wide, and it’s getting harder to ignore as AI adoption accelerates. Business teams do not want to wait weeks to access a new capability. But the approval chain wasn’t built for that speed.

SAP Store was built for exactly this. More than 3,600 SAP and partner solutions—applications, extensions, AI-powered tools, integrations—are all accessible through a single marketplace where SAP customers can explore, trial, quote, and purchase within their existing SAP environment.

Listings clearly outline integration requirements, pricing, and deployment options upfront. Many solutions offer free trials or demos with no sales call required. And when a customer is ready to buy, the platform handles automated entitlement checks, pre-verified product dependencies, and flexible payment options, so there are no handoffs to a procurement inbox that may or may not be monitored.

One of the less-discussed advantages is speed of access. Customers can go from purchase to provisioned access in less than an hour: no license delays stalling a project, no waiting on a quote that takes three business days to arrive. And because SAP Store integrates directly into the customer’s existing SAP environment, new solutions do not require a separate onboarding process to connect with the tools already in place.

Organizations using advanced procurement platforms report 15% to 20% cost savings and 40% faster cycle times compared to traditional manual processes. The operational case is clear. The harder part is cultural: getting teams to actually stop managing approvals through email when that is what they’ve always done.

The companies moving fastest on software adoption right now are not necessarily using better tools. They’re spending less time managing the process around the tools.

To discover SAP and partner solutions, request quotes, start trials, and manage purchases through a more centralized experience, explore SAP Store.

Don Larcinese is global vice president of SAP Marketplace Sales & Enablement.

18 June

BUSINESS NEWS

Navigating the Transition from SAP Solution Manager to SAP Cloud ALM

by cybersite 0 Comments

At SAP Sapphire in 2026, SAP announced major innovations in SAP Cloud ALM, including seven new migration and modernization assistants covering system analysis, custom code, data management, configuration, business process, testing, and adoption—all embedded in the agent-led toolchain to help reduce ERP migration effort. Importantly, SAP Cloud ALM is also the operational observability hub for AI agents within the new SAP AI Agent Hub, helping customers trace agent sessions, monitor goal completion, and govern the full AI agent lifecycle across their enterprise landscape. Customers have new opportunities to transform their SAP landscape, and SAP Cloud ALM is the basis for this transformation.

These announcements bring AI-led transformation to focus and are very relevant as we approach the end of mainstream maintenance for SAP Solution Manager on December 31, 2027*, many customers are transitioning to SAP Cloud ALM to stay competitive and future-ready. SAP recommends that customers complete the transition to SAP Cloud ALM before this date.

We are proud that SAP Solution Manager has served thousands of customers exceptionally well over two decades as a key element of SAP’s support offerings, providing the governance, monitoring, and lifecycle management capabilities needed to support mission-critical landscapes.

Twenty-five years in, the business environment that it was built for has significantly evolved to one where enterprises innovate continuously, scale globally, adopt AI, maintain a clean core, and deliver business outcomes at unprecedented speed. Market expectations have changed, technology stacks are running on cloud-ready architecture, and the revenue potential of businesses has exponentially grown. These realities require a fundamentally different approach and functional scope for application lifecycle management. SAP Cloud ALM was designed with exactly these factors in mind. As a cloud-native solution coming with SAP Enterprise Support, or any cloud subscription from SAP, it can close the gaps that modern organizations face in an increasingly fast-moving digital landscape.

All the information required for the transition from SAP Solution Manager to SAP Cloud ALM is available on the Transition to SAP Cloud ALM page. You can access essential tools for a seamless transition as well as recommendations based on your current landscape, project plans, and operational needs. You can also find focused guidance on typical customer situations.

Take action now:

Request your SAP Cloud ALM tenant via SAP for Me.
Join the welcome session, a 90-minute onboarding designed to help you get up and running quickly.
Run the SAP Readiness Check tool for SAP Cloud ALM to get an exact understanding of your current SAP Solution Manager footprint and receive guidance for your transition journey.
Expand your knowledge through the SAP Cloud ALM learning portal and join our community events.
Subscribe to the monthly ALM newsletter to stay updated on innovations, tips, and use cases.

While SAP Solution Manager’s end of mainstream maintenance in itself is a call to action, it isn’t the primary business case. The real need for transitioning lies in the value that SAP Cloud ALM delivers: accelerated implementations, AI-powered and autonomous operations, continuous feature innovation, lower TCO, and a platform purpose-built for modern, cloud-first landscapes. As every digital touchpoint around you is being modernized and optimized for value, your ALM landscape should not be an exception.

Stefan Steinle is executive vice president and head of Global Customer Support at SAP.

*Details related to maintenance options are covered in SAP Notes 52505 and 3255311.

17 June

BUSINESS NEWS

Reimagining the Supply Chain: Turning Strategic Vision into Operational Reality

by tempuser_4085427917 0 Comments

Supply chain leaders are facing a defining moment. The conversation has largely moved from disruption and resilience to operational orchestration that transforms isolated functions into a unified, agile system capable of responding to real-time challenges and delivering measurable business impact. This shift is reflected in new research from IDC based on a global study of 300 C-level executives, published in the whitepaper Orchestrating the End-to-End Supply Chain: Strategic Priority, Practical Reality. End-to-end orchestration is no longer a distant ambition. For many organizations, it is becoming critical.

At the same time, the research also makes clear that ambition and vision are not enough.

The orchestration gap

Nearly half of the executives surveyed by IDC recognize the substantial benefits of end-to-end orchestration—but many have yet to take decisive action. The true challenge lies not in understanding its value, but in bridging the gap between strategic intent and effective execution.

IDC surveyed C-level leaders across industries and regions. The message was consistent. Leaders understand the destination, but they want clearer guidance on the blueprint to execution. As one executive told IDC, the value of supply chain orchestration is evident, but the challenge is defining and executing the path to get there.

That tension is familiar. Many organizations have made progress in operational silos, but far fewer have connected design, planning, procurement, manufacturing, logistics, and service into a truly coordinated operating model.

What orchestration really means

An orchestrated supply chain connects people, processes, and technology to provide agility and deliver continuous improvement, despite persistent disruption. Agentic AI is fundamentally reshaping orchestration, enabling systems to analyze, decide, and coordinate across functions in real time. From sourcing and procurement to planning, manufacturing, logistics, and delivery, the focus shifts from optimizing individual functions to achieving enterprise-wide alignment.

Traditional linear supply chain models were built for a more predictable world. Today’s reality is different. Geopolitical uncertainty, AI-driven disruption, climate pressures, regulatory complexity, and rising customer expectations are constant. Decisions made in one area now ripple quickly across the rest of the supply chain.

Orchestration addresses this reality by establishing a shared foundation of contextually relevant information, designing processes to operate together, and enabling systems that support end-to-end decision-making and execution. Technology plays a critical role, but orchestration ultimately depends on organizational alignment: clear roles, shared metrics, and coordinated processes. Instead of optimizing planning or execution in isolation, orchestration evaluates trade-offs based on their impact on the entire supply chain and the broader business.

Different leaders, shared outcomes

IDC’s research also highlights how perspectives on orchestration vary by role. COOs focus on enterprise performance, CSCOs balance transformation with operational demands, and CPOs emphasize cost and risk exposure in direct materials, including mitigation strategies. Orchestration must deliver value across these perspectives while maintaining a unified, end-to-end view.

This diversity of perspective reinforces why orchestration matters. Success comes from respecting functional priorities without allowing silos to drive disconnected decisions, enabling coordinated decision-making that optimizes the whole, not just the parts.

Efficiency and agility, not trade-offs

Many executives perceive a trade-off between efficiency and preparedness, but orchestration changes the equation. With integrated data, shared context, and agile tools, companies can respond faster, reduce disruption response times, and make informed trade-offs—demonstrating that agility and efficiency can reinforce each other rather than compete.

As one procurement leader told IDC, organizations need to be both resilient and efficient, or at least able to make informed trade-offs quickly. Without integrated supply chains and shared context, that balance is difficult to achieve. When companies can identify issues earlier and respond faster, recovery times shrink, translating into lower costs, less expediting, and more reliable customer service.

The role of agentic AI

Agentic AI is emerging as a practical, transformational path to supply chain orchestration. AI-driven agents can monitor signals, evaluate scenarios, and recommend or initiate actions within defined guardrails. Across SAP customer environments, AI delivers value in supplier onboarding, predictive maintenance, and rapid rebalancing of inventory or capacity. Leaders generally prefer AI as an advisor rather than a fully autonomous decision-maker, reflecting the continued importance of human judgment, accountability, and experience. Orchestration works best when AI strengthens decision-making while keeping people firmly in the loop.

Data, platforms, and the role of SAP Supply Chain Management

Effective orchestration requires more than connectivity, it depends on harmonized data, coordinated processes, and contextual intelligence embedded where work happens. As supply chains extend across multi-tier supplier networks, logistics partners, and service providers, the challenge is no longer access to data, but making data usable, contextual, and actionable at scale.

IDC’s research underscores that true end-to-end orchestration must span both internal operations and external ecosystems. Much of the most critical information—risk signals, capacity constraints, execution status—lives outside the enterprise. Without a common data foundation, organizations struggle to move from insight to action.

This is where SAP Supply Chain Management plays a distinct role. SAP brings together an end-to-end portfolio of supply chain applications, deeply integrated with ERP and line-of-business systems, and connected externally through SAP Business Network. Planning, sourcing and procurement, manufacturing, logistics, and service operate as a coordinated system rather than isolated domains.

At the data layer, SAP Business Data Cloud provides a normalized foundation that can harmonize operational, transactional, and network data. This shared context provides visibility, analytics, and AI. On top of it, embedded and extensible AI—including agentic AI and Joule—supports orchestrated decision-making, helping to accelerate time to decision and time to recovery while keeping people engaged and in control.

Turning priority into practice

The move toward orchestrated supply chains is well underway, but progress remains uneven. Only a minority of organizations consider themselves close to full, end-to-end orchestration. Technology alone is not the constraint. Data readiness, clarity of outcomes, organizational alignment, and change management matter just as much.

Leading organizations start with clear objectives, invest in people alongside platforms, and build pragmatic road maps that prioritize time to value. Orchestration is not a single project. It is a progression that evolves as capabilities mature.

At SAP, our focus is on making orchestration practical and accessible. Through SAP Supply Chain Management solutions and SAP Business Network, we help organizations align teams, connect processes, integrate partners, and embed AI into core supply chain activities—enabling better decisions, faster execution, and sustained enterprise impact in a constantly changing world.

Hagen Heubach is chief marketing officer for Supply Chain Management at SAP.

17 June

BUSINESS NEWS

Building Africa’s Renewable Backbone: KETRACO’s Push for a Smarter Grid

by tempuser_2902902171 0 Comments

Imagine building high-voltage transmission lines across remote terrain on volcanic ground with steep escarpments, earthquake-prone areas, and geothermal hotspots. Then, add the challenge of building on protected wildlife areas and engaging with inhabitants of politically sensitive community lands.

Managing abundance

These are just some of the challenges facing KETRACO, Kenya’s electricity transmission company, as Africa’s energy sector is undergoing a shift from a centralized power system to a more diversified, renewable-energy-based grid.

“Renewable energy is abundant. The real challenge is how to manage, integrate, and stabilize it,” Dr. Njogu Kimando, energy expert at KETRACO, said, speaking at the TAC Insights conference for SAP for Energy and Utilities in Toulouse. “The energy transition is not constrained by capacity, but by our ability to manage complexity in real time.”

Geothermal power generated in the Great Rift Valley provides about 40% of electricity in the region, making Kenya Africa’s largest geothermal producer. About 24% is generated by hydro power from rivers. The rest of the demand is met by wind power coming mostly from Lake Turkana, Africa’s largest wind farm, as well as solar. The fastest growing sector, solar is widely used in rural homes and businesses. Kenya has one of the highest household solar adoption rates in the world.

While renewables reduce costs, support climate alignment, and provide energy security, challenges include drought-induced water shortages, sun and wind variability and grid instability.

Lack of synchronized intelligence

In the traditional grid, power is generated at a few centralized plants, creating a stable source of supply that is easy to control based on demand forecasts. The renewables (REN) grid, on the other hand, fluctuates with the weather, requiring real-time monitoring, rapid balancing, and more dynamic system control.

The core challenge in modern power systems is not the absence of data, but the lack of unified, real-time visibility across fragmented systems. This lack limits the ability to make timely and coordinated operational decisions.

“We’re constantly balancing supply and demand,” Kimando explained. “We have limited real-time visibility across generation sources, transmission assets, and demand patterns.”

As renewables expand, KETRACO’s role has evolved from simply building and operating transmission lines to managing power flows in real time, coordinating variable energy generation, and ensuring grid stability and reliability. The company is relying on digital systems to accomplish these tasks.

Kimando outlined the company’s new, integrated smart grid infrastructure. Forming an end-to-end digital value chain, it functions as the digital twin foundation for the grid and links operational technology with enterprise systems and advanced analytics.

Data is captured by SCADA, an industrial control system for infrastructure and utility networks, and is securely routed through SAP Business Technology Platform middleware to SAP S/4HANA, which serves as the enterprise backbone. It is here that operational data is translated into structured business processes.

From data to decisions

“We’re relying on SAP technology to transform that raw data into predictive, actionable intelligence,” said Kimando, citing asset lifecycle management and outage reduction metrics as examples of ways to shift from reactive maintenance to predictive grid reliability. “Digital transformation is no longer a technology choice, but a strategic necessity. It’s a balancing game: values versus risks.”

For KETRACO, the goal is to unlock the full value of renewable energy while avoiding the escalating risks of operating in a complex and dynamic power environment. Inaction leads to grid instability and operational inefficiency, underutilization of energy investments, rising costs, and exposure to regulatory and compliance risks. Action based on data analytics leads to improved financial efficiency and better CAPEX decisions. It also leads to enhanced operational resilience with reduced outages and faster system recovery.

“Together, this strengthens our strategic positioning for the energy transition and ESG compliance,” Kimando explained.

The next frontier

At KETRACO, AI is considered a capacity multiplier, enabling a crucial shift from resource-intensive grid expansion to intelligence-driven grid optimization.

“AI is helping us achieve more with the same workforce. We’re enabling engineers, not replacing them,” the expert shared. “Automation is enabling our people to focus more on predictability and decision making.”

In addition, AI supports long-term sustainability goals because simulating scenarios before investing reduces errors and costs. It also enables self-optimized grid operations, reducing manual interventions and improving collaboration and integration among regional power systems and cross-border energy flows.

KETRACO’s role is to transmit electricity across Kenya and connect the country to the wider East African power market. Its importance is growing as Kenya has become a REN hub, expanding its geothermal, wind, and hydropower generation. Without its transmission infrastructure, much of Kenya’s renewable energy could not be delivered efficiently to consumers or neighboring countries.

In closing, Kimando summarized how digital transformation is changing the way power is managed, stabilized, and optimized: REN presents a system challenge, not a technological one. Technology must align to operations and strategy, control is achieved through visibility and integration, and partnerships accelerate scale and execution.

“The future grid will not be defined by how much power we generate, but by how intelligently we manage it,” he concluded.

16 June

BUSINESS NEWS

Early Talent Hiring and Development: Now’s the Moment for a Major Reset

by tempuser_118422762 0 Comments

How will organizations attract and develop the AI-native workforce they’ll need tomorrow when entry-level roles are shrinking today? Here’s the future-ready, early talent strategy you need.

Fewer opportunities for early talent

The job marketplace has contracted significantly for those with less than five years of professional experience. Research published by SAP shows that openings in the 10 most common entry-level job titles declined by 35% in just one year, from 2024 to 2025.*

Budget constraints, hiring freezes, and uncertainty around the ROI of early talent as AI increasingly takes on routine and manual tasks are among the reasons cited by HR leaders today.

Applications skyrocket

AI is also having a major impact on the recruitment process. With such limited opportunities available, more than half of early talent candidates use AI to help them land a job—a process that now takes eight months on average and involves more than 300 job applications.*

HR is feeling the pressure managing the candidate pipeline, with the number of applicants per early talent job opening doubling since 2021. A high volume of candidates are submitting AI-generated résumés and applications, and it’s becoming much harder to detect high-fidelity signals around skills, fit, and potential.

It’s a painful scenario for everyone involved. Fragile and unsustainable. And the implications will be profound for enterprises that don’t act quickly.

HR leaders voice concerns

Playing out the current trajectory to its natural conclusion, what happens when all the fresh talent eventually dries up? Already, HR leaders are alarmed by this risk. “Ultimately, if we stop investing in early talent, we will wind up eliminating our talent pipeline,” one global head of early talent programs at a high-tech organization told researchers.*

A senior HR director at a high-tech organization commented: “If we continue down this path and don’t provide a way for early talent to get started, it’s going to lead to massive skill shortages in the future.”

Widespread reductions in early talent hiring will lead to skills gaps that will prove expensive to remedy. Organizations will struggle to build company capabilities, retain knowledge, and develop future leaders.

But by far the most common concern from leaders was around not seeing early talent as AI-native. If the AI capabilities of this cohort are overlooked, companies may miss out on a key opportunity to scale AI innovation and adoption across the business.

What’s the answer?

Today, there’s an opportunity for HR leaders to be more intentional and strategic, to reimagine their approach to early talent from the ground up. With the right early talent strategy, organizations can gain a competitive advantage.

Here are three steps to consider.

Step 1: Rethink entry-level roles

Traditionally, junior employees have mainly been given routine, repetitive tasks. Combined with frustratingly slow career progression, the result is eroding morale and commitment.

This approach must evolve. The nature of work is changing rapidly, and early talent no longer need to take on those routine tasks. These employees need the opportunity to develop at speed and to be supported in performing work that meaningfully addresses business challenges.

HR has the chance to reshape entry-level positions, to provide support, guidance, and tools to enable junior staff to contribute in more impactful ways. This may involve them working with proper guidance to support more critical projects, interacting with customers, and even owning some tasks end to end.

This approach not only enables early talent to contribute more positively to the business at an earlier stage, but when combined with clear goals, regular feedback loops, and occasional coaching, it also fosters greater engagement and commitment.

Step 2: Support your strategy with technology

Hiring and developing early talent have become more complex—from deciphering AI-generated applications, to redesigning roles and meeting their aspirations in a fast-changing business context. And with the nature of early talent work shifting, leaders need tools to help understand the new capabilities that will predict long-term success and demonstrate the value of early talent initiatives.

Here’s where technology can help. During the hiring process, technology can help employers see beyond the noise of AI applications and rediscover the meaningful signals they need to create candidate shortlists and strengthen hiring decisions. Meanwhile, technology can also help to maintain engagement with other high-potential candidates who applied—for when the next opportunities arise.

Once early talent begin work, today’s technology can help you track their participation in early talent programs and progression towards their goals. It also helps facilitate individualized learning opportunities and demonstrate the ROI of your early talent investments. For research-based recommendations on the role of technology in early talent selection and development, check out this quick guide.

Step 3: Reframe the business case for early talent

As the nature of early talent work is changing alongside the technology used to support them, HR leaders agree that the old business case for early talent investments needs to be reimagined. Many organizations are focused on mitigating critical skill gaps and engaging in large-scale AI transformations. While early talent lack experience, they are eager to engage in continuous learning and understand how to work effectively alongside AI.

Research also reveals that—as they work alongside modern tools and technologies—early talent can contribute to high-value, meaningful work much faster than in the past.

A modern early talent business case is one that involves focusing on faster time to meaningful work, reducing critical skill gaps, and leveraging the AI-native capabilities of today’s entry-level workers.

Build your early talent strategy

Will HR leaders watch on as a generation of AI-savvy talent remains underused, or act now and build the skills pipelines necessary for a future-ready workforce?

Get further insights on this topic by reading our report, “Early talent in peril: How HR can strategically select and develop the workforce of tomorrow.” Visit our research library to stay tuned for when phase two of this research gets published later this year.

Dr. Autumn D. Krauss is chief scientist at SAP SuccessFactors.

*Early talent in peril: How HR can strategically select and develop the workforce of tomorrow, SAP, 2026.