WALLDORF and GHENT, Belgium — SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) and TechWolf today announced they have entered into an agreement for SAP to acquire TechWolf, provider of a leading AI work intelligence platform.

TechWolf gives enterprises a continuously updated view of the work their people do and the skills they have, using its proprietary data model called context graph for work. The acquisition will bring this context graph, along with TechWolf’s AI models and applied AI research team, into SAP, establishing work intelligence as a strategic SAP asset. The deal is expected to close in Q4 2026, subject to usual closing conditions, including regulatory approval. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. 

TechWolf works from existing HR and business systems that customers connect. It builds its model of the organization at three levels: the work itself, down to the tasks inside a job; the skills people have and apply; and the external labor market. It maps that against the customer’s business strategy, so the leaders responsible for hiring, reskilling and redeployment are working from better information.

TechWolf is expected to become an intelligent core of the SAP SuccessFactors portfolio, supporting the company’s talent and work intelligence strategy. TechWolf will power workforce and talent strategies across SAP SuccessFactors, bringing skills mapping, workforce planning and organizational redesign informed by context from across the Autonomous Enterprise. Once the transaction closes, TechWolf and SAP will unify skills and work data to inform HR and business leaders to guide decisions about development, deployment and workforce transformation.

“TechWolf’s proprietary context graph for skills and work provides an excellent grounding layer for agent queries regarding work and skills planning and talent management,” said Manoj Swaminathan, president and chief product officer for SAP Autonomous Suite and member of the Extended Board of SAP SE. “This grounding layer perfectly matches our strategy. It makes token usage more efficient, lowers the cost of deploying workforce agents and will make Joule more intelligent in AI-driven HR scenarios such as skills-based hiring, workforce planning and role redesign.”

Joint SAP and TechWolf customers using the technology are seeing measurable results from the partnership the two companies have had. Building on that foundation, SAP and TechWolf will jointly co-innovate a concrete set of new AI-powered workforce and skills optimization products to be designed and developed post-close. SAP plans to integrate TechWolf’s solutions to a greater degree, offering customers even better insights and work intelligence to help organizations plan reskilling, internal mobility and hiring.

“Organizations everywhere are trying to figure out how AI is reshaping work, and what their workforce needs to look like because of it,” said Andreas De Neve, CEO and co-founder of TechWolf. “We have spent eight years building the evidence layer to answer those questions. It’s always been our mission to connect skills, tasks and work to help employers solve AI transformation, and joining SAP will allow us to extend that mission across a broader set of business context and larger scale. In this next chapter, we plan to build a world-class AI company.”

Subject to closing and required consultation, SAP’s current plans are for TechWolf to remain as an independent entity under CEO Andreas De Neve in its Ghent headquarters, with offices in London, New York and San Francisco, and for its platform to remain available to both SAP and non-SAP customers. J.P. Morgan served as exclusive financial advisor to TechWolf.

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About TechWolf

TechWolf is a leading applied AI company that helps large enterprises understand how AI is transforming work and what that means for their workforce. Its platform brings together skills, work, and market intelligence, into a single context graph for work; Its open-source models have been downloaded more than two million times.  TechWolf co-exists with systems enterprises already use, including SAP SuccessFactors and non-SAP applications, and connects with AI tools and agents. Customers include HSBC, Atlas Copco Group, GSK, Ericsson, AMD, MetLife, PayPal and Booking.com. The company offers EU and US data-residency, standard encryption, access controls and certifications including ISO/IEC 42001 and ISO/IEC 27001 that support EU AI Act governance and security. Learn more at www.techwolf.ai.

About SAP

As a global leader in enterprise applications and business AI, SAP (NYSE: SAP) stands at the nexus of business and technology. For over 50 years, organizations have trusted SAP to bring out their best by uniting business-critical operations spanning finance, procurement, HR, supply chain, and customer experience. For more information, visit www.sap.com.

Note to editors:
To preview and download broadcast-standard stock footage and press photos digitally, please visit www.sap.com/photos. On this platform, you can find high resolution material for your media channels.

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For more information, press only:
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Marcus Winkler, +49 151 571 18 691, marcus.winkler@sap.com, CEST
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Reinhard De Milt, TechWolf, +32 498 495781, reinhard.demilt@techwolf.ai, CEST

This press release was created with the assistance of artificial intelligence and has been reviewed by the editorial team.

This document contains forward-looking statements, which are predictions, projections, or other statements about future events. These statements are based on current expectations, forecasts, and assumptions that are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results and outcomes to materially differ. Additional information regarding these risks and uncertainties may be found in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including but not limited to the risk factors section of SAP’s 2025 Annual Report on Form 20-F.
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Joule Work, Joule Assistants and SAP Business AI Platform help organizations turn business AI into trusted outcomes across every core function.

LAS VEGAS — SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) today showcased the Autonomous Enterprise in action at SAP Connect, demonstrating how Joule Work and Joule Assistants generate value for customers across every line of business.

“This is a breakthrough moment for business AI,” said Christian Klein, CEO of SAP SE. “The Autonomous Enterprise has arrived. With Joule and SAP Autonomous Suite, built on SAP Business AI Platform, we’re helping organizations like Novartis, Morgan Foods, Nestlé and PwC connect intelligence across every function to deliver trusted business outcomes.”

At SAP Connect, these customers shared how the Autonomous Enterprise is already driving measurable value across their businesses:

• “We’ve co-developed and recently launched a pilot of SAP’s Joule Sourcing Assistant,” said Christoph Buerki, Head of Procurement, Novartis. “Our vision is for AI agents to handle the manual heavy lifting, enabling sourcing professionals to focus on strategy, supplier engagement and value creation.”
• “At Morgan Foods, we’re already putting the pieces in place for agentic adoption, especially through our technical foundation. The biggest shift will be moving from reactive to predictive, where agents can connect demand signals, inventory levels and supplier status faster than ever before,” said Steve Hankins, Chief Financial Officer, Morgan Foods, “Our superpower will come from people on top of agents. Our approximately 1,000 employees are what make our supply chains work—the technology helps make them even better.”
• “Our SAP S/4HANA transformation across 140 countries is creating a connected digital core with consistent processes, trusted data and greater visibility across markets and functions. With that foundation, Joule and the Accounts Receivable Assistant can automatically prioritize collections work based on risk and business context, recommend the next best action and help our finance teams respond faster to change,” said Luca Dell’Orletta, Global Head IT Innovation & Enterprise Architecture, Nestlé.
• “In professional services, billing can be one of the more error-prone processes, with accuracy playing an important role in the client experience. SAP’s Billing Assistant brings greater intelligence to this critical process, helping identify potential issues earlier so our people can deliver better client outcomes and build stronger relationships,” said Jill Notz, Chief Accounting Officer, Controller, Business Services Leader, PwC. Building on the success of the Billing Assistant, PwC and SAP are extending their collaboration into new areas of joint AI innovation.

SAP’s Autonomous Enterprise Scales Up

Joule Work is beginning its customer rollout as a new AI user interface that lets employees interact with SAP solutions in their own language and complete work across SAP and third-party data. Grounded in business context from SAP Knowledge Graph, which maps more than 7 million data fields, Joule provides information users can rely on. At SAP, Joule Work is already live with 110,000 employees, with the company seeing 20% productivity gains across finance, HR and procurement. A select group of customers also is using Joule Work in their business environments.

• “After 28 years as an SAP customer, partnering with SAP on our AI journey and the Joule Work desktop early adopter program has delivered more momentum in just a few months than we saw in all the years before,” said Peter Wied, Director of Complexity Management, Maschinenfabrik Reinhausen. “What once required up to an hour of manual effort across our SAP S/4HANA environment is now accessible in seconds through natural language—fundamentally changing how our teams interact with business data.”
• “The dedicated team has been phenomenal. Their proactive communication, focus on accelerating architecture activation, rapid remediation of defects and overall support have enabled us to become Joule ready much sooner than would have been possible had we needed to navigate these challenges on our own,” said Keith Smith, SAP Platform Architect, CONA Services. “The CONA team is excited about the progress made to date and looks forward to exploring and testing Joule’s capabilities in greater depth over the coming months as we continue our adoption journey.”

When a query is not enough, Joule Assistants execute operational work directly within business workflows, using established data, authorizations and audit trails. Customers control the level of autonomy. SAP’s approach is also open: through the Agent2Agent protocol, Joule can connect with third-party AI and agents, bringing governed business context into broader AI workflows.

At SAP Connect, SAP showcased how these capabilities generate outcomes across SAP Autonomous Suite:

• In finance, controllers can automate revenue recognition, disclosures and trade compliance, with early deployments of the International Trade Assistant reducing trade classification effort by up to 50%.  
• In supply chain, planners can turn multi-hour disruptions into one-click resolutions across planning, manufacturing and logistics.
• In HR, leaders can determine the best way to close workforce gaps, while employees can make smarter benefits choices tailored to their needs.
• In procurement, decision-makers can identify savings opportunities against peer benchmarks and manage the full contingent workforce life cycle.
• In customer experience, organizations can turn customer engagement into sales opportunities with AI-powered campaigns, quoting and customer workflows.
• Across industries, SAP is collaborating with customers to apply AI to specialized industry processes, helping organizations in manufacturing, retail, commodity trading and asset-intensive industries improve decision-making, automate routine actions and build more resilient operations.

The Platform Powering Business AI You Can Trust

SAP Business AI Platform gives organizations one place to build, contextualize and govern AI across SAP and third-party environments. With Joule Studio, business users and developers can build and extend skills and agents from no-code to pro-code workflows, choosing from more than 70 AI models. SAP Business Data Cloud and SAP Knowledge Graph ground those agents in trusted business data and context, helping organizations select the right model for each use case and better manage AI value and consumption.

SAP-managed governance helps organizations scale AI with transparency, accountability and control. SAP AI Agent Hub in SAP LeanIX solutions provides a central inventory of enterprise agents, while SAP’s independently ISO/IEC 42001-certified governance architecture supports regulatory requirements, established authorizations and auditable AI operations.

To help organizations adopt AI at scale, SAP’s Business Transformation Management portfolio, including SAP Signavio, SAP LeanIX and SAP WalkMe solutions, provides the toolchain to analyze processes, govern applications and agents, and drive adoption across the enterprise.

SAP Brings Embedded Payments to Cloud ERP

SAP also announced that it is entering the payments market with SAP Pay, powered by Tereina, an SAP company. Embedded directly in SAP Cloud ERP, SAP Pay executes and reconciles payments within the same workflow when an invoice is due, reducing manual file handling and external processing dependencies, while giving customers greater control.

Partners Expand the Reach of Autonomous Business

SAP is extending the Autonomous Enterprise beyond SAP’s own application portfolio through new partnerships that bring specialized intelligence directly into SAP workflows.

A new partnership between SAP and Moody’s Corporation is designed to embed Moody’s supplier risk monitoring data into SAP Ariba Supplier Lifecycle and Performance. This gives procurement teams continuously updated insights into supplier financial health, operational risk and regulatory status at the point of decision. Organizations will be able to move from periodic risk reviews toward continuous monitoring, enabling Joule Agents to flag supplier risk signals and surface alternatives before disruption affects the business.

An expanded partnership with ORO Labs brings procurement orchestration to SAP customers as a solution extension. SAP Ariba Procurement Orchestration by ORO Labs is a purpose-built orchestration layer that connects procurement workflows end to end across heterogeneous enterprise environments, giving business users a seamless experience for intake, actions and visibility.

Visit the SAP News Center. Get SAP news via LinkedIn and Bluesky.

About SAP

As a global leader in enterprise applications and business AI, SAP (NYSE: SAP) stands at the nexus of business and technology. For over 50 years, organizations have trusted SAP to bring out their best by uniting business-critical operations spanning finance, procurement, HR, supply chain, and customer experience. For more information, visit www.sap.com.

Note to editors:
To preview and download broadcast-standard stock footage and press photos digitally, please visit www.sap.com/photos. On this platform, you can find high resolution material for your media channels.

For customers interested in learning more about SAP products:
Global Customer Center: +49 180 534-34-24
United States Only: 1 (800) 872-1SAP (1-800-872-1727)

For more information, press only:
Aimée Leabon, +1 (212) 653-9600, aimee.leabon@sap.com, EDT
SAP Press Room; press@sap.com

This press release was created with the assistance of artificial intelligence and has been reviewed by the editorial team.

This document contains forward-looking statements, which are predictions, projections, or other statements about future events. These statements are based on current expectations, forecasts, and assumptions that are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results and outcomes to materially differ. Additional information regarding these risks and uncertainties may be found in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including but not limited to the risk factors section of SAP’s 2024 Annual Report on Form 20-F.
© 2026 SAP SE. All rights reserved.
SAP and other SAP products and services mentioned herein as well as their respective logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP SE in Germany and other countries. Please see https://www.sap.com/copyright for additional trademark information and notices.
Please consider our privacy policy. If you received this press release in your e-mail and you wish to unsubscribe to our mailing list please contact press@sap.com and write Unsubscribe in the subject line. 

New innovations are bringing the Autonomous Enterprise to life.

New York Climate Week has long been known for big announcements, but this year it felt more like a working week: the focus on delivery and implementation, rather than ambition.

With more than 1,500 events across the city running alongside the UN General Assembly, the event was hailed as the biggest Climate Week yet.

Delegates arrived feeling three pressures that had been building all year: an energy price shock, a summer of climate disasters, and a fast-growing argument about the resources artificial intelligence consumes. What came out of the week was a clearer picture of where sustainability now sits in business: inside the numbers that decide whether companies grow, stall, or get stopped.

Sustainability is back, on different terms

For a few years, sustainability seemed to be slipping down the corporate agenda. Last week suggested it is returning, but not in the form it left.

Energy is the clearest example. UN Climate Chief Simon Stiell put the cost of energy shortages linked to the Iran war at more than $100 billion in higher fuel prices for American consumers alone. The UK’s Ed Miliband urged governments to treat climate and nature loss as a matter of national security. Clean power is increasingly an argument for independence and competitiveness.

Physical risk is the second. Iceland’s Prime Minister Kristrún Frostadóttir described resilience as a foundation laid well before the storm arrives. By Thursday, the General Assembly had approved its first declaration on sea-level rise, aimed at replacing fragmented initiatives with sustained, coordinated, and properly funded action. The UN has acknowledged that overshooting 1.5°C is now inevitable. For business, the stakes are large: an MSCI analysis estimates corporate business interruption losses from climate hazards at more than $1.1 trillion a year, most of which never appears as a line on a balance sheet.

But knowing a risk exists is not the same as being able to act on it. A flood forecast only becomes a business decision when someone can put a value on what sits in its path: the asset, the revenue that depends on it, and the cost of protecting it.

That is the gap most companies face. Everyone is reporting climate risk, yet far fewer are deciding with it. That is why SAP and Jupiter Intelligence came together this week, connecting Jupiter’s physical climate risk intelligence with SAP’s enterprise data and reporting foundation. The starting point is disclosure that holds up to scrutiny. The direction of travel is climate risk that informs where companies invest, protect, and build.

The real question about AI is permission

If one subject dominated the week, it was AI. Views were sharply divided: Stiell warned that AI leaders are “on thin ice” when it comes to their license to operate, while speakers from all across business and academia argued that AI is too important to give up and will ultimately help tackle climate change.

Both sides are responding to something real. But the issue that will decide AI’s path is not capability, which is already abundant, but whether the people who host AI, power it, and work alongside it keep agreeing to it. Every model runs on land, electricity, water, and cooling. Every data center needs a community willing to have it, and every rollout needs a workforce willing to adopt it. Groups weighing a new data center don’t separate the water question from the jobs question, and companies can’t afford to either.

Governments are starting to set expectations. Türkiye’s COP31 presidency launched the Antalya Pledge on AI, with the COP31 President-Designate saying companies are expected to be transparent about their energy use and to power their operations with clean energy. A draft is due before the summit, which will have a dedicated day on technology and AI.

That pressure applies to every company’s climate commitments, SAP’s included. We have run our own offices and data centers on 100% renewable electricity since 2014, we consider environmental impact at the design stage of our AI architecture, and we have started sharing the footprint of our cloud services with customers, with a beta view for selected products now in SAP for Me. While none of that makes the challenge go away, it makes it visible, and measuring a footprint is where accountability starts.

The week also showed the other side of the ledger. Working from connected data, AI can weigh cost, carbon, availability, and regulation in a single decision, which no planning team can do by hand at scale. Instead of checking whether every product is compliant, companies can ask which products are at risk, why, and what design or supplier change would fix it.

“The question for sustainability leaders is no longer how to manage AI’s impact. It’s how to shape where AI investment goes,” said Sophia Mendelsohn, chief sustainability and commercial officer at SAP. “AI can weigh cost, carbon, and risk together, but only if sustainability is in the data it works from. Leave it out, and AI will optimize it away.” 

Governance is the other half of the answer. Speed won the first phase of AI adoption. The next phase will go to organizations that can show how an automated decision was reached and who is accountable for it. In 2025, SAP reviewed 860 AI use cases against its AI ethics principles and escalated 44% as high-risk for senior review. Where no ethically acceptable trade-off could be found, the project did not go ahead in its original form.

Implementation runs on systems

The organizers asked delegates to move from ambition to implementation. The main obstacle to that remains disconnected data. When sustainability information sits apart from procurement, manufacturing, and finance, even good AI produces confident wrong answers: recommending a lower-carbon supplier, for instance, that is not approved for the market in question. The organizations making progress treat sustainability data with the same discipline as financial data, with the same quality standards, audit trail, and controls.

Industrial manufacturer HARTING, for example, connected its sustainability data to the systems it already runs, moving product carbon footprint calculations from manual work to AI-assisted mapping across its material portfolio.

Nowhere does that discipline matter more than in the supply chain.

“Every climate target eventually becomes a supply chain decision: what you source, where you make it, how you move it,” Mendelsohn said. “That’s where commitments are won or lost, and that’s where the data has to be.”

The road to Antalya

New York Climate Week was the last major business gathering before COP31 in Antalya in November, and the COP31 presidency used the week to launch a global pledge to raise electricity’s share of final energy consumption to 35% by 2035, and a new pledge on how AI is powered and measured.

Pledges set the direction, but the pace is set by business decisions. Away from the main stages, the conversations with customers last week sounded different from a few years ago. The questions focused on what carbon costs, where supply chains are exposed, and whether the numbers will hold up to an auditor. Those are commercial questions, and they have commercial answers. The tools, the economics, and the business case are largely in place. What remains is connecting them inside the processes where decisions are actually made.

That is truest of all for AI, the technology that dominated last week. It will scale only as far as the energy, data, and trust beneath it allow. In other words, AI’s future runs through sustainability, and the companies that act on that now will set the pace for everyone else.

To learn more about how SAP can support, visit SAP Sustainability.

Monica Molesag, Head of Sustainability Communications

Every executive I talk to is navigating the same fundamental challenge: how to execute faster and make smarter decisions while operating in an unpredictable market. Shifted demand, supply chain constraints, and margin pressure are no longer temporary disruptions—they are standard operating conditions.

To adapt, businesses are increasingly moving toward the vision of an Autonomous Enterprise. Achieving this requires connected, intelligent cloud systems that provide immediate operational clarity and give their teams the confidence to act.

When organizations get this right, the results go far beyond internal efficiency. They set new standards for their entire industry, deliver exceptional value to customers, and solve critical economic, environmental, and social challenges.

That is the driving force behind the 2027 SAP Innovation Awards. Every year, the awards recognize organizations that take on tough business challenges, leverage modern SAP technology, and deliver measurable outcomes that push their organizations—and our global community—forward.

Why participate?

Recognizing your team’s hard work is just the beginning. SAP Innovation Awards are designed to elevate your success story on a global stage and provide tangible benefits for your organization:

• Global visibility and marketing: Winners gain high-profile exposure, including a dedicated feature on the SAP News Center, cross-channel promotional campaigns, and potential placement on the SAP.com homepage.
• Event access and speaking opportunities: Winners receive a complimentary pass to SAP Sapphire (or a $1,000 charity donation voucher) and an invitation to celebrate at the SAP Sapphire reception. Top innovators may potentially secure coveted speaking slots at the event to share their journey directly with industry peers.
• Official recognition: To properly celebrate your team’s achievements, winners receive official, physical trophies and finalists and winners receive kits to showcase their success internally and externally.

A streamlined experience: focus on your story

Operational agility should apply to recognition, too. We have updated the submission process for 2027 to make sharing your story straightforward and fast.

You no longer need to figure out which category fits your project.

Instead of asking you to navigate a complex list of options, we want you to focus entirely on what matters most: telling your story. Simply submit your entry detailing the business problem you set out to solve, the SAP technologies you deployed, and the tangible business results you achieved.

Once submitted, our review committee will evaluate your entry and automatically assign it to the most relevant category. Because transformative work rarely stays in a single silo, your entry will also be considered across multiple applicable categories to maximize your team’s recognition.

Recognizing excellence across the enterprise

The 2027 awards framework recognizes breakthrough achievements across 14 core solution areas:

• AI Excellence
• Autonomous Enterprise Orchestrator
• Business Network Luminary
• Cloud ERP Champion
• Emerging Growth Leader
• Supply Chain Catalyst
• Financial Futurist
• Procurement Visionary
• People Experience Pioneer
• Customer Experience Innovator
• Technology Pathfinder
• Transformation Impact
• Services Superstar
• Sustainability Hero

Additionally, every entry is automatically evaluated for our Industry Leader awards, recognizing organizations that are building new business models across five key sectors:

• Consumer Industries
• Discrete Industries
• Energy & Natural Resources
• Public Services
• Financial Services

Showcase your progress

Real innovation rarely happens in one massive leap. It happens when focused, pragmatic teams use technology to solve everyday problems, make better decisions, and build momentum day by day.

If your team is using SAP solutions to drive real value, we want to celebrate your work and share your success with our global ecosystem.

Submissions are open now. I encourage you to submit your story for the 2027 SAP Innovation Awards today!

Eric van Rossum is chief marketing officer for Autonomous Suite Product Marketing and Learning at SAP.

Together with NVIDIA, SAP is helping shape and strengthen the execution layer for enterprise agentic AI.

Today, alongside the announcement of NVIDIA Open Agent Safety Platform and the broad availability of NVIDIA OpenShell, we’re deepening our collaboration with NVIDIA to help make enterprise AI agents safer, more governable, and easier to audit by design.

As announced this year at SAP Sapphire, SAP and NVIDIA have a deep technical collaboration, with plans to bring SAP Business AI Platform together with OpenShell, an open-source secure runtime for autonomous AI agents. This is more than a planned integration, it reflects a shared effort to help define what “enterprise-grade” means for autonomous AI systems.

As part of our ongoing co-development activities, SAP engineers are contributing directly to the OpenShell codebase and embedding OpenShell within SAP Business AI Platform. Joule Studio, an AI-first development environment, provides a complete execution and governance stack for enterprise AI agents, while OpenShell supports deploying agents with a focus on safety and security.

SAP and NVIDIA are also working to:

• Help harden the OpenShell runtime for enterprise-scale deployment, including in regulated industries with strict security and compliance requirements
• Connect OpenShell’s runtime isolation with the business governance layer of Joule Studio runtime, linking technical execution boundaries to enterprise authorization models, IAM frameworks, and audit trails
• Work toward FedRAMP, FIPS, and regulated-industry enablement on a committed road map
• Advance open research and AI safety through the Open Secure AI Alliance, of which SAP and NVIDIA are both founding members alongside other industry leaders

Joule Studio runtime: Governance above the execution layer

Joule Studio runtime helps determine whether an action should execute at all—applying business authorization, role-based policy, and process context before a request in action reaches the runtime. OpenShell provides an open-source runtime boundary designed to help build and deploy autonomous, self-evolving agents more safely. It governs how the agent executes, what it can see and do, and where inference goes. Together, the two aim to give enterprise customers execution containment and business accountability in a single integrated stack.

SAP engineering contributions to NVIDIA OpenShell

SAP engineers are contributing to four areas of the OpenShell project. On platform architecture, SAP has helped drive decomposition of the runtime into independently deployable components, separating the supervisor and agent execution layers so they can scale independently. For Kubernetes-native operations, contributions include operator support, image pull secret management for private container registries, custom volume claim templates, and foreground deletion of sandbox resources. SAP has also worked to minimize the gateway image footprint and extend compute driver support for heterogeneous enterprise infrastructure. Contributions to supervisor health monitoring and structured log-level configuration bring the runtime to enterprise observability standards.

Joule Studio runtime is available free for SAP customers and partners through October 2026—start building today

Andre Lamego is senior vice president and chief product officer for SAP Business AI Platform Fabric at SAP.

SAP has been positioned in the Leader Category of the 2026 IDC MarketScape for AI-Enabled Direct Spend Vendor Assessment.*

We believe this recognition reflects SAP’s long-term investment in helping manufacturers connect sourcing, engineering, planning, and supplier collaboration on a single foundation.

Direct materials procurement doesn’t get enough credit for how hard it actually is. Unlike indirect spend, direct materials sit at the intersection of engineering, planning, finance, and supplier relationships—often all at once. A design change triggers a sourcing event. A commodity price spike ripples into contract terms. A supplier quality issue lands on the production floor before procurement even knows it happened.

The organizations that manage this well don’t just have good sourcing tools. They have connected systems, trusted data, and the ability to act quickly when conditions change. Solving for that complexity is what SAP’s direct spend portfolio is built to do.

Connecting design, sourcing, and execution

SAP’s direct spend offering is built with an industry-specific lens. A cookie-cutter approach to procurement business processes does not work for direct materials.

An engineering-oriented industry like automotive or aerospace, where a design change can trigger a sourcing event, has fundamentally different needs than a brand- or asset-oriented industry such as consumer goods or chemicals, where commodity exposure and supplier scale dominate. SAP builds for both, with purpose-built offerings tuned to how each actually works.

What our offerings share is a single, unbroken data model running from new product introduction through sourcing, contract award, and purchase order execution, all within SAP Business Suite: no bolt-on connectors, no manual handoffs between systems.

This matters more than it might seem. Data fragmentation across the design-to-source-to-settle workflow remains one of the biggest barriers to AI delivering real value in direct spend. When procurement decisions are connected to engineering, planning, supplier, and financial data on a shared foundation, AI has meaningful context to work with.

A network and ecosystem that extends the core

The sourcing suites are the center of gravity, but what surrounds them is equally important for manufacturers managing complex, multi-tier supply chains.

SAP Business Network connects millions of trading partners across roughly 190 countries, with more than US$7.7 trillion in annual commerce flowing through it. The network supports forecast collaboration, purchase order execution, inventory management, logistics visibility, quality processes, and supplier communication. For global manufacturers managing complex supply chains, that scale can be operationally significant.

Customers are already seeing the benefits of a more integrated approach to direct spend. For example, global automotive supplier Multimatic selected SAP’s direct materials sourcing solution because of its close integration with core ERP processes, including bill of materials management, production planning, and cost calculation. By connecting sourcing more closely to product development and manufacturing workflows, the company is helping procurement, engineering, and suppliers work from the same foundation throughout the product life cycle.

Additional SAP capabilities extend the process further across product development, commodity management, supply planning, supplier collaboration, financing, and analytics. Together, these capabilities help organizations manage direct spend as part of an integrated process that spans from early design collaboration through supplier payment, supported by a unified data foundation.

Taken together, these capabilities span a much broader scope than traditional sourcing software, from early design collaboration through supplier payment, all governed on SAP Business Data Cloud as a unified analytics foundation.

Where AI stands today, and where it’s going

Today, SAP delivers AI-powered supplier and item recommendations, invoice data extraction, category strategy insights, supplier risk scoring, and Joule capabilities embedded throughout the suite. These are production capabilities already helping customers streamline procurement processes.

Looking ahead, SAP plans to expand its AI capabilities across the direct spend life cycle, with new agentic experiences focused on areas such as market intelligence, supplier discovery, RFx orchestration, negotiation support, contract authoring, and supply chain impact analysis. These innovations will be delivered through Joule Work and Joule Studio 2.0, a no-code/low-code environment built on SAP Business AI that enables organizations to create and manage agents grounded in live business data and end-to-end process context.

The foundation underneath this road map is what makes it credible. Agents are only as good as the data and process context they can access. When that foundation is fragmented across disconnected systems, AI adds noise as often as it adds value. When it’s unified, agents can execute with greater relevance and accuracy.

Who this is built for

The SAP Ariba offering foo direct spend works with any ERP backend, with the added benefit of integrating out of the box with SAP Cloud ERP. For aerospace and defense customers with data sovereignty requirements, SAP offers deployment options for sovereign cloud that few vendors in this space support. For brand- and asset-oriented enterprises, a consolidated source-to-pay platform spanning both direct and indirect spend can simplify governance while reducing complexity.

For manufacturers operating complex global supply chains, the value of a natively integrated approach is straightforward: fewer manual handoffs, better visibility across functions, faster response to disruptions, and AI that can draw on connected business data rather than isolated point solutions.

What this recognition means to us

We’re grateful to the customers and partners whose real-world feedback shapes how we build these products. We believe an IDC MarketScape recognition reflects their experiences as much as it reflects our road map, and we don’t take that lightly.

This recognition energizes us. For more than 50 years, SAP has helped organizations run their most critical business processes, and direct spend is one of the areas where that experience comes together most clearly. We’ll continue investing in deeper integration, broader network capabilities, trusted AI, and the industry expertise our customers rely on. We’re grateful to the customers and partners that continue to help shape these solutions and help us deliver meaningful innovation across the direct spend life cycle.

Fang Chang is executive vice president and chief product officer for SAP Procurement and External Workforce Solutions at SAP.
Baber Farooq is chief marketing officer for SAP Spend Management.

*IDC MarketScape: Worldwide AI-Enabled Direct Spend 2026 Vendor Assessment, IDC #US54900426, September 2026.