Management has long been treated as the default marker of professional success. Moving into leadership is often seen as a sign of growth and the next logical step for high performers. But for many, this assumption that career progression must lead to people management can leave talented individual contributors feeling misaligned with their passions and strengths.
Take this common pattern: a brilliant software engineer gets promoted to team lead, only to find the new role demands completely different skills. Technical expertise doesn’t always translate into leadership success. Managing people requires mentoring, conflict resolution, and strategic decision-making—skills that aren’t always developed in technical roles.
When companies push top performers into management without proper support or alternatives, they risk losing great individual performers, like engineers or developers, and gaining ineffective managers. As a result, some employees may feel disconnected from the work they love, and stepping back can feel like failure rather than a strategic career choice.
SAP delivers value to every learner through a wide range of resources to fit all learning needs and skill levels
This default move to management can often be a symptom of an organization’s professional learning gaps, where high-performing individual contributors can plateau because structured learning paths for deepening expertise are missing. Plus, it can often be a moment where professional learning is missing and newly minted managers aren’t provided with the proper management training, which sets both individuals and teams up for struggle. Professional learning plays a critical role in this juncture of individuals’ careers, and being able to provide the appropriate learning in this moment is crucial.
The case for dual career paths
Not everyone is cut out for—or interested in—management. A 2024 survey by CoderPad found that 36% of tech workers have no interest in taking on managerial responsibilities. Some professionals thrive as individual contributors, while others excel as people managers, technical leads, or mentors. Recognizing this, forward-thinking companies offer a genuine choice: pursue a management career or deepen expertise as a specialist. This dual-ladder system allows growth that aligns with their strengths, interests, and motivation.
Retaining talent by valuing expertise
Providing both management and expert career paths does more than boost job satisfaction; it helps retain top talent. When employees see a future that matches their interests, they are more likely to stay, contribute at a higher level, and innovate. It also fosters a culture of continuous learning, where growth isn’t reserved for those who manage others.
Organizations don’t just need boardroom executives or “managers of managers”; they need top performers at every level. That means intentionally creating and rewarding non‑managerial opportunities—with clear progression, pay parity, and visibility.
Supporting employees in finding their path
Effective support for career choice goes beyond general promises of opportunity and structures on paper. Organizations need a clear distinction between management and expert tracks, defined criteria for progression, protected time for learning, and leaders equipped to coach learning and development across both tracks. It also calls for clarity on which competencies are evolving in both leadership and expert roles, ensuring development targets skills, not titles.
Turning that clarity into impact requires a learning infrastructure: curated curricula, mentoring, communities of practice, and visible milestones that normalize expert development. In the SAP context, SAP Learning Journeys and skill-validation programs provide organized resources that can support building and maintaining skills over time, enabling development at different depths and paces, independent of title changes. SAP Certifications serve as neutral milestones that can validate skills, increase transparency, and make expert progression comparable to managerial advancement.
Growth, simplification, and artificial intelligence (AI) are no longer optional. That is the unmistakable signal from SAP’s Global Business Priorities Study, which surveyed nearly 12,000 executives across 20 markets and 31 industries. The results capture both urgency and possibility.
Across the world, 95 percent of companies say growth is a priority for the year ahead. Their top focus areas—including expanding market presence, broadening distribution through partners, and scaling operations—speak to leaders’ determination to create value in a climate of uncertainty and change.
From SAP Connect: Deep research AI and role-based assistants, coupled with SAP Business Suite innovations, take efficiency to new heights
In my engagements with customers, I see this reality every day. Companies everywhere want to grow, but they want to grow with confidence. They are looking for partners who understand their unique challenges, who support them with their long-term ambitions, and who can help them keep pace with rapid change.
Technology is central to this ambition. Nearly all respondents in the study rank simplifying work and improving processes alongside growth. Here, artificial intelligence stands out. Nine in 10 organizations have already made generative or agent-based AI a priority, and more than 70 percent have some form of AI in use. While concerns about data quality and talent remain, the message is clear: AI has moved beyond experimentation into the mainstream of how companies operate and unleash value.
From Frankfurt to Dubai to Singapore: How regional differences shape opportunities and risks
Regional differences tell a powerful story. In Europe, AI adoption comes with caution. Large enterprises put compliance, privacy, and transparency first, while many mid-market firms are still piloting solutions. In Asia-Pacific, the pace is different. Mid-market companies there already report strong AI use above global averages, and growth expectations run high. For them, AI is a way to seize advantage quickly in a fast-moving market.
These contrasts show why cultural intelligence matters so much for global leaders. Whether in Frankfurt, Singapore, or Dubai, I see how local realities, regulations, and expectations shape both risks and opportunities. In Europe, energy costs and geopolitical uncertainty drive supply chain strategies. In Asia-Pacific, digital adoption and market dynamism set a different pace.
Sustainability is another area where nuance matters. European companies place it near the top of their priorities, tracking or slightly exceeding global benchmarks. Asia-Pacific firms value sustainability but often rank it lower than growth and speed to market. Each is weighing trade-offs in its own context, creating exciting opportunities for SAP to bring the most relevant technology, data, and practices to each region to help organizations achieve both economic and environmental goals.
The through-line in all of this is agility. Supply chain fragility, geopolitical conflict, inflation, and regulation continue to test even the best-run organizations. Technology can enable agility, but only if leaders embrace change themselves, rethinking processes, investing in skills, and building cultures of continuous learning and exploration. Security and ethical standards must also be the cornerstones of every AI conversation.
Turning AI potential into outcomes by centering value creation and integration
I believe this is a time for grounded optimism. The appetite for growth is real and the technology to achieve it is more advanced than ever. Innovation is accelerating at an extraordinary pace, with daily breakthroughs showcasing the expanding potential of AI.
There is a recent example that demonstrates AI’s ability to process multi-step tasks for over 30 hours. This achievement highlights not only the rapid evolution of AI, but also how increasingly accessible and capable these technologies are becoming.
However, as AI systems grow more autonomous and context-aware, organizations must recognize that true value doesn’t come from raw capability alone. To harness AI effectively, especially in enterprise environments, a consistent semantic layer is essential. It ensures alignment among data, tasks, and outcomes, enabling AI to reason reliably across systems and scale impact without losing coherence.
Companies must also move beyond simply adopting AI to actively testing and refining applications to gain a significant advantage. Equally important is a deliberate approach to managing the human element of a transformation, rooted in structured and human-centric change management.
Realizing AI’s true promise requires a fundamental shift in how people, applications, and data connect. Success relies on deeply connecting every part of an organization’s business, delivering end-to-end transformational value. A seamless, integrated suite provides insight and agility, whether responding to a problem or ensuring readiness when opportunity knocks.
This is where SAP Business Suite is a game changer, integrating applications, data, and AI in a virtuous cycle that delivers tangible business outcomes. At our inaugural SAP Connect event earlier in October, we showcased new applications, strategic data partnerships with Google Cloud and Databricks, and a new network of role-based AI assistants in Joule across every line of business.
Altogether, our continuous innovation marks the beginning of a new era powered by self-reinforcing AI, data, and applications. By keeping customer needs and value realization at the center and leading with innovation, businesses can not only navigate uncertainty, but build a more resilient, intelligent, and sustainable future.
Manos Raptopoulos is chief revenue officer of APAC, EMEA, and MEE, and a member of the Extended Board of SAP SE.
SAP Connect: Read news, stories, and coverage from the event
LESER GmbH & Co. KG is a leading German company specializing in designing and manufacturing safety valves. Founded in 1818 and headquartered in Hamburg, Germany, LESER is recognized as the largest manufacturer of safety valves in Europe and one of the global leaders in the industry.
The manufacturer was heavily reliant on manual documentation, which caused delays in accessing and updating critical data and documents, resulting in data quality and compliance issues.
To address these challenges and optimize asset management, LESER sought to establish seamless data integration through a unified single source of truth. After thorough research and careful comparison of options, the valve manufacturer successfully chose to implement digital twin technology with SAP Business Network Asset Collaboration to help optimize collaboration with customers.
Error-free asset data and streamlined collaboration with smart asset management
Relying on a manual documentation process was not only time-consuming but also prone to errors and delays. This was causing significant challenges in accessing and updating critical data and documents, leading to poor data quality and inefficiencies across the ecosystem. Recognizing the need for a modern solution on the operator side, LESER identified the importance of supporting customers with a centralized asset management system. LESER decided to digitize its asset management system by implementing a centralized, cloud-based platform. This platform enables LESER to seamlessly share the digital twin with customers, enhancing transparency and data sharing while continuing to manage internal processes separately.
By implementing the digital twin technology integrated with SAP Business Network Asset Collaboration, LESER created a one-to-one virtual replica of each piece of physical equipment and product, consolidating all relevant data and documentation into a single, accessible platform.
“The digital twin acts as a precise digital mirror of the physical safety valve, enabling our customers to receive complete, error-free, and up-to-date data about the safety valves,” Pierre Draheim, manager of Product Data Management at LESER, explains.
Plan, schedule, and execute maintenance and service operations better by integrating intelligent technologies from SAP
LESER provides digital twins both for new (greenfield) and existing (brownfield) safety valves, centralizing all relevant data and documents. Each valve is labeled with the globally-standardized ID link, or QR code, IEC 61406 that allows LESER’s customers to directly access and sync product-specific information with their asset management systems, enabling seamless data transfer, documentation compliance, and cost reductions of up to 95% for initial recording.
“By embracing digital innovation, we have empowered our customers to boost their operational efficiency,” Draheim says. He emphasizes that this not only helps LESER achieve substantial time-savings but also enables the company to focus on core activities and drive greater business growth: “It’s a win-win. Not only us, but also our customers achieve significant improvements in overall productivity.”
Reduce operational costs with real-time digital twin integration
Automating valve data sharing within SAP Business Network Asset Collaboration has made it much easier for LESER operators and service providers to coordinate maintenance, eliminating the need for manual data reconciliation. This automation cuts down on administrative work, helps avoid unnecessary downtime, and optimizes spare parts inventory, all of which contributes to a substantial decrease in operational costs.
By standardizing and digitizing data with a globally-standardized ID link, multiple service providers get instant access to accurate, up-to-date information.
“With the introduction of the digital twin and SAP Business Network Asset Collaboration, we can now automate valve management, making the entire process faster and more reliable,” Draheim says.
Ensure safety and quality through global and regulatory compliance
Making sure safety valves meet international standards at every step requires a high level of automation in managing product data. This is especially important for LESER. “Compliance is not just about meeting regulations, but about the ‘rules of the game’ in the industry, which enable an automated exchange of information across different IT systems and stakeholders,” Draheim says.
With such a significant market presence, LESER holds its suppliers and materials to very high standards, ensuring every part complies not only with global regulations but also local rules. This level of care is particularly essential for operators working in industries with strict safety and regulatory conditions.
Beyond setting these standards, LESER keeps detailed records to maintain full transparency and traceability across the supply chain. This integrated approach helps the ambitious company reduce the need for additional level approvals and supports safe, reliable plant operations all over the world. In return, its customers experience improved reliability and confidence in the products and services they receive, creating a positive impact throughout the entire value chain.
What happens in Vegas doesn’t have to stay in Vegas, especially when it’s about the future of enterprise technology. At last week’s SAP Connect event in Las Vegas, SAP Executive Board Member and Chief Operating Officer Sebastian Steinhaeuser took to the keynote stage on the final day to share how SAP is creating a new era of productivity, intelligence, and business outcomes for customers worldwide.
Deep research AI and role-based assistants, coupled with SAP Business Suite innovations, take efficiency to new heights
Before diving into the heart of the keynote, Steinhaeuser invited SAP solution area CMOs to deliver lightning-fast recaps of news from the various SAP Connect event tracks. In just under two minutes each, they covered finance, procurement, supply chain, HR, and customer experience. From autonomous accounting and next-gen procurement to AI-driven talent acquisition and smarter customer loyalty, the message was clear: SAP is innovating across every business function.
The real challenge: connecting priorities
As Steinhaeuser pointed out, “The reality is each business area has its own unique priorities and, of course, all-important urgent matters.” The real challenge is not just launching new features; it’s aligning processes, data, and teams to conquer uncertainty and achieve true customer focus. “Simply putting an [AI] agent on top of a broken process will solve nothing,” he said.
The flywheel: AI, data, and apps in motion at SAP
So, how does it all work together? Enter the “flywheel” model: the dynamic cycle of AI, data, and applications that drives synergy across the enterprise. This is not just a theoretical approach. Steinhaeuser showed how “SAP runs SAP” using the flywheel model.
First, he said, SAP uses “role-based AI assistants, powered by specialized agents, [to] support team members across all areas of SAP.”
Next comes data. Earlier this year, SAP became “customer zero” for SAP Business Data Cloud (SAP BDC), connecting all enterprise data in a single layer to generate faster and better insights across financial, workforce, and sales planning. “We’re excited to go live with the first set of intelligent apps, starting with People Intelligence,” he added.
Finally, the app layer: SAP has moved from SAP ERP Central Component (SAP ECC) to SAP Business Suite and SAP Cloud ERP, through RISE with SAP. “The SAP Business Suite is where data is created and where AI delivers impact,” Steinhaeuser said.
But processes continuously evolve with AI, he said, noting that business transformation management, powered by solutions like SAP Signavio and SAP LeanIX, helps SAP and its customers continually improve processes and architecture, with AI embedded everywhere. The company also uses WalkMe to ensure employees stay informed and engaged at every step.
“Driving SAP’s own transformation, I understand the challenges you face,” Steinhaeuser said. “I am convinced leveraging the flywheel of AI, data, and apps across the entire SAP Business Suite is how we win together.”
Embedded AI: tangible value, secure, and seamless
Brenda Bown, chief marketing officer of Business AI at SAP, took the stage to highlight how business AI is showing up in day-to-day work. “I’ve heard three consistent themes in conversations [with customers]: first, you want AI that can provide tangible value; second, that is secure and properly governed; and third, that works seamlessly across your teams and business. We’re here to deliver just that,” she said.
Joule is now embedded in use cases in trusted SAP applications and is making work faster and easier across the enterprise. “By the end of this year, we will have more than 400 of these AI use cases,” Bown said. Joule Agents automate tasks across departments, and the new agent builder in Joule Studio (generally available in December) helps customers extend, build, or customize their own agents. SAP LeanIX AI Agent Hub and agent mining capabilities in SAP Signavio provide governance and transparency for AI agents.
Bown noted that customers like Matur Fompack are using Joule in SAP SuccessFactors to hire faster and improve career development. “The results are phenomenal: a 48 percent reduction in HR process execution time and 40 percent faster employee development and career planning, and, most importantly, a better employee and candidate experience,” she said.
For processes that require multi-step workflows and nuanced decisions, SAP introduced a new generation of role-based AI assistants. “They know your role in the organization, because they are role and context aware,” Bown said. These assistants tap into the right agents for the job, removing any guesswork and helping humans unlock new levels of insight and productivity.
She also showcased how agents collaborate across departments, automate workflows, and even extend SAP’s business logic to autonomous devices like robots. Early pilots with partners like NEURA Robotics are already showing Joule Agents planning and executing real work in the real world.
Data and intelligent applications: unified and actionable
Data is only valuable when it is actionable. Irfan Khan, president and chief product officer for SAP Data and Analytics, highlighted SAP BDC, which unifies enterprise data and powers intelligent applications. “SAP BDC offers the most powerful foundation for connecting your existing data, building next-generation applications, and the ability to foster and deploy reliable AI,” he said. And the new SAP Business Data Cloud Connect solution enables secure, bi-directional data sharing with partners like Databricks and Google Cloud.
Intelligent applications bridge the gap between people and AI. They support smarter decisions and collaboration. “These applications learn from your data and include business simulations to support every business leader with smarter decisions,” Khan explained. “If we don’t have a reliable data foundation built around trust, having reliable and resilient data, it becomes very debatable whether or not AI will succeed.”
From insight to action: transformation in practice
How do organizations turn strategy into action? Michael Ameling, president of SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP), demonstrated how SAP Business Suite helps drive innovation by uniting core applications, data, and AI, all powered by SAP BTP and Business Transformation Management solutions. “Let’s say you want to understand and improve a business process,” he said. “SAP Signavio lets you dive deep and understand every detail, and can suggest concrete actions. Then, use those insights to improve the process in SAP Build by automating processes and building your own agents.”
He demonstrated how SAP BTP and the Business Transformation Management portfolio can help organizations connect systems, gain visibility, and automate processes. Tools including SAP Signavio, SAP Build, and SAP Integration Suite are helping customers like Blue Diamond Growers streamline operations and accelerate transformation.
Services and support: accelerating innovation and realizing value
SAP’s Anja Schneider, SVP and global head of Premium Engagement and Advisory, wrapped up this segment of the keynote by focusing on how the company’s services and support teams help customers realize the full value of their SAP investments.
“We’re with you every step, like a personal trainer,” she said, highlighting how SAP’s suite methodology, integrated tools like WalkMe and SAP Cloud ALM, and expert guidance help customers realize the full value of their SAP investments. She pointed to IBM’s transformation project as proof: working with SAP MaxAttention teams and a clean core approach, upgrades went smoothly with low incidents for more than 150,000 users across 175 geographies.
Customer perspective: Southern California Edison’s journey
Real-world impact matters. Southern California Edison (SCE) SVP and CIO Todd Inlander shared how the utility company’s transformation journey with SAP is helping modernize its foundational systems and optimize back-office processes. Facing unprecedented demand and environmental challenges, the company is leveraging SAP solutions, including SAP Business AI capabilities, to transform its operations.
“We need to adhere to our mission: to deploy safe, reliable, affordable power,” he said. “We can’t do that by doing things the way we’ve always done. We have to incorporate SAP. We’re using it to transform the way we work in our environment. We need to leverage AI because we don’t have enough humans to do all the work. We have to scale.”
As SCE deploys SAP Business Suite over the next year, it’s focusing on keeping a clean core and reducing customizations. “When we implemented ECC 15 years ago, about 66 percent of our enhancements were never used. We’re learning from that experience,” Inlander said. He went on to note that SCE will use the SAP deployment time to continue to transform its back-office operations. “We’ll be integrating Joule and other AI solutions because doing things the way we’ve always done them and expecting a different outcome is the definition of insanity.”
Steinhaeuser closed the keynote with a look to the future: “We’ve made great progress across all lines of business to deliver a unique experience for you—with AI becoming your personal assistant, powered by data that defies boundaries and applications that take insight to action. The cross-capabilities you just saw now make the flywheel spin.”
The future is here, and is powered by the synergy of AI, data, and applications. Every business can turn innovation into impact.
SAP Connect: Read news, stories, and coverage from the event
In today’s world of constant change, HR leaders are being asked to do more than ever before: anticipate skills shifts, personalize the employee experience, and navigate complex regulations—all while staying agile in the face of accelerating business transformation.
Unprecedented possibilities: Discover how new SAP SuccessFactors innovations power people and business connection
SAP SuccessFactorsHCMgives organizations the tools to lead with confidence. Part of the SAP Business Suite, SAP SuccessFactors brings together global core HR, AI-driven insights, and a unified skills foundation to connect people and processes, close skills gaps, simplify compliance, and build a workforce ready for what’s next.
With the second half 2025 (2H 2025) product release, we’re excited to introduce hundreds of new features and enhancements in SAP SuccessFactors, many enabled by AI. Together, these innovations help HR teams, business leaders, and employees work smarter, move faster, and stay future-ready.
Drive better people and business decisions
Data about people, skills, performance, and business outcomes exists everywhere, but without a clear view, it’s difficult to act. People Intelligence in SAP Business Data Cloud, now generally available, is designed to help organizations make better workforce decisions by unifying SAP and third-party data. Through intuitive dashboards, AI-assisted insights powered by Joule, and hundreds of HR metrics, leaders can now move from insights to action with unprecedented speed.
With pre-built use cases spanning critical areas like skills, compensation, recruiting, learning, performance, and succession, People Intelligence makes it easier to uncover trends, identify opportunities, and take action. By bringing together clean, centralized HR data and powerful AI, it equips HR and business leaders with the intelligence they need to drive meaningful workforce transformation.
Build a future-ready workforce
To stay competitive, organizations must continuously evolve alongside their people. This release introduces new innovations that align skills, performance, and development with future business needs.
We are excited that the Performance and Goals Agentin SAP SuccessFactors is now available. This agent empowers managers to lead consistent, high-impact performance conversations by analyzing employee data, such as performance goals, activities and achievements, and continuous feedback, to create tailored conversation prompts for each employee. Using Joule, managers receive AI-guided insights like goal progress summaries, key accomplishments, growth focus areas, and development recommendations. Users can ask follow-up questions to dive deeper into any of these areas.
Additionally, business rules integration in performance management support consistent and transparent performance reviews by automating feedback prompts and actions based on predefined conditions, such as dynamically exposing a comment field only when a rating condition is met.
Succession planning is also getting a boost with skills-based successor recommendations in SAP SuccessFactors Career and Talent Development,which analyzes skills, proficiency levels, and internal work experiences captured in employee growth portfolios to recommend potential successors who might have been overlooked using traditional metrics. And with the new person-based modelfor talent management, organizations can drive smarter talent decisions, faster reskilling, and greater workforce agility by unifying learning and talent data in a person-based view that follows employees across changing roles, teams, and assignments.
Enable agile and compliant HR
As regulations evolve and business needs shift, HR must stay both agile and compliant. This release introduces new capabilities to help teams adapt quickly while ensuring accuracy and trust.
The new SAP SuccessFactors Workforce Schedulingsolution,available to early adopters in January 2026, supports optimized shift planning in manufacturing and other production industries by aligning workforce skills and staffing levels with operational demand. Geofencing in SAP SuccessFactors Time Tracking helps prevent fraud and ensure compliance by defining work site locations and ranges to govern where employees can clock in and out. SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central simplifies U.S. leave management by connecting with FMLA service providers to automate leave deductions and improve tracking accuracy.
Across the suite, our updated home page delivers a more intuitive and personalized experience for users with streamlined navigation, targeted communications, and real-time insights across desktop and mobile.
Extend applications to easily adapt
As workforce expectations and business priorities evolve, flexibility is key. This release delivers new capabilities to help seamlessly connect and optimize HR processes, maximizing investments while supporting the changing needs of people and the organization.
SAP SuccessFactors Work Zone is now enhanced by Joule and generative AI to deliver faster access to information, improved self-service, and more informed decision-making. Joule streamlines tasks with role-based self-service, workflow automation, and real-time insights, while generative AI simplifies feedback, coaching, and goal updates with context-aware insights. Employees can also quickly find company-specific knowledge through Joule for accurate, relevant information when they need it.
Lead the future of HR
With the 2H 2025 release, SAP SuccessFactors HCM helps HR leaders navigate complexity with ease. By uniting global HR, AI-driven insights, and a unified skills foundation, organizations can make smarter decisions, develop future-ready talent, and stay agile in a rapidly changing world.
Today’s complex business environment is marked by financial volatility, supply chain disruptions, and rapidly evolving compliance landscapes. With faster and well-informed decisions, these challenges can be turned into strategic opportunities.
SAP Cloud ERP Private: A tailored-to-fit cloud ERP that adapts to your organization’s unique transformation
As the pace of innovation accelerates, enterprises must not only become more agile, but also modernize their technology foundations to keep pace—simplifying landscapes, embracing cloud architectures, and ensuring continuous access to the latest capabilities.
With AI, enterprises face widening skill gaps that challenge their ability to drive meaningful business transformation. This is where SAP stands at the forefront as a trusted partner, empowering businesses with process- and context-aware AI, underpinned by semantically rich and unified data. Together, these elements form a robust foundation for outcome-driven and sustainable business transformation.
With the 2025 release of SAP Cloud ERP Private, we’re translating this vision into action. The release delivers innovations that matter most to our customers, from a strengthened data foundation to embedded AI and intelligent agents that enhance how work gets done. It enables enterprises to run smarter, modernize faster, and realize the full potential of applications with data and AI across end-to-end business processes.
Interconnected applications as the core foundation
A business suite that delivers best-in-class capabilities with a harmonized data model is essential in the age of AI. ERP continues to evolve to meet today’s industry needs, strengthening our customers’ ability to compete and grow with confidence. There are a number of such innovations, including:
Supply chain: Manufacturing customers achieve faster, more reliable order fulfillment through intelligent automation that links order promising with logistics execution. The enhanced advanced available-to-promise (ATP) capability reduces manual effort and optimizes inventory use.
Finance: For multinational enterprises, universal parallel accounting and value chain analysis provide real-time profitability insight and automate intercompany flows, helping finance leaders steer performance proactively and improve transparency.
Asset management: Maintenance planners improve equipment reliability and reduce downtime through enhanced visibility into open preventive and corrective maintenance requirements. Additional insights into maintenance orders and planning buckets enable proactive scheduling and optimized resource use.
Operations: Organizations improve efficiency, transparency, and compliance across entities through the new multistage intercompany sales and stock transfer process. It automates critical steps, enhances visibility, and streamlines execution, enabling faster, more reliable, and scalable supply chain operations.
Data that fuels AI’s transformative power
Trusted, connected, and context-rich data turns AI’s potential into measurable results. When organizations can rely on consistent high-quality data, they gain the confidence to act on insights that drive efficiency and growth.
The semantically rich data foundation within SAP Cloud ERP provides this advantage, serving as the platform for building insights and driving actions. SAP Business Data Cloud unifies SAP and third-party data, delivering insights through pre-built data products and intelligent applications.
With the 2025 release, more than 200 pre-delivered data products are available out of the box, preserving business context and metadata so leaders act on insights, not raw extracts. The result is an AI-ready foundation of trusted, compliant, reusable data assets that accelerates decision-making. Looking ahead, we are developing more intelligent applications through Cloud ERP Intelligence Private that leverage these data products across every business function, expanding the reach and impact of data-driven intelligence.
AI in and across your key business processes
AI is becoming every enterprise’s most powerful assistant, helping people work smarter, make faster decisions, and achieve better and informed outcomes. Embedded in core processes, it provides contextual guidance, intelligent recommendations and reasoning, and automation where it matters most.
With the 2025 release of SAP Cloud ERP Private, we’re embedding AI across key end-to-end business processes. Built on a unified data and application foundation, our AI innovations bring precision, predictability, trust, and security to every decision—across finance, supply chain, manufacturing, and service.
At the center is Joule, now evolving into a role-aware assistant, that tailors insights and actions to each user’s responsibilities. It ensures every interaction is relevant, governed, and grounded in business context, helping teams act with clarity and confidence. We are building a growing library of specialized Joule Agents. Here are a few examples:
Accounts Receivable Agent: Improves liquidity by accelerating collections, reducing overdue invoices, and recommending next-best actions
Dispute Management Agent: Shortens resolution cycles by identifying inconsistencies, proposing responses for quick approval, and executing follow-ups
Maintenance Planner Agent: Builds on enhanced maintenance insights to boost uptime by recommending maintenance events and coordinating schedules based on integrated and interconnected data across production planning and procurement
Grounded in SAP’s unified data and process model, these agents connect workflows across functions and roles, enabling organizations to act faster, operate smarter, and scale intelligence across the enterprise.
Faster upgrades, faster value
The SAP Cloud ERP Private 2025 release is fully compatible with previous scopes, eliminating multi-step upgrades. Customers can move to the latest version with minimal effort and immediately benefit from advances in applications, data, and AI. With near-zero-downtime upgrades and automated updates, maintenance windows are shorter, delivering faster adoption, lower disruption, and quicker time to value.
Looking ahead together
We continue to co-innovate closely with our strategic and beta customers to turn these innovations into business reality. Our commitment extends beyond technology delivery: we guide every step of modernization, AI adoption, and process transformation.
If you’re ready to be an early adopter, join us to co-innovate, learn, and shape the future together, unlocking new ways of working and sustainable outcomes.
This week at SAP Connect, we introduced the next wave of business AI innovations to empower enterprises. We unveiled our newest Joule Agents, the concept of role-based AI assistants, and new embedded intelligence throughout SAP Business Suite.
Deep research AI and role-based assistants, coupled with SAP Business Suite innovations, take efficiency to new heights
To better understand the opportunity to produce returns on investment from AI, SAP commissioned new global research that was shared at SAP Connect. In partnership with Oxford Economics, we surveyed 1,600 executives in medium and large enterprises across eight countries.
We found that today, on average, organizations are benefiting from a 16 percent return on AI investments—a number they expect to nearly double within two years. In addition to impressive financial returns:
94% of business leaders say AI is improving innovation within their organizations
87% say AI is improving customer engagement
78% believe AI agents have the potential to transform their business operations
New deep research and AI assistants in Jouleexpand what is possible
These innovations were engineered based on what our customers tell us they need: to act quickly, simplify complexity, and unlock better, data-driven decisions across the lines of business and processes that matter. But most of all, our customers need AI that drives significant, measurable business outcomes.
To help every organization accelerate returns on investment from AI, at SAP Connect we announced powerful new capabilities for Joule, which makes business data and the entire SAP Business Suite immediately accessible through the power of a simple conversation. And because Joule is grounded in your company’s data, it understands context and delivers insights that are specific, actionable, and relevant to your business.
Deep research in Joule, announced at SAP Connect, is a new capability expands what people can do within the Joule interface. It goes beyond quick answers to deliver strategic analysis, reporting, and synthesis in a single, connected experience. It brings together internal SAP data and external intelligence so people can ask complex questions and receive comprehensive research and recommendations—without ever leaving Joule. The deep research capability in Joule will be available in beta this December.
We also unveiled the new concept of role-based AI assistants in Joule, built to partner with people in their specific roles. These assistants connect to the right Joule Agents for the job, removing guesswork so teams can unlock new levels of productivity and insight. Whether it’s a finance leader forecasting working capital, a recruiter evaluating headcount needs, or a planner adjusting inventory, AI assistants surface the right intelligence, at the right time, in the right context. In the background, Joule Agents get work done for you.
These innovations mark the next chapter in how people interact with enterprise systems, helping every role across an organization seamlessly move from inquiry to insight to action.
New Joule Agents autonomously get work done
To help enterprises further accelerate business results, we introduced 14 new Joule Agents at SAP Connect. They help people coordinate, decide, and execute tasks with greater precision. Joule Agents are embedded across core business processes in finance, HR, procurement, and supply chain, in a way that only SAP—with our deep expertise in these functions—can deliver.
For example, rather than navigating multiple systems or running countless manual checks to release an order, a production manager—a key role in the supply chain function—will be able to turn to our Production Planning and Operations Agent, planned for general availability in the Q1 2026. They can simply ask Joule to do it, safely and in real time. The agent will validate and release orders when conditions are met, accelerating production start times and shortening order-to-delivery cycles.
And starting December 2025, with the general availability of Joule Studio, now in beta release, customers will be able to create and deploy custom Joule skills and Joule Agents tailored to their unique business needs. Agent builder in Joule Studio is your command center for designing, building, and deploying enterprise-ready custom Joule Agents using the same powerful SAP technologies—including SAP Knowledge Graph for deep business context, SAP Business Data Cloud for comprehensive data access across SAP and non-SAP sources, and SAP’s central identity and authorization services to ensure responsible agent behavior. These capabilities empower every enterprise to extend, customize, and personalize SAP Business AI solutions.
New embedded intelligence across SAP applications
To help our customers move faster and make better decisions where work happens, we continue to bring intelligence directly into the applications they rely on every day. These embedded capabilities extend the same AI-driven guidance that powers Joule Agents into core SAP solutions, enhancing user workflows with context, clarity, and automation. We will have more than 400 of these AI use cases by the end of the year.
For example, in SAP Engagement Cloud, starting in February 2026, AI will orchestrate personalized interactions across HR, marketing, and service, bringing harmonized data, relevant context, and better business outcomes into every engagement. In the SAP Supply Chain Orchestrationsolution, planned for general release in the first half of 2026, AI will predict shortfalls and fulfillment risks, helping planners simulate and respond with speed and precision.
Additionally, the rebuilt SAP Ariba source-to-pay suite, arriving in February 2026, brings a modern, cloud-native experience to every stage of procurement. Embedded AI guides people with intelligent recommendations, accelerates contract reviews, and surfaces supplier insights in real time. By simplifying sourcing decisions and improving compliance, it helps procurement teams strengthen supplier relationships and capture more value, faster.
Governing AI with visibility and control
As our customers continue to adopt these AI innovations embedded across their functions, we know they need transparency into how it operates, what it influences, and the value it creates. That is why we provide tools to give them the visibility they need to deploy AI with confidence and scale it responsibly.
SAP LeanIX AI Agent Hub helps CIOs and business leaders see their entire AI agents landscape at a glance. From one dashboard, they can understand where agents are deployed, what processes they touch, and how agents are performing. This allows teams to evaluate effectiveness, identify redundancies, and manage AI like any other enterprise asset: aligned to outcomes, governed by policy, and continuously optimized.
Complementing that, agent mining in SAP Signavio gives organizations a powerful way to analyze how AI contributes to process performance. It reveals how AI agents decide and act, flags bottlenecks and non-compliance, and uncovers where automation adds value and how to fine-tune it for efficiency and impact. Together, these tools bring clarity to what has often been a black box: transforming governance from reactive oversight into proactive optimization.
What’s next for business AI
At SAP Connect, we also shared a view into what’s coming and how our innovations will continue to redefine enterprise productivity. For example, we’re developing an outcome-driven user interface that adapts to context in real time. Instead of navigating menus or searching for data, people will simply express what they want to achieve, and the system will guide them through the right actions, insights, and tools.
We’re also extending Joule Agents beyond software into the physical world—connecting your company’s business intelligence to robotics and industrial systems. This opens a new frontier for automation, combining state of the art electronics that utilize physical AI tools, such as computer vision and collision detection, with AI agents capable of reasoning through complex goals and planning multi-step workflows. Reserve your place at SAP TechEd this November to learn more.
Ready to start your AI journey?
We know AI is top of mind for most business leaders today. In fact, another finding from the research we commissioned with Oxford Economics is that 41 percent of tasks in global businesses will be supported by AI within two years—up from 25 percent today.
As you continue to explore what is possible with business AI, we’ll keep innovating to deliver systems that are intelligent by design, trusted in operation, and, most important, measurable in their impact.
For us, it’s all about what you hope to achieve. We’re proud to partner with you on your AI journey. If you’re ready to take the next step, here are three things you can do right now:
Led by SAP Executive Board Member Muhammad Alam, in charge of SAP Product & Engineering, SAP executives announced a string of business AI innovations, including role-aware Joule assistants, during the kickoff keynote at the inaugural SAP Connect event in Las Vegas this week.
Deep research AI and role-based assistants, coupled with SAP Business Suite innovations, take efficiency to new heights
Against the backdrop of the event theme—”Connect Everything, Achieve Anything: Agents, Data, and the Business Suite”—they set out SAP’s vision for how SAP Business Suite, which combines AI, data, and applications, can transform enterprises and deliver unprecedented business value to customers despite global macroeconomic uncertainties.
Unique times
“We are living in very unique times,” Alam said at the start of the keynote. “Unique in terms of the unpredictability we face from a geopolitical and macroeconomic perspective, and also unique in terms of the advancement in AI and the potential that carries for all of us.”
He added, “Even the most significant challenges can be responded to, navigated, and—when approached the right way—turned into opportunities. And that’s exactly where SAP comes in. Because the best way to face uncertainty is with confidence that you can see what’s happening across your business and your network.”
An Economist Impact study sponsored by SAP found that 89% of procurement professionals feel confident in their ability to leverage AI to drive efficiency and productivity. This finding highlights the urgency of the challenge and the optimism around AI’s potential to strengthen resilience.
Deep research AI and role-based assistants, coupled with SAP Business Suite innovations, take efficiency to new heights
In times of uncertainty, spend is one of the levers companies can actively control. Leaders are expected to deliver not only savings, but also resilience, sustainability, and risk-aware processes.
At SAP Connect, we introduced several new AI capabilities to bring more automation, deeper integration, and smarter insights across our spend management solutions. These innovations are focused on improving outcomes: reducing risk, strengthening supply chains, increasing productivity, and freeing people to focus on higher-value work. They ensure spend continues to fulfill its elevated role as a driver of business growth and resilience while helping customers stay ahead of evolving demands.
Next-gen SAP Ariba brings deeper AI integrations and new AI assistants in Joule
SAP is rolling out the next generation of SAP Ariba solutions for source-to-pay to automate the power of procurement, improve cost savings, ensure compliance, and build supply chain resilience. Next-gen SAP Ariba is the world’s most modern source-to-pay solution designed to power the future of procurement.
The first AI-native source-to-pay suite redefines what is possible today and sets the course for the future. With businesses facing ever-present change, our customers can take advantage of a solution that’s built to endure — intelligent, integrated, and scalable. The capabilities delivered as part of next-gen SAP Ariba will empower businesses to tackle today’s challenges and excel in the future.
Next-gen SAP Ariba is built on SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP), and has a completely redesigned user experience, embedded analytics, and seamless integration with SAP Cloud ERP public and private applications.
The advanced capabilities and benefits of next-gen SAP Ariba solutions offer the following:
Accelerated value realization: Faster adoption with intuitive interfaces and guided workflows
Deeper insights: Actionable analytics that translate into tangible savings and operational improvements
Empowered teams: A more productive experience for procurement professionals
Next-gen SAP Ariba capabilities will be rolled out starting in Q1 2026.
SAP also introduced new agentic and generative AI capabilities across the SAP Ariba suite to help organizations optimize productivity and decision-making. Planned for release in Q1 2026, a new Joule Agent for bid analysis automatically compares supplier bid data, including total cost, to give procurement teams insight and recommendations for award decisions.
SAP also added three AI features to the SAP Ariba procurement portfolio:
AI supplier-response summary will use Joule to help review, analyze, and summarize supplier responses to questionnaires, helping procurement specialists make more informed decisions. This is planned to be generally available in Q1 2026.
Joule for simplified invoice creation will help employees outside accounts payable to easily submit invoices from SAP Cloud ERP for processing with minimal input. The feature will be generally available in Q4 2025.
Intelligent contracting will use Joule to automatically extract key information, generate summaries, and search historical contracts for discrepancies and compliance issues. This feature will be generally available in Q4 2025.
As part of the broader SAP Ariba portfolio, SAP Ariba Intake Management is now globally available. The solution provides a single-entry point for all procurement requests to simplify intake, improve compliance, and give employees full visibility into status updates. With Joule, users can easily submit requests or follow guided steps, while the system orchestrates processes across SAP and non-SAP systems.
New AI enhancements in SAP Fieldglass connect the right external talent to the right roles
New AI enhancements to the SAP Fieldglass portfolio make it easier to match potential external workers with available positions by automatically analyzing role descriptions to determine the skills required for each position.
The new skills-based hiring feature automatically analyzes role descriptions to determine the skills required for each position, reducing the time to source potential candidates by up to 50 percent. By accelerating candidate matching, organizations can count on a faster, more cohesive, and efficient hiring process.
This feature is generally available and works in conjunction with existing AI features, including resume analysis and job description creation.
SAP Concur and American Express Global Business Travel make business travel easier, smarter and more impactful for organizations everywhere
SAP Concur announced a strategic alliance with American Express Global Business Travel (Amex GBT). Complete by SAP Concur and Amex GBT is a co-developed solution that will combine booking, servicing, payments, and expensing into one experience with AI at its core. The solution will benefit from SAP Concur and Amex GBT technology and business travel expertise. Complete customers will also have access to Amex GBT’s unmatched marketplace, software, and services via Complete, offering greater incentives and cost savings.
Smarter AI for travel and expense management in SAP Concur
We also introduced new AI capabilities for SAP Concur that will streamline reporting, strengthen fraud prevention, and simplify travel planning, helping organizations better control costs while improving the employee experience.
These innovations include:
The Receipt Analysis Agent, a newly embedded Joule Agent in ExpenseIt, will go beyond basic receipt scanning, automatically completing missing information, determining expense types, and verifying vendor details, even for unknown vendors, to deliver accurate results without iterative learning. General availability for these features is expected for Q4 2025.
Verify, the automated expense-audit service from SAP Concur now features an AI-generated receipt checker that flags receipts likely created by AI or online generators, helping auditors stop fraudulent claims. The service is currently generally available.
A new pre-spend planner tool uses generative AI to estimate trip budgets based on policies and itineraries, while also providing relevant travel advisories to keep travelers informed. General availability is planned for early 2026 and Concur Expense customers can take advantage of the pre-spend planner at no extra cost. It will be available to Concur Travel customers later in the first half of 2026
Partnerships and integrations
SAP Concur has enhanced its integration with Uber for Business to further automate how ride and meal expenses are processed, providing better visibility to executives and business users. Ride and meal receipts are automatically routed into Concur Expense, with detailed tax, tip, and itemization data, resulting in cleaner data, fewer manual corrections, and faster reimbursement.
Looking ahead
SAP’s latest innovations across procurement, external workforce, and travel and expense help customers achieve positive outcomes such as cost savings, reducing risk, strengthening supply chains, creating value, improving productivity, and freeing people up to do higher-value work.
Etosha Thurman is chief marketing officer for SAP Finance and Spend Management.
SAP Connect: Read the latest news, stories, and coverage from the event
Finance professionals have proven their resilience through volatility, from shifting interest rates to evolving regulatory landscapes, putting intense pressure on leaders to make faster and smarter decisions.
Deep research AI and role-based assistants, coupled with SAP Business Suite innovations, take efficiency to new heights
However, the pace of change has made traditional approaches, like best-of-breed point solutions, no longer sufficient to help finance teams keep up.
That is why the future of finance technology should act as an orchestra, not disjointed soloists.
Finance teams require a unified experience where applications, data, and AI work seamlessly together. With SAP Business Suite, these elements come together as one orchestra, enabling finance to operate in harmony and deliver outcomes that point solutions alone cannot achieve. This means not only faster close and stronger liquidity, but also tighter compliance and credible plans that hold up under change.
To strengthen collaboration across finance and bring innovation to the CFO’s office, SAP unveiled Joule’s next stage as the AI force at the center of SAP Business Suite’s value creation. A new generation of role-aware assistants in Joule are designed to partner with people in their specific business roles by tapping into the right agents behind the scenes for the job. For finance professionals, SAP introduced the next round of automation support using agentic AI.
SAP is embedding AI-powered reasoning directly into finance processes to automate routine work and elevate the strategic role of finance with the following new agents:
The Accruals Agent will calculate accruals and deferrals based on system data and present the accountant with a proposal for review, along with a detailed explanation of the calculation logic.
The Cash Management Agent will automate daily bank statement reconciliation tasks and recommend opportunities for optimization.
The International Trade Classification Agent will reason over product characteristics and trade regulations and act to classify goods for international shipping, recommending customs tariff numbers and commodity codes
By bringing automation to critical but repetitive finance processes, these agents underscore SAP’s commitment to equipping the office of the CFO with AI-driven innovation that strengthens resilience in an increasingly complex business environment.
Finance as the conductor of the enterprise
The role of the CFO has expanded far beyond closing the books or reporting quarterly earnings. Today, finance teams are expected to bring together data, processes, and people from the entire business to enable seamless collaboration.
With SAP’s AI-first, suite-first approach, applications and data flow seamlessly, allowing finance leaders to coordinate business operations with confidence. This unified foundation ensures that insights are not siloed, but instead shared across the enterprise, enabling faster and smarter decisions.
Take working capital management, one of the biggest pressure points for finance leaders: A recent Economist Impact survey of 480 CFOs found confidence levels were strong in almost all areas, including revenue, profit, and customer retention, but only 36 percent felt confident in their ability to achieve working capital targets. SAP Business Suite can help organizations meet their targets by automating manual work and enabling actionable decisions — all by leveraging dynamic, autonomous, and action-oriented solutions in SAP Business Suite.
When an organization manages incoming receivables, outgoing payables, as well as cash and inventory within SAP, that connected experience creates data that provides real-time visibility into liquidity through SAP Business Data Cloud. That data fuels SAP Business AI to analyze situations, recommend actions, and even resolve issues like disputed invoices automatically, which would otherwise slow the cash collection process. And with the integration of Joule and intelligent agents, SAP Business AI not only automates, it senses, reasons, orchestrates, and acts — turning insights into outcomes that free capacity and accelerate the business.
As AI agents take on more of the behind-the-scenes work, finance professionals can step fully into their role as the conductor of the enterprise. They can guide strategy with foresight, aligning every function in harmony and shaping outcomes that extend far beyond revenue or cost goals.
CFOs and their teams can then move beyond reactive decision-making toward shaping strategy in real time. This will position their office as a driver of growth, resilience, and innovation.
Looking ahead
SAP is laying the foundation for a new era of autonomous finance, where routine processes are automated, insights are delivered in real time, and finance teams are empowered to focus on strategy and growth.
These innovations mark just the beginning of SAP’s commitment to helping businesses navigate an increasingly complex financial landscape with agility, intelligence, and confidence.
Lawrence Martin is chief product officer and head of Public Cloud Engineering at SAP. David Imbert is head of Finance Product Marketing at SAP.
SAP Connect: Read the latest news, stories, and coverage from the event
