In an era where artificial intelligence has transitioned from a disruptive force to an operational necessity, global enterprises face new challenges and opportunities. The adoption of AI is no longer limited to experimental use cases or niche areas—it is the backbone of business transformation.

Our commitment to innovation drives every initiative we undertake. As a global leader in enterprise software solutions, we are uniquely positioned to deliver AI capabilities tailored to our customers’ needs. This dedication is at the heart of our enhanced AI strategy and why we are partnering with NVIDIA to embed NVIDIA NIM microservices, including a new microservice designed to work with a broad range of LLMs, which now supports deploying over 100,000 models into our architecture, enabling customers to harness the power of AI while meeting the specific demands of their local markets and industries.

Local AI from SAP can ensure that AI prompts and customer data stay within SAP-controlled environments, helping to enhance security and ensure compliance with regional regulations. By focusing on local deployment and aligning with NIM microservices, our strategy prioritizes scalability without compromising compliance or security.

“NVIDIA NIM microservices deliver optimized inference performance, portability, and enterprise support for custom models, helping customers accelerate innovation at every stage of the AI development and deployment cycle,” said Kari Briski, vice president, Generative AI Software for Enterprise, NVIDIA. “With NVIDIA NIM microservices on SAP Business AI, developers can supercharge AI adoption with local models running on local infrastructure.”

Why highly regulated industries demand a new AI paradigm

Industries like healthcare and public services stand at a crossroads. These are sectors where the stakes are highest—where AI can revolutionize patient care or streamline essential services—but the constraints are equally significant. Data sovereignty laws, compliance obligations, and the need for operational transparency often place these industries in a bind, forcing leaders to choose between accelerating innovation or staying compliant. SAP has long understood these challenges and has taken deliberate steps to provide solutions that strike the right balance.

Collaboration as a catalyst for innovation

As part of our ongoing drive to enhance AI adoption, SAP has optimized its architecture to leverage some of the most advanced inference technologies available. By collaborating with model innovators such as Aleph Alpha, Meta, and Mistral, alongside our own fine-tuned ABAP model, we aim to deliver a curated selection of trusted AI tools. These models are designed to address multilingual, explainable, and retrieval-augmented generation tasks, working to ensure that enterprises have access to solutions tailored to their unique business challenges. By placing our customers’ needs at the forefront, SAP can deliver AI systems that are not only more powerful but also deeply embedded in the enterprise ecosystem.

Building AI that’s market-aware and customer-driven

Enterprise leaders are under growing pressure to translate innovation into measurable outcomes. Our expanded collaboration with NVIDIA aims to address these demands with a focus on:

• Enterprise-grade performance: Leveraging NVIDIA NIM and curated models, fine-tuned by SAP for enterprise-grade performance
• Operational flexibility: Supporting local deployment while seamlessly integrating with SAP’s technology ecosystem
• Strategic alignment: Addressing the shifting dynamics of AI sovereignty and industrial leadership

What’s next for enterprise AI?

The road ahead for AI in enterprises is as exciting as it is demanding. Compliance will remain a core concern, but so too will the need for agility and innovation. Through our partnership with NVIDIA, we are not just responding to these demands—we are anticipating them, building infrastructure and solutions that can empower our customers to stay ahead of the curve.

For businesses ready to embark on this journey, the process starts now. Explore how our AI solutions can redefine what’s possible for your business.

Explore the opportunities ahead.

The demand for supply chain resilience and agility has never been higher. Procurement and supply chain functions have evolved beyond mere cost management, becoming increasingly crucial to customer satisfaction, regulatory compliance, and overall business objectives. To navigate this complex environment, companies need comprehensive B2B solutions that foster collaboration and drive efficiency for both themselves and their trading partners.

In a previous article, I explored how SAP Business Network can deliver measurable value for buyer organizations by accelerating order cycles, improving efficiency, and generating significant ROI. Now, I’m turning my attention to the other side of the equation: the suppliers.

A recent IDC white paper sponsored by SAP, The Business Value of SAP Business Network — For Selling Organizations, sheds light on how business networks can help organizations meet key goals by improving efficiency, reducing costs, and driving innovation. Let’s delve into the findings and explore how SAP Business Network can transform the supplier experience.

Cutting costs through visibility and information sharing

Technology plays a critical role in the buyer-supplier relationship. Traditional collaboration tools, designed to bring buyers and sellers together, are increasingly limited in today’s rapidly evolving technological landscape. To meet new demands, organizations are turning to modern business networks that enable more efficient ways to collaborate with partners.

These networks offer greater convenience, speed, and a broad selection of products and services, transforming how businesses sell products and manage their end-to-end supply chain. To succeed, teams need meaningful visibility into supply chain activity. Discovering opportunities to improve operational efficiencies and deliver business value requires access to real insights across key metrics. Business networks make this possible by enabling end-to-end tracking of orders, shipments, and inventory. This transparency also contributes to stronger collaboration with customers, allowing teams to respond quickly to changes in demand, optimize inventory levels, and maintain more reliable and accurate forecasts.

These benefits can be realized through automation capabilities contained within the platform, bringing further cost savings. For one customer using SAP Business Network, automated order processing eliminated manual checks and data entry, significantly reducing costs. While manually processed orders cost around $30 each, automated orders cost them less than a dollar.

Beyond order processing, automation and data visibility also improved demand forecasting. Users reported a 19% increase in forecast accuracy, which helped reduce stockouts, overproduction, and production waste. These improvements not only delivered operational efficiencies but also contributed to higher renewal rates and new business opportunities.

Driving value while staying efficient

Automation through SAP Business Network helps companies reduce manual tasks, saving employees’ time and resources while improving accuracy, efficiency, and compliance. These process improvements can also enhance employee performance, allowing them to focus on higher-value tasks that drive better business outcomes.

Tasks like customer support see major benefits from efficiency gains through business network automation. Structured data ensures deeper integration with other systems, allowing employees to quickly access complete storefront and portfolio data to respond to customer inquiries faster. Business networks can also provide better visibility and near-real-time data, leading to faster, more accurate responses to customer needs and boosting customer satisfaction by nearly 37%. These improvements help reduce product turn-times and allow companies to deliver products promptly, benefiting both employees and customers.

SAP Business Network customers also saw invoice approvals and shipping notices processed 50% and 48% faster with automation compared to manual methods. This also led to a 21% increase in on-time document delivery, reaching 91% overall, highlighting the significant impact of SAP Business Network on operational efficiency.

With fewer errors, faster payments, and enhanced visibility into financial data, automation through SAP Business Network helps procurement teams do more than streamline operations. It can empower them to deliver the added value that companies have been searching for.

Strengthening and streamlining business development efforts

Strong visibility helps teams understand customer needs and use a data-driven approach to identify new opportunities more quickly. Business networks can even help boost a supplier’s profile as well, with certification and trust ratings that help bring in more business. These metrics can help translate new opportunities into bigger picture products and solutions.

Process automation and accelerated payments inherently increase customer value by responding to their needs faster. At the same time, they give organizations additional time to reach and maintain more customers to drive growth through new agreements that could allow them to scale further. SAP Business Network helped customers accelerate their go-to-market speed by 20%, reducing the time from product development to market launch.

Businesses using SAP Business Network also report that the effects of speeding up and simplifying the selling processes were crucial to overall business success, showing a 36.8% increase in customer satisfaction and a 53.8% improvement in sales administration efficiency. The total annual revenue gain through these means added up to $2 million per organization.

Leveraging SAP Business Network as a supplier

As companies search for solutions that enable them to build resilient, agile, and sustainable supply chains, business networks have emerged as a powerful tool to meet performance goals, improve efficiency, and comply with regulatory requirements.

SAP Business Network takes this a step further by integrating with both traditional and emerging supply chain management applications. By enabling suppliers to grow their customer base and build stronger relationships through increased visibility and trust, SAP Business Network helps empower suppliers to operate more strategically and competitively in today’s digital economy.

The benefits highlighted in this research complement the buyer-side advantages explored in my previous article, underscoring the holistic value that SAP Business Network can bring to the entire supply chain ecosystem. As we continue to navigate the complexities of modern procurement and supply chain management, platforms like SAP Business Network will undoubtedly play a pivotal role in shaping the future of business collaboration and efficiency.

Tony Harris is SVP and chief marketing and solutions officer of SAP Business Network.

When it comes to digital transformation, having the right software is only part of the equation. Companies navigating the complexities of cloud migration also need a partner committed to walking with them every step of the way. This is where SAP Preferred Success services can drive momentum.

More than a support plan, SAP Preferred Success offers a guided, proactive success model that helps accelerate outcomes, reduce risk, and drive continuous innovation. As companies move to cloud ERP solutions, especially in regulated and complex industries, the services can become a strategic advantage in bridging the gap between implementation and long-term business transformation.

Delivering transformation as a service

Technology implementation, even for cloud ERP with embedded AI and automation, can only take a business so far. To drive true business transformation, expertise is still essential.

SAP Preferred Success helps overcome challenges in realizing expected ROI and business outcomes, such as adoption gaps, siloed insights, and reactive operations that slow progress. The services can provide strategic support tailored to each organization with a structured engagement model, direct access to SAP experts, and proactive recommendations aligned with business goals.

For example, organizations can realize the full value of SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition and other cloud solutions from SAP faster and with less risk by leveraging:

• Tailored guidance and best practices from SAP experts across industries
• Proactive insights to help customers align innovation with strategy
• Accelerated adoption of SAP innovations, including embedded AI and SAP Fiori apps
• Optimization support to help continuously refine system performance and processes
• Business-specific planning aligned with transformation milestones

SAP Preferred Success can also deliver best practice guidance through structured success checks—touch points where SAP experts assess alignment with standard processes, identify risks, and provide tailored recommendations. This proactive approach supports a “keep clean, stay clean” strategy, helping customers safeguard system integrity and accelerate future innovation.

For IT teams, the services can decrease time spent on incident resolution while increasing system stability. Access to architectural reviews, upgrade planning, and expert troubleshooting enables a critical shift from reactive support to proactive innovation.

At the same time, business teams can be better positioned to adopt new features quickly, leading to higher productivity and measurable progress on strategic KPIs. SAP experts can assist in defining and tracking those KPIs from the beginning, helping ensure the technology evolves with the business. In addition, with each new release, SAP Preferred Success can provide guidance on how to adopt what matters most.

To see the services within SAP Preferred Success in action, let’s consider Eurofarma. Operating in more than 20 countries, the pharmaceutical company turned to SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition to modernize and scale its operations. However, the turning point wasn’t just the technology but also the partnership through SAP Preferred Success.

As noted by William Almeida, operations support systems coordinator at Eurofarma, in a video:

“SAP Preferred Success has significantly impacted our operations by driving innovation and enabling us to fully leverage all the tools contracted with SAP. We share our business needs with them, and they connect us with SAP experts in each area. This partnership has been instrumental in improving performance, scalability, and our ability to utilize cloud-based tools, ultimately enhancing our overall modernization.”

SAP Preferred Success helped Eurofarma align its cloud environment with evolving business goals, optimize infrastructure, and adopt new tools more quickly. With personalized guidance, the company moved from reactive maintenance to proactive transformation—boosting its productivity, improving compliance, and building a stronger digital foundation for growth.

Turning embedded AI into business outcomes

When embedded with purpose and backed by expert guidance, AI becomes more than a tool. It drives tangible business outcomes. Yet, most companies struggle to adopt the technology because they lack a clear path to value.

Although it’s designed to transform business operations with intelligent recommendations, automation of manual tasks, and foresight that once took hours to uncover, the full potential of AI requires more than flipping a switch.

SAP Preferred Success offers an AI acceleration path through its AI exploration service, designed to help organizations move from isolated pilots to strategic, embedded intelligence. The service can provide expert guidance to identify high-impact use cases, align capabilities to business goals, and help ensure secure, scalable adoption.

From streamlining financial close processes to enabling natural language interactions through the Joule copilot, companies can gain the insight and support needed to make AI truly work for their business. For industries where speed, compliance, and innovation go hand in hand, this level of enablement helps clear the way for a personalized, scalable approach to innovation.

Creating a trusted foundation for future-ready businesses

Cloud transformation isn’t a one-time event; it’s a continuous journey. SAP Preferred Success can support every step, from go-live and scaling to innovation and evolution.

Whether the focus is on modernizing finance, optimizing supply chains, embracing generative AI, or shifting to a clean core strategy, SAP Preferred Success brings structure to transformation, clarity to complexity, and confidence to your most important decisions.

Ready to get more from your cloud investment? Find out how SAP Preferred Success services can help you get there.

Mine Ecevit is global lead for SAP Preferred Success Sales at SAP.
Andreia Bessa is global program lead for Global Customer Engagement and Services at SAP.

The TUI Group is a leading global tourism company headquartered in Germany, offering integrated travel services like hotels, cruise ships, and travel agencies to its 20 million customers. At SAP Sapphire in Orlando, Laura Dean, digital adoption and training lead at TUI, shared the company’s success in streamlining its HR processes in SAP SuccessFactors solutions with WalkMe.

TUI implemented SAP SuccessFactors eight years ago, and now the company’s over 41,000 employees use various SAP SuccessFactors solutions for performance management, talent management, learning, HR data management, and more. “With so many capabilities and so many employees, as you can imagine, it’s a steep learning curve for our employees,” Dean said. This is where TUI turned to WalkMe to help standardize and automate its HR processes for an improved employee experience and increased efficiency.

Benefits for the business and employees

TUI faced three main challenges when it came to HR processes, Dean explained: employees struggled to learn new systems, legacy training approaches were expensive and difficult to maintain, and time-consuming HR tasks were impacting overall business operations. “We needed something that was going to bring us into the future but that could support the organization as well,” Dean said. The solution also needed to be available 24/7 and in multiple languages to effectively support TUI’s global employee base, which includes flight attendants, pilots, travel agents, and other seasonal roles.

TUI implemented WalkMe to help employees navigate the company’s HR processes more easily and efficiently as well as aid HR staff members. With WalkMe analytics, TUI can identify where users have challenges in existing processes and then build WalkMe solutions to create personalized and automated experiences to help mitigate those challenges. For employees, this can mean the software feels easier to use; for HR staff and the business, it can lead to fewer employee and manager errors and faster time-to-value for SAP SuccessFactors solutions.

Dean described how WalkMe automation helped simplify TUI’s onboarding processes for new employees by automatically assigning e-mail addresses in the SAP SuccessFactors system during the hiring process to reduce login issues on an employee’s first day. This not only improved the new hire experience, it also saved HR teams time and proactively addressed any errors.      

TUI also simplified the time-off request process for HR staff and employees.    

“We set up a process whereby if somebody is booking sick leave and they have annual leave at the same time, WalkMe will intercept them. It will say ‘You’ve actually got holiday at the same time so we need you to cancel that holiday and put it through as sick time,’” Dean said. “What that means then for us is that we’ve got less questions going to HR, less tickets being raised, and more people following the actual process for their region.”

The data speaks volumes

WalkMe analytics can offer visibility into what software is being used and how. With this insight, companies can identify opportunities for improved efficiency and deploy in-app guidance and automations to address specific points in processes. “One of the real benefits of WalkMe is how the data that is available helps us make decisions around how we support employees and how we build digital adoption solutions for our employees,” Dean said. “We’ve focused a lot on the data that’s within the annual employee process and how our users are actually using their system currently.”

Analyzing aggregated annual employee form process data collected by WalkMe over 90 days, Dean saw that HR completed the process with no errors 70% of the time, completed the process with some errors 5% of the time, and did not complete the process 23% of the time. Even more, Dean could see where the errors were occurring and where users who didn’t complete the form were getting stuck. Based on this data, Dean used WalkMe to highlight the most-missed fields on the form, reminding users to complete them before moving on. “If 5% of the time they don’t know that information, I need to do something when they get here to say, ‘Please make sure you have this information before you carry on.’ So, I’m telling them in advance they need to have that, which I can do with WalkMe,” she said.

When asked how easy the analytics dashboards are to build, Dean explained that WalkMe gathers all the forms automatically so there’s no need to build anything additional. With WalkMe flow analytics, you set up the process step-by-step and then the report collects data over time. “It’s super quick and easy. With UI intelligence you get an out-of-the-box set of insights that shows usage of forms in the system. It shows me where people stop and start processing and points of friction,” she said.

Self-service employees

TUI’s brand purpose to “create the moments that make life richer” not only applies to its customers, but extends to its employee base as well. With the help of WalkMe and SAP SuccessFactors solutions, TUI has certainly succeeded in enriching and empowering HR and end users.

“What we’ve been able to see is 80% higher employee self-efficiency,” Dean said. “So the good news is they don’t need to contact their local support team because actually what they can do is go into our WalkMe menu and search for any of the content, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, across six different languages.” TUI has also experienced 70% less time spent on training, a 40% increase in task completion, and 50% fewer support calls with the help of WalkMe.

For Dean herself, WalkMe has enhanced her role as a trainer: “It actually supports me to do that change management piece within my organization. It supports me to educate and enable our end users without me having to be available and fly all around the world.”

Discover how WalkMe for SAP SuccessFactors HCM can help drive adoption and streamline HR processes.

Gillian Hixson is an integrated communications specialist at SAP.

German city centers are fighting for survival, and they need to reinvent themselves. How? With innovative technologies that improve efficiency, boost customer loyalty, and unlock new revenue streams for retailers. Retail media is the name of the game here. According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) Europe, it will generate some €25 billion in revenue in 2026—more than twice as much as in 2022.

It’s the same story everywhere: Germany’s downtown shopping streets are struggling with high retail vacancy rates. Holstenstraße, one of the country’s oldest pedestrian shopping zones, is no exception. Here, in the heart of the Baltic Sea coast city of Kiel, capital of the state of Schleswig-Holstein, the store vacancy rate is 38.5%. In an effort to revive the city’s retail scene, its marketing department launched an innovative initiative known as Zukunftsraum (“future space”). In the brick-and-mortar shopping environment of a pop-up store, retailers can explore the opportunities that new technologies bring. “Collecting data and using it effectively is central to gaining a better understanding of customer requirements and to unlocking new revenue streams,” Käthe Fleischer says. As an interim manager for business development on the Kiel pilot project, she knows that data collected in stores is the key to more effective and personalized marketing.

Grasping the power of a new business model

Enter retail media, an opportunity for retailers to generate additional revenue and bolster their cash-strapped coffers by selling physical and digital advertising space. “Many retailers have not yet recognized the value that this new form of advertising can unlock,” says Marlene Lohmann, head of Marketing Research at Germany’s EHI Retail Institute. Referring to the results of a recent study, she reports that while some front-runners—including leading German retailers REWE, Lidl, OBI, dm, and Douglas—have adopted this new business model, the retail landscape as a whole has a lot of catching up to do. “Retail media is still very much in its infancy,” she says.

Yet its potential for the sector is immense. And ultimately, it’s a win-win for everyone: retailers profit from new sources of revenue and manufacturers can target potential buyers with greater precision. Quoting a consumer study by Kantar, Dirk Sperrfechter, an expert at the market research firm, says: “Consumers rate contextually relevant advertising at the point of sale as particularly authentic and helpful.” The number of touchpoints, he adds, also plays a key role in how retail media advertising is perceived.

Retail media unlocks a multitude of benefits

Retailers should be using these findings to their advantage. And, indeed, more and more are doing so, at least online. Sponsored ads are everywhere these days—in web shops, on social media, and in online newsletters—but they still leave much to be desired in terms of personalization. But the potential of in-store solutions such as screens and digital totems often remains untapped as well. This is probably partly because different sales channels are often poorly integrated, making it difficult to consolidate the first-party data they generate.

“What retailers need most of all if they want to unlock the added value of retail media are powerful technologies for collecting, cleansing, and enriching customer data,” Lohmann says. Ultimately, they need to be able to analyze their first-party data in detail and segment it. If they do not have reliable metrics at their fingertips, they will struggle to persuade interested manufacturers and brands of the potential of the advertising space they want to sell.

Smart technology and SAP Business Data Cloud as enablers

This is where SAP comes in. “Our cloud solutions for retail help retailers generate and provision relevant data about customer behavior, clearance sales, promotions, and prices,” explains Stefan Binkowski, vice president, Retail & Wholesale Advisory, SAP Deutschland. In the newly launched SAP Business Data Cloud (SAP BDC) solution, retailers can consolidate data from manifold sources with ease. First presented at SAP Business Unleashed, SAP BDC can integrate all SAP and non-SAP business data and, in so doing, helps provide a foundation from which to get up and running with retail media.

SAP offers what enterprises need to build and implement a robust retail media strategy: smart store technologies for tracking customer frequency rates, interactions, and so on with ease; intelligent analyses for gaining detailed insights into customer behavior, preferences, and needs; a data platform for collating all the relevant information; and, last but not least, an omnichannel customer engagement platform for planning and implementing targeted retail media campaigns. “Generating added value from data is central to SAP’s strategy,” Binkowski says. “Once retailers recognize the value of their data, they can take full advantage of the untapped potential that retail media offers.”

Retail media is one of the topics on the agenda for the German-speaking SAP User Group’s retail conference (DSAG-Handelstagen) on July 1 and 2 in Osnabrück, Germany. The event will look at the technological aspects of leveraging customer data and retail media in the industry, which smart technologies come into play, and how SAP BDC can contribute to the success of this marketing concept. Sign up today.

This also appeared on the German SAP News Center.

SAP has once again been recognized as a Leader in the QKS Group’s 2025 SPARK Matrix for Digital Twin of an Organization (DTO), marking the fifth year in a row this acknowledgment has been bestowed.

In addition, for the second consecutive year, SAP has received the highest rating, evaluated against 19 leading vendors, across both SPARK Matrix assessment categories: Customer Impact and Technology Excellence. This leadership position highlights our commitment to helping enterprises navigate complexity with agility, intelligence, and confidence using SAP solutions.

The SAP Signavio approach to DTO has always been intrinsically linked with the concept of process observability, whereby companies have the ability to visualize processes as they should happen, as they execute on and impact customers and employee satisfaction. Through this unique, integrated toolkit of AI-infused business transformation management solutions, organizations can gain actionable visibility into the four pillars of their organization: people, processes, applications, and data.

“Our goal is to empower our customers to build transformation as a capability within their organizations, rather than seeing transformation as a one-off project,” Dee Houchen, chief marketing officer at SAP LeanIX & SAP Signavio, said. “By leveraging DTO capabilities to build a virtual representation of any business process with associated systems, decision-makers can simulate different process scenarios and calculate the impact of alternative automations before implementation, allowing for the creation of continuous improvement loops and ensuring transformation has the greatest positive impact. Being recognized as a Leader in the SPARK Matrix for the fifth year in a row is a reflection of the value of this approach and reaffirms our commitment to innovation and customer satisfaction.”

The repeated recognition provides useful context on the current DTO vendor landscape, with several key points differentiating SAP solutions from others on the market:

• Enterprise observability: Customers can achieve full enterprise observability, enabling them to centralize and manage transformation initiatives within a single solution.
• AI innovations: SAP solutions offer generative AI-powered applications that leverage over 50 years of SAP process knowledge to help provide insights and recommendations.
• Value accelerators and best practices: Thousands of value accelerators and best practices are available to help expedite benefit realization in both SAP and non-SAP environments, helping customers start their transformation projects on the right foundation and accelerate time to value.
• Automated insights: SAP solutions can provide users with a portfolio of advanced statistics, performance monitoring, and value analysis capabilities to support informed decision-making.
• Modeling and experience connection: We extend DTO capabilities to customer touchpoints, working to ensure comprehensive transformation efforts that connect experiences to processes.

To understand the DTO market better, including why SAP has been acknowledged as a leader in this crucial area for five years straight, download a complimentary copy of the latest SPARK Matrix here and here.

Lucas de Boer is global marketing program lead for SAP Signavio.

As the global workforce undergoes rapid transformation driven by technological advancements, the demand for new skill sets is intensifying. A recent McKinsey report highlights that surveyed executives express a pressing need not only for advanced IT and data analytics but also for critical thinking and creativity—skills currently in short supply.

Academic institutions are at the forefront of addressing this challenge, tasked with equipping students with the competencies required in a digital-first economy. Recognizing this imperative, SAP University Alliances and HEC Montréal have collaborated to develop Business Builders, an innovative, gamified learning platform designed to help enhance students’ analytical and decision-making skills using SAP Analytics Cloud.

Introducing Business Builders: A gamified approach to make students future-ready

Business Builders is designed to help students develop these high-demand skills in a practical and engaging way. Through real-life business challenges powered by SAP Analytics Cloud, students can learn how to visualize data, draw actionable insights, and make evidence-based decisions in real time.

Used by educators in over 70 countries, Business Builders is free for educators and students. It is designed to be accessible to any classroom—whether in business, STEM, or interdisciplinary courses.

By blending gameplay with professional tools, Business Builders helps address several key pain points in education:

• It can make data and analytics more tangible and relevant.
• It helps foster analytical thinking, data storytelling, and digital literacy.
• It can align directly with the needs of the future workforce.

Whether students aspire to careers in consulting, supply chain, product management, marketing, sustainability, or HR, Business Builders can provide an environment to explore these topics while gaining in-demand skills.

Two new scenarios for a broader audience

Building on the success of three existing scenarios, SAP and HEC Montréal are now launching two brand-new games designed to support even earlier-stage learners: The Agent and The Maple Heir. These scenarios help make Business Builders more inclusive, scalable, and suitable for students age 15 and older and first-year university students. Importantly, no prior experience with SAP tools is required, making it easy for educators and students to get started.

The Agent is an easy-to-use sports management scenario that can empower students to become decision-makers as they take on the role of a sports agent. Through real-world sports challenges, students can develop basic analytical skills using intuitive dashboards in SAP Analytics Cloud. They answer questions like: Which player is the most improved? How can a team optimize its performance? Which sport averages the highest number of followers on social media? What is the value? It’s a fun, relevant, and accessible way to introduce analytics in the classroom—no SAP experience needed.

The Maple Heir, on the other hand, is a scenario that introduces students to the fundamentals of running a business through the engaging story of inheriting a maple syrup company in Quebec, Canada. Students step into the role of a new stakeholder eager to understand and optimize the company’s operations, financial health, and growth potential. From analyzing income statements and profitability metrics to exploring production processes and workforce management, students can gain hands-on experience in making strategic business decisions. The scenario also addresses real-world challenges like seasonal demand fluctuations and business expansion opportunities. By visualizing data and presenting actionable insights with SAP Analytics Cloud, students can learn essential concepts in entrepreneurship, finance, and operations in a gamified, accessible way.

Both scenarios are built with educators in mind: they’re easy to integrate into existing curricula and supported by ready-made teaching materials. Whether in economics, business, IT, or interdisciplinary courses, they can offer an engaging way to make learning stick.

Empowering educators to build the future

The launch of these two new scenarios reaffirms SAP’s commitment to empowering the academic community to build the future workforce—one student at a time. By helping students master analytics tools, hone critical thinking, and gain early exposure to business systems, Business Builders helps ensure they’re better prepared for internships, first jobs, and long-term careers.

In a world increasingly shaped by AI and data, it’s not just about knowing how to code or use a tool—it’s about thinking critically, communicating clearly, and making sense of complex information. With Business Builders, educators can give students a head start in all of these areas.

If you’re an educator looking to enhance your curriculum with innovative, practical learning tools, explore Business Builders today or join one of our virtual road shows to experience it in action and hear firsthand from those already using it.

Thorsten Haas is part of SAP University Alliances.

The AI landscape is evolving at breakneck speed. Previously, AI systems were primarily assistive and reactive, offering recommendations or performing predefined tasks when asked. Now they are entering the era of agentic AI: systems that operate autonomously, adapt in real time, and collaborate like digital colleagues.

But as AI becomes more independent, new risks emerge. So, how can we navigate this next frontier responsibly? This is a question that we at SAP do not leave to chance.

From tools to teammates

Imagine you’re buying a car. You expect it to meet all safety standards, regardless of where the component parts are built or how the car is assembled. The process behind the scenes does not change your expectation of safety. The same goes for agentic AI.

Agentic AI systems are more than tools; they are intelligent agents that plan, learn from experience, self-correct, and collaborate. They’re capable of orchestrating complex processes, making decisions, and even engaging with other agents or humans to achieve a goal. However, with this leap forward comes a new layer of complexity and risk.

Core capabilities and risks of agentic AI

Agentic AI systems bring powerful capabilities like planning, reflection, and collaboration, enabling them to tackle complex tasks autonomously. They can map strategies, learn from mistakes, use external tools, and coordinate with humans and other agents.

However, each strength introduces risks. For example, flawed planning can cause inefficiencies, reflection may reinforce unethical behavior, tool usage can lead to instability when systems interact unpredictably, and unclear collaboration can result in miscommunication and compounded errors. Balancing these capabilities with proper safeguards is essential for safe, ethical deployment.

Managing autonomy: balancing freedom with control

One of the most pressing challenges with agentic AI is managing its autonomy. Left unchecked, these systems can veer off course, misinterpret context, or introduce subtle risks without immediate detection. To address this, organizations must strike a careful balance between freedom and control.

We have learned that oversight should be calibrated according to risk. High-stakes domains like healthcare or human resources demand robust human supervision, while low-risk, routine tasks can tolerate greater autonomy. Also, continuous monitoring is essential; agentic AI systems, like any complex technology, require regular checks to ensure quality, compliance, and reliability.

A key element of this oversight is maintaining a “human in the loop” approach, where human judgment is integrated into critical decision points, ensuring that automated actions remain aligned with human values and organizational intent.

This principle has been at the heart of SAP’s ethical AI approach from the beginning, reflecting our belief that AI should augment, not replace, human decision-making. To reinforce this, SAP has introduced mandatory ethics reviews for all agentic AI use cases, ensuring that each deployment is scrutinized for ethical implications and remains aligned with our responsible AI principles.

Building transparency and accountability

Transparency is not just a buzzword; it’s a foundational requirement for building trust in agentic AI. From the outset, during the design phase, it is crucial to classify AI systems based on the complexity and risk of the tasks they perform. This classification guides decisions about the necessary safeguards and ensures that mechanisms for human intervention are integrated from the beginning.

At runtime, transparency is maintained through explainability and traceability. Developers and end-users must be able to understand what the system is doing and why. Crucially, accountability must always rest with humans or legal entities, never with the AI itself.

Rethinking governance and regulation

Despite the emergence of agentic AI, there have been no new regulations specifically crafted for it. Existing laws and frameworks such as GDPR still apply and provide a solid foundation for governance. However, what has changed is the level of technical rigor required to remain compliant and ethically sound. Organizations must now adopt more robust processes. They need to analyze use cases with greater precision, apply risk-based controls that match the potential impact of the AI system, and ensure that ethical and legal standards are upheld through enhanced design practices and ongoing testing.

Designing with human values at the center

Agentic AI cannot be an excuse for lowered standards. At SAP, the stance is unequivocal: Even in autonomous systems, AI must meet the highest ethical benchmarks. This means embedding principles such as fairness, transparency, and human agency directly into the design.

Ultimately, all users should be equipped with the tools and understanding they need to supervise and, when necessary, intervene in the system’s behavior.

Building trust in a black-box world

Trust in AI doesn’t happen by default; it must be intentionally built and continually reinforced. One of the most effective ways to do this is by giving stakeholders the right amount of information. Too much detail can be overwhelming and counterproductive while too little fosters blind trust or fear of the unknown. The key lies in communicating clearly about the system’s capabilities, risks, limitations, and appropriate use. Empowering users to critically assess the AI’s behavior – and to know when to step in – is central to creating a safe, secure, and trusted AI environment.

Rethinking KPIs in the AI-augmented workplace

As agentic systems, like our Joule Agents, begin handling more tasks, human roles will naturally evolve. To keep up with this shift, organizations need to rethink how they define and measure success. This starts with investing in change management and upskilling programs that prepare employees to work effectively alongside AI. It also requires redefining productivity metrics, moving beyond task completion to focus on how well humans and AI agents collaborate. Success should be measured by how efficiently teams harness AI to unlock new levels of insight and innovation.

Building AI that builds trust

Agentic AI is not just another phase; it is a transformation. But like any transformative technology, success depends on how it’s built, governed, and used.

At its best, agentic AI amplifies human capabilities, accelerates innovation, and helps tackle challenges once considered too complex. But it also demands a new level of diligence, oversight, and ethical reflection.

The future is not just about building smarter agents; it’s about building responsible ones.

Learn more:

• 2025 SAP Sapphire Innovation Guide
• AI Ethics Handbook, Guidelines & Global AI Ethics Steering Committee
• Learning Journey: Putting AI Ethics into Practice at SAP
• The Evolution from Chatbots to Agentic AI Systems

Walter Sun is senior vice president and head of AI at SAP.