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.
Support your employees in the flow of work with WalkMe 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.”
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.
Address specific retail industry needs to help achieve cost-effective transformation and sustainable growth
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.
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.
Your business processes have hidden potential. Unlock their true value fast and at scale.
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.
Business Builders: Transforming Education through Gamified Learning
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.
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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.
Joule Agents can help your whole business run faster
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.
Over the past few years, we have continued to lead the way with groundbreaking advanced AI capabilities for the enterprise.
This year at SAP Sapphire, we announced the latest innovations and highlighted the enormous momentum we are seeing with our customers and partners. We have delivered more than 230 AI scenarios.
By the end of 2025, SAP Business AI will have more than 400 AI scenarios on top of its 1,600 Joule skills, delivering unparalleled business value to customers. This commitment has already led to 34,000 customers utilizing SAP Business AI.
Innovation is at the heart of this growth, which is why SAP continues to enhance our generative AI copilot Joule, Joule Agents, and our AI scenarios embedded across the portfolio — all built with AI Foundation on SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP), the technical backbone that powers Joule and Joule Agents.
During SAP Sapphire, we announced the latest SAP Business AI innovations that make Joule more powerful and accessible. I wanted to share a few innovations below, but I encourage you to dive into all the incredible announcements SAP made in the 2025 Innovation Guide.
Joule: the new UI in the age of AI
Our UI has continuously evolved to meet the needs of SAP customers. Now, SAP Business AI with Joule and natural language redefines the end user’s experience.
Joule is solidifying its role as SAP’s new UI, transforming how customers work and interact with our software through natural language — whether on the web, mobile, or in different languages. This way, the end user can ask questions in natural language, and Joule does the hard work in the system to find information or answer.
Joule is already one click away in every SAP application, but we also understand that customers store data across non-SAP systems, which should not prevent it from helping users. Joule cannot operate in a vacuum if it is going to offer real business value. That is why we are now expanding Joule to any application so that customers can access everything, everywhere, with the help of WalkMe.
Joule is breaking free to become omnipresent and accessible across non-SAP applications with the SAP Joule action bar supercharged by WalkMe. This integration expands Joule’s reach beyond SAP Business Suite, so it is always right by our customers’ side, giving Joule the “eyes, legs, and arms” to see what customers see.
Joule can follow business users across SAP and third-party systems, using context from active applications to connect data, surface insights, and streamline workflows.
No matter where our customers are, if they see information relevant to their business and want to know what it means in the context of SAP data, all they need to do is click to get the right context from Joule. This overarching context across multiple applications means Joule can orchestrate workflows and data from any application and website.
Joule is always on and proactive, providing customers with recommendations and proactively letting them know when Joule Agents have completed a task or require feedback. Customers are also empowered to create custom Joule skills for any application. Joule skills can handle repetitive, rule-based tasks, alleviating routine activities like data entry, IT ticket raising, and PO creation. Custom skills can execute these tasks based on natural language conversations with users that are triggered contextually and through user intent. This simple access through Joule only further democratizes access to AI and SAP.
Answer engine with Perplexity
If Joule is everywhere, it should also be capable of answering everything. Joule already provides answers across our customers’ structured and unstructured data, from procurement or travel activities to policies.
At SAP Sapphire, we elevated Joule again with help from SAP Business Data Cloud and SAP Knowledge Graph, and a new collaboration with Perplexity, an industry-leading company in the field of unstructured data.
SAP and Perplexity, an AI-powered answer engine that provides accurate, trusted, and real-time answers to any question, are collaborating to extend SAP’s generative AI and search capabilities by bringing together the best of both worlds in unstructured and structured data. By integrating Perplexity’s ability to address questions accurately and transparently with SAP’s business answer capabilities, we are bringing both worlds together: the power of Joule to answer business questions, and the power of Perplexity to understand what’s happening in the world.
Together with SAP Business Data Cloud, SAP Knowledge Graph, and our integration with Perplexity, Joule can now seamlessly combine internal business data with real-world insights. Whether data is structured or unstructured, from systems or the broader web, Joule brings it all together, delivering intelligent answers in real time. Learn more about the collaboration here.
Joule Agents: reason and act
Insight to action is a key principle of enterprise software. Businesses can access incredible insights by analyzing data, which they can use to arrive at conclusions before making a decision. Joule makes getting these insights through natural language simple. Now, Joule Agents can reason to fulfill the action part of the equation with other agents. This ability marks a paradigm shift in enterprise software that helps customers go from insight to action to reason and act with AI.
Joule Agents can reason and coordinate to autonomously execute tasks through multi-step, self-conceived workflows while always involving a human.
Envision an environmental health and safety agent assessing a new chemical entering a plant: This agent could ensure that inventory is not stored near reactive chemicals and then could consult with HR to verify that staff are qualified before recommending appropriate protective equipment. Additionally, the all-new accruals agent for finance reduces today’s manual work by 90 percent. This agent learns a customer’s accounting rules and then, using financial data, can propose the right accruals during financial close.
In this sense, as much as Joule is the new UI for AI, Joule Agents are reimagining the business process layer across SAP Business Suite in an AI-native way.
AI agent hub in SAP LeanIX
As the number of agents across SAP and third-party vendors grows, customers will need a way to discover agents and then govern and control what they do. This is precisely the role of the AI agent hub in SAP LeanIX solutions: It offers a governance and control framework to manage all these agents.
Because SAP LeanIX already knows our customers’ enterprise landscape, it can map every available AI agent to the business capability or process step it supports. This framework helps customers spot automation gaps and discover new AI agents to fill them. Tracking governance for each agent means customers can, for example, make sure agents meet ethical and compliance standards.
The AI agent hub in SAP LeanIX will be generally available in the fourth quarter of 2025.
SAP, NEURA Robotics, and NVIDIA
SAP announced a collaboration with NEURA Robotics and NVIDIA, unveiling a new era where SAP Business AI moves to the physical world.
Through this collaboration, Joule Agents connect enterprise data and processes with NEURA’s advanced cognitive robots, ranging from mobile autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) to humanoids, empowering businesses to automate real-world tasks such as adaptive manufacturing, autonomous replenishment, compliance monitoring, and predictive maintenance. The Mega NVIDIA Omniverse Blueprint plays a crucial role, enabling enterprises to validate and optimize robotic fleets in digital twins before deploying them on the shop floor or in the warehouse, thus ensuring safety, efficiency, and rapid scaling.
AI Foundation: the AI operating system business AI
We knew from the outset that Joule and Joule Agents needed a strong operating system. That is what SAP’s AI Foundation on SAP BTP, our operating system for AI, now offers customers. AI Foundation gives developers a centralized set of tools to build, extend, and run custom AI solutions and agents at scale, all accessible via one entry point. AI Foundation already had more than 90 capabilities, and at SAP Sapphire, we introduced over 60 more, such as AI Agent runtime, a brand-new AI evaluation service.
AI Foundation accelerates AI development by bringing together SAP Business AI solutions such as generative AI hub, Joule Studio, SAP Document AI, and SAP Knowledge Graph. Centralizing and simplifying AI operations also reduces the total cost of ownership.
SAP Knowledge Graph gives Joule and Joule Agents more accuracy and context. It grounds AI in a customer’s business context and exposes metadata that makes the relationships between information accessible. This way, for example, an agent working on a customer service ticket knows the relationships between products and purchase orders. Initial support for the SAP Cloud ERP and SAP Business Data Cloud solutions is expected to be generally available by the third quarter of 2025.
Other SAP Business AI solutions are also getting new enhancements. For example, Joule Studio, which helps developers create custom AI, will get a new skill builder capability to help developers create custom skills for Joule. We are also adding an agent builder capability that allows developers to create custom AI agents using low-code and no-code capabilities. General availability is planned for the third quarter and fourth quarter of 2025, respectively.
AI Foundation offers the latest AI models, including GPT-4.1, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, and, most recently, Gemini 2.5 Pro. Customers can select from a range of self-hosted models on SAP’s GPU infrastructure, such as Mistral AI, Cohere, or Meta model families for more sovereignty and control. Customers can also pick from best-in-class, industry-specific models created by our partners. One example is Deloitte, which brings its unique finance and tax experience to the AI Foundation with Zora AI.
Deloitte plans to integrate Zora AI with SAP Business AI, enabling customers to create intelligent digital workforces powered by agentic AI. Using SAP BTP, Zora AI offers a suite of preconfigured agents capable of autonomously performing complex business tasks with precision and speed. When paired with SAP’s robust enterprise capabilities, and enhanced by the data access in SAP Business Data Cloud, Zora AI has the potential to transform how work gets done, helping customers unlock the full value of agentic AI. Learn more about the integration here.
All these models deliver incredible results when the prompts are carefully designed. But herein lies a significant challenge: Once our customers are committed to a specific model, it can be difficult to change, as even subtle model updates can break carefully tuned prompts. That is why we worked hard to eliminate prompt engineering.
Prompt engineering is dead
Prompt engineering is dead; say hi to benchmark engineering. Prompt engineering requires customers to learn how to “talk” to the AI so it can effectively leverage its knowledge and capabilities to meet their specific needs. This process was manual and cost-intensive; above all else, it made it tedious and slow to change models.
I am excited to introduce SAP’s prompt optimizer, designed collaboratively with Not Diamond, a frontier AI lab renowned for its model-agnostic approach. Prompt optimizer is a capability of the generative AI hub in AI Foundation.
Switching models and optimizing prompts is time-consuming — it can take an organization days to migrate a single use case from one model to another — but it shouldn’t be. We wanted to tackle that challenge because customers need to be able to change models easily. Maybe a new model is better, more cost-effective, or unavailable in your country: Whatever the reason, switching models shouldn’t be difficult.
SAP’s prompt optimizer automates this entire task. Selecting a new model automatically converts all existing prompts into optimized prompts for all the latest models using public benchmarks. This helps reduce the time needed to change models and optimizes them from days to only minutes of background processing.
The prompt optimizer now means SAP customers can switch to the best available AI models for their specific use cases when they become available without any costly delays. It lays the groundwork for a multi-model future, where applications are decoupled from specific models and customers can utilize the most suitable model anytime.
We want organizations to seamlessly use AI capabilities without being locked into single-model dependencies, fostering flexibility and innovation in building AI solutions. A limited early access program is now available for early sign-up, with general availability expected later this year.
SAP Document AI
These announcements, and many others, made at SAP Sapphire in 2025 reaffirm our commitment to continually innovate and listen to feedback to meet our customers’ evolving needs. Take paperwork: Billions of documents are scanned into SAP systems yearly. Extracting relevant information from documents manually is costly, error-prone, and inefficient. That is why I am excited to introduce SAP Document AI, previously Document Information Extraction, which is natively integrated with SAP applications.
SAP Document AI seamlessly processes, extracts, and understands structured and unstructured data from business documents while automating document processing. SAP Document AI significantly reduces manual efforts and minimizes errors. Customers like Serax, a Belgian design brand, already use SAP Document AI to reduce manual work by 33 percent.
SAP Document AI will build upon the well-established Document Information Extraction Base and Premium editions, preserving their proven capabilities while enhancing efficiency. In addition, later in 2025, we plan to introduce the Premium Plus edition to expand the product’s scope, ensuring smooth, out-of-the-box integration across the SAP portfolio. For more details, read “SAP Document AI: The Road Map for Seamless Document Processing in SAP Business Suite.”
We continually strive to innovate our products; the same applies to SAP Document AI. That’s why we introduced instant learning to enhance the out-of-the-box accuracy of SAP Document AI in the pursuit of reaching 100 percent. Suppose SAP Document AI extracts something incorrectly from a document due to improper formatting. In that case, customers simply need to log in and correct the error once for the system to learn and avoid making the same mistake again. Previously, this would have required time-consuming retraining with numerous documents. To see it in action in SAP Document AI and SAP Cloud ERP, watch this demo video.
Additional AI innovations with partners
Cohere: SAP is expanding its partnership with Cohere to bring secure, enterprise-grade generative AI models to the SAP ecosystem, starting with Cohere’s Rerank model and extending evaluations with the Command and Embed models. These models are planned to be available alongside other leading AI models from SAP and third parties in the generative AI hub in SAP AI Core, with the intent to give customers more choice to build AI-powered solutions that meet their unique business needs.
Vianai Systems, Inc.: Vianai’s hila is an innovative generative AI conversational analytics application designed to engage a series of line-of-business executives. It currently focuses on empowering the office of the CFO, enabling direct interrogation of transactional systems. Our collaboration with Vianai centers on exploring how hila could complement established platforms such as Joule and the just ask feature in SAP Business Data Cloud by offering greater query precision and accuracy for non-SAP systems in the future. We are energized by the opportunity to push the boundaries of conversational analytics together. Stay tuned as we continue to uncover the transformative potential of these advancements. Learn more about the collaboration here.
AWS: SAP and AWS have announced the launch of an AI co-innovation program to help partners create generative applications, providing customers with direct access to innovative solutions that address complex business, logistics, and supply chain challenges. The program includes a fund in the form of AWS and SAP technical resources, expertise, and credits to help customers and partners leverage Amazon Bedrock through SAP BTP to define, test, and deploy industry-specific generative AI solutions, such as forecasting and planning for severe weather impacts on operations or increasing precision in financial outlooks. The program underscores the companies’ shared vision to help customers develop and deploy practical, secure generative AI applications that solve critical business operations challenges. Learn more about the co-innovation here.
AI investments
The externally managed SAP.iO Fund has made an investment in Nova Intelligence. Nova Intelligence is building end-to-end AI coding agents that can parse and understand legacy custom ABAP SAP code to modernize it into cloud-compliant applications. The AI agents iteratively test and refine the generated code until a successful outcome is achieved. Nova Intelligence is developing specialized AI agents to support the transformation of legacy custom code.
New SAP Business AI capabilities as part of the SAP Sustainability portfolio
We’re introducing new AI capabilities in the SAP Sustainability portfolio to help customers prepare data, automate processes, and enhance expertise. These innovations streamline environment, health, and safety (EHS) and product compliance processes and optimize risk and cost management while advancing sustainability goals. They will be available in beta in August 2025. New capabilities include:
AI-assisted permit management in SAP S/4HANA for EHS: Automates and simplifies permit handling, extracts key data, and proposes follow-up tasks
AI-assisted safety observation reporting with Joule in SAP S/4HANA for EHS: Enables seamless incident reporting through a conversational interface
AI-assisted safety instruction generation in SAP S/4HANA for EHS: Suggests safety instructions based on risk assessments
AI-assisted compliance information processing in SAP S/4HANA for product compliance: Automates data extraction and mapping from declarations and certificates
These capabilities will be available in the new Joule Premium for Supply Chain Management package, adding to existing AI features like:
AI-assisted ESG report generation in SAP Sustainability Control Tower
AI-assisted emission factor mapping in SAP Sustainability Footprint Management
AI-assisted declaration image analysis for SAP Green Token
Combining existing and new AI features, SAP Business AI helps customers reduce costs, lower risks, and drive performance in reporting, carbon management, circularity, and compliance.
SAP Business AI in 2025
SAP Sapphire was an exciting time. We have announced many innovations that drive value for our customers; however, the rest of 2025 promises to deliver more. We will continue offering AI scenarios that help our customers, from new Joule Agents to building strong, open partnerships that realize value in this fast-paced AI era.
In the fast-paced world of esports, victory isn’t just about reaction time and skill—it’s about making the right decisions at the right moment and picking the right strategy. Team Liquid, one of the most decorated organizations in competitive gaming, has consistently pushed the boundaries of performance, secured more than 140 major titles, and started 2025 with winning the League of Legends Championship of the Americas (LTA).
With major tournaments generating millions of data points every minute, esports has become increasingly data-driven. League of Legends is one of those highly strategic games, which generates vast amounts of data. Team Liquid faced the challenge of quickly analyzing and interpreting complex statistics without having to search different dashboards and making the data available to more users across the business. But how can players, coaches, and analysts efficiently access the information in natural language without slowing down decision-making?
Drive productivity with omnipresent, always-on, and proactive AI
To perform at the highest level in professional gaming, Team Liquid is constantly thinking of new ways to gain more insights from its data. Traditionally, Team Liquid analysts manually gathered data from multiple sources, slowing decision-making and limiting real-time strategy adjustments. In the Next Level Esports Center built on SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP), Team Liquid centralizes its game data, ensuring a single source of truth for performance analysis. However, accessing insights remained a challenge for non-technical users like players, coaches, and marketing teams, who needed a more intuitive way to extract even more meaningful data.
With agents in SAP’s AI copilot Joule, Team Liquid is entering a new world of getting fast and precise insights out of its existing database. By simply typing in a question about a respective player or team, the agents can go through more than 1.6 terabytes of game data from 10 million games to find the right answer to the question and can even suggest strategies to beat the opponent. This allows both analysts and non-technical users to request insights using natural language, eliminating the need for manual data retrieval. With seamless integration of SAP HANA Cloud and SAP Analytics Cloud, Team Liquid gains a robust and scalable data infrastructure, ensuring fast, actionable insights. Joule enables users to instantly access game statistics, player performance trends, and strategic comparisons, making critical information available within seconds.
The impact of Joule Agents can be truly game-changing:
Faster data access: Analysts can retrieve and analyze data instantly, which saves valuable time and enhances preparation for upcoming matches. With easy access to insights, different departments from coaching teams, marketing, or communications can align their strategies or content based on data-driven narratives.
Empowered users: Players, coaches, and staff can effortlessly access insights through AI-driven queries, improving their ability to make data-informed decisions.
Enhanced strategy: Real-time data comparisons can enable precise, data-backed decisions, giving Team Liquid a competitive edge in one of the most dynamic gaming environments.
Proactive pattern recognition: The agents can uncover patterns in the large data sets that might not have been discovered in manual data analysis.
With agents in SAP’s AI copilot Joule, Team Liquid is preparing to unlock AI-driven analytics that will make critical insights instantly accessible. “Thanks to SAP’s AI copilot Joule and the upcoming Joule Agents, even non-technical users like our players and coaches will be able to ask for the data they need using natural language queries. What once took hours of manual work will become available instantly, driving our strategies and enhancing team performance,” said Haitham Algbory, head of Analytics & Data, League of Legends at Team Liquid. “This partnership is setting a new standard in esports, proving that AI and data integration are the future of competitive gaming.”
Team Liquid embraces AI-powered analytics and pushes the boundaries of innovation, proving that the future of esports is data-driven and that AI can play a crucial role. As competitive gaming continues to evolve, AI solutions like Joule will be critical in unlocking the full potential of esports teams and maintaining competitiveness.
In conversations with customers last month at SAP Sapphire & ASUG Annual Conference, one question seemed to reverberate throughout the corridors of Orlando.
Amid the ongoing stresses to global supply chains exerted by tariffs, geopolitical tensions and the proliferation of mandates in many countries regarding electronic invoicing and materials traceability, how can organizations best deploy cloud-based business networks and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to extend visibility, steady the flow of commerce, and mitigate third-party risk?
To instill resilience throughout mission-critical operations and those of their trading partners, businesses are turning increasingly to AI-powered cloud solutions to orchestrate complex, often volatile, supply chains. But the sheer volume of transactions and rigor of processing across vast troves of underlying data require that digital commerce be anchored within an infrastructure durable enough to withstand today’s pace of change yet supple enough to sustain tomorrow’s scope of innovation.
That is why some of the most significant innovation underway for SAP Business Network, the world’s largest business-to-business platform, involves its ongoing move to SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP), a shift with profound implications for SAP customers and their ability to counter disruption.
The cloud-native architecture of SAP BTP optimizes collaboration and innovation capabilities for organizations large and small, and the platform offers the scalability that SAP Business Network customers and their trading partners require to perform at their peak as business needs evolve. With its high-performing infrastructure, SAP BTP ensures seamless connectivity not only between SAP Business Network and other SAP solutions but across third-party systems as well.
Meanwhile, as differing regulatory regimes for electronic invoicing and materials traceability take effect in various countries, the built-in security and compliance features of SAP BTP ensure that businesses can manage multi-tier supply chains while adhering strictly to regional requirements. In addition, ongoing innovation to SAP Business Network takes full advantage of extensive AI capabilities in SAP BTP to automate complex workflows and securely augment applications with agentic capabilities.
For SAP Business Network, this means reinvesting on a regular basis in the architecture and infrastructure necessary to accelerate the speed of transactions, responsiveness to up-to-the-minute fluctuations in supply and demand, scalability to support business growth, streamlined integration across SAP and non-SAP systems, greater extensibility and deeper functionality, an intuitive user interface that reduces complexity and friction, and the most advanced, AI-augmented analytics capabilities available anywhere.
The ongoing transition for SAP Business Network to SAP BTP accomplishes all of the above. Over the long run, however, the change that customers are likely to appreciate most is the ease with which they can innovate alongside their trading partners and shape new business models through the insights harnessed by AI applications drawing upon sprawling repositories of accumulated day-to-day operational data.
While SAP Business Network upgrades its platform, it continues to innovate with several new capabilities announced at SAP Sapphire. To provide additional support for product compliance and quality control, SAP Business Network Supply Chain Collaboration is introducing these features:
Mass upload of certificate documents: Suppliers can now bulk upload quality and compliance certificates directly within the advance shipping notification (ASN) upload template at the line-item level, significantly reducing manual effort and improving data accuracy
Buyer-controlled document mandates: Buyers can specify which type of certifications are required for each purchase order, automatically enforcing compliance and quality standards while streamlining the process
These capabilities simplify the tracking of critical certifications, including sustainability credentials, carbon footprint documentation, and industry-specific certifications. Benefits include improved compliance, reduced delays, enhanced process adoption, and improved traceability, thus supporting regulatory compliance and sustainability goals throughout the supply chain.
Enhanced greenhouse gas emissions tracking: Integration of actual emissions data from carriers and logistics service providers into SAP Transportation Management, enabling planned versus actual analysis, marks a crucial step toward capturing and analyzing scope 3 emissions data from external sources
Extended ocean freight support: New ocean tendering and dispute handling functionalities within SAP Transportation Management are essential as the global container shipping market is forecast to grow at a 12 percent compound annual rate to around US$15.87 billion in 2028
To strengthen the ability of operators, manufacturers, and service providers to manage equipment and other physical assets via a digital network for resiliency and transparency, SAP Business Network Asset Collaboration is introducing these features:
Cloud-based ERP integration: Users can now initiate and manage ERP integration directly from the cloud, offering greater control over data synchronization
Enhanced material and model integration: Bi-directional integration of materials and models between SAP Business Network Asset Collaboration and ERP systems
Inbound integration for shared functional locations: Synchronizing shared functional locations to improve collaboration between operators and service providers
Asset administration shell (AAS) file upload for equipment creation: Automate equipment creation and associated document management through AAS file uploads, reducing manual data entry
Quality inspection checklists: By the integration of checklists into SAP Business Network Asset Collaboration, operators can share their inspection checklists and characteristics with service providers, who can in turn record the results for the operator
All of these enhancements are scheduled to be available by the end of 2025, offering businesses across industries the opportunity to transform their supply chain operations, drive sustainability initiatives, and attain new heights in efficiency, visibility, and competitive advantage.
Jörn Keller is executive vice president and chief product officer for SAP Business Network.
Get all the latest news and stories from SAP Sapphire in 2025
MADRID— SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) announced that Amer Sports, a global group of iconic sports and outdoor brands, including Arc’teryx, Salomon, Wilson, Peak Performance, Atomic and Armada, has embarked on the RISE with SAP journey to accelerate digital transformation.
Newly unveiled innovations and partnerships revolutionize the way work gets done
Recognizing the limitations of on-premises legacy systems, Amer Sports moved its Arc’teryx brand to the SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition, fashion and vertical business solution, establishing a scalable and future-ready digital core. Amer Sports wanted a solution that would offer cost predictability with a subscription model, regular technological upgrades and access to innovative technologies such as artificial intelligence, sustainability tracking and advanced analytics.
“SAP S/4HANA Cloud is the ideal entry point into our cloud enterprise resource planning era,” said Stefan Schubert, senior vice president and CIO of group IT, Amer Sports. “Moving to the cloud is more than just upgrading our technology landscape. For us, moving to a clean, standardized ERP environment unlocks the potential of future innovations and enables our brands to innovate faster and operate with greater agility.”
With operations in over 40 countries and more than 13,000 employees, Amer Sports is one of the first customers to implement the solution. As part of its broader transformation journey, the company already has kicked off the migration of its global system built on SAP ERP Central Component and is actively working with SAP on several AI use cases.
Additionally, Amer Sports is a beta client for the SAP Business Data Cloud solution, providing feedback on the recently launched software-as-a-service solution that unifies and governs diverse SAP data and smoothly connects with third-party data.
“Operating in an industry where supply chain agility, data insights, security and business continuity are mission critical, we are proud to be partnering to provide these advanced capabilities,” said Manos Raptopoulos, chief revenue officer for APAC, EMEA and MEE at SAP. “This enables a global leader like Amer Sports to innovate faster, optimize its operations and deliver exceptional experiences to its vast community of athletes and outdoor adventurers.”
MADRID— SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) today announced that CAF, a global leader in urban rail and bus systems, has successfully migrated to SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition.
Newly unveiled innovations and partnerships revolutionize the way work gets done
This milestone marks the first step in CAF’s digital transformation journey to a sustainable and efficient manufacturing process.
Moving from a heavily customized on-premises landscape to a standardized one in the cloud, Beasain, Spain-based CAF has smoothly integrated SAP solutions into core business functions including master data management, record to report, source to pay, sales and transport, engineering to stock (including manufacturing) and workforce management.
“CAF is now set for future success, as our new technology landscape allows us to better comply with business requirements in a complex and fast-changing market,” said Guillermo Apellániz, CAF’s digital transformation director. “Additionally, we’re now able to leverage other technologies or capabilities such as AI with a focus on company efficiency.”
Continuing on its digital transformation journey, CAF is looking to enhance the integration of its data with the SAP Business Data Cloud (SAP BDC) and SAP Datasphere solutions. This will reduce time to market of analytical requests, enabling CAF to make data-driven decisions more efficiently. CAF will also tap into the SAP Databricks capability in SAP BDC to help it manage data from its various product lines of buses and trains. This will open new possibilities for integrating business and product data, with the potential to leverage artificial intelligence.
“SAP solutions are empowering CAF to focus on sustainability by manufacturing high-speed trains, commuter trains, metros and buses with low or zero emissions,” said José Vallés, managing director of SAP Spain. “The complexity of CAF’s projects and demanding supply chains require robust and flexible solutions, which SAP is proud to provide.”
