The prowess of generative AI with text has brought immense value — from writing emails and answering questions to generating wedding speeches. AI models trained to deal with text, like large language models (LLMs), have powered this value and are only getting better at natural language.

However, there are challenges when we move beyond text to apply these models to structured, tabular data, which is essential for enterprise business operations. This imbalance comes partly because of the availability of training data. Text used to train models is plentiful, often consisting of text scraped from the internet, whereas tabular data, especially data with multiple linked tables, is scarce.

To bring AI advancements to the enterprise sector, researchers working on training and benchmarking the performance of these models in an enterprise setting need realistic tabular data. That’s why SAP developed “Sales Autocompletion Linked Business Tables” (SALT), a curated dataset that includes anonymized data from a customer’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.

SALT is specifically designed to support researchers working on AI models for real-world business contexts and can be accessed on Hugging Face and GitHub.

Challenges of getting and working with enterprise data

Providing the research community with realistic enterprise data like SALT has been challenging. Data privacy, confidentiality, and commercial interests make obtaining large, clean, high-quality enterprise datasets difficult for training models and benchmarking them for specific use cases. This means there is a growing gap between what researchers are working on and what actual enterprise data looks like.

In addition to the problem of availability, enterprise data is complex. First, business data is usually stored in multiple interconnected tables. For example, a sales order entry may be linked to numerous tables, such as customer IDs connected to a supplier table containing address information. Second, tables are inherently heterogeneous in the data type they can contain. One field may be text, while the other contains numerical or categorical values. Finally, business data frequently shows significant column imbalances, meaning that, for example, a specific product category makes up 90 percent of all sales orders while others are rarely used.

The best way to help researchers develop enterprise models for these challenges is to provide accurate enterprise data.

SALT dataset

Accurate enterprise data is a bottleneck in AI research. The SALT dataset alleviates this bottleneck by providing the research community with the first real ERP dataset. It uses actual industry data collected by an ERP system that records sales orders. It has been minimally processed to protect privacy.

“There is a gap between academia and industry in terms of data. It cannot be closed easily because of privacy,” says Tassilo Klein, one of the SAP researchers behind the dataset. “But we want to enable the research community to work on real problems, not just simulated problems.”

ERP systems help organizations manage core business operations like finance and spending. With millions of entries and extensive, interconnected relational tables focused on sales, the SALT dataset replicates customer interactions in an ERP system. SALT’s realistic enterprise data means it is a perfect basis for helping models understand the characteristics of business data and validate their performance through benchmarking. It also should help researchers develop better foundation models for linked business data.

Getting this right will advance enterprise automation, as many enterprise business processes are heavily centered around data in structured tabular formats. Even though this data plays a crucial role in enterprise day-to-day activities, the generative AI revolution has yet to tap into them.

“SALT is a first step to providing researchers with authentic representative industry data that gives a glimpse into actual enterprise data; for now, we are starting with just one customer and use case,” shares Johannes Hoffart, CTO of Business AI at SAP. “However, we plan to publish more datasets that cover a diverse set of customers and use cases that, along with SALT, can serve as a basis for pre-training, adapting, as well as benchmarking models.”

Collaboration with academic institutions is also a motivation for publishing this data.

“At SAP, we hope to collaborate with academic partners who usually can only publish their results on open repositories,” Klein says. “Another hope for the dataset is encouraging more people to explore and validate new methods that help foundation models better deal with tabular enterprise data.”

What SAP is doing

Alongside its investment in the open research community with SALT, SAP is building SAP Foundation Model to handle enterprise tabular data. This table-native AI model aims to accelerate time-to-value for predictive tasks on tabular data, offering a model that can work with tabular data out-of-the-box with little or no additional training data. The PORTAL paper, published alongside SALT, provides a first glance at how this model could look.

Knowledge graphs are critical here. They work by exposing metadata — the who, what, and when of data — making relationships between information accessible. This provides a structured, interconnected representation of the data that AI models can easily understand and utilize. With the help of SAP Knowledge Graph, SAP Foundation Model can be scaled and adapted to a wide array of diverse use cases with some lightweight fine-tuning.

Learn more about:

• SAP Knowledge Graph
• SAP Foundation Model
• PORTAL
• SALT

Many finance leaders are gearing up for a step change in 2025. New technologies are bringing significant opportunities to improve productivity in finance and beyond. However, CFOs also have a chance to widen their influence this year as they use their unique skills to help organizations strategize around returning growth and business reinvention.

These changes bring vast challenges but large potential rewards for those who can upskill their teams and tackle the looming talent crunch.

To set up their organizations for growth, CFOs will need to be nimble in executing their strategies, evaluate the technologies they invest in, prioritize cybersecurity, integrate ESG reporting, and tackle talent crunch.  

1. Bringing to life 2024 growth plans 

In 2024, many CFOs focused on devising growth and reinvention plans to scale their businesses in a sustainable manner. In this quest, they had to be nimble and creative: according to PwC’s 27th Annual Global CEO survey, over 80 percent of CEOs thought that their company would no longer be viable if it did not try to reinvent itself. In order to succeed in 2025, CFOs will need to continue building trust with CEOs to partner on executing these plans successfully. 

To sell their vision in 2025, CFOs will also need to build their leadership image with the wider business, internal and external stakeholders. This is why they will need to dedicate resources to mastering their storytelling skills. This will enable finance leaders to ensure that peers and colleagues are aligned with the business’ short- and long-term planning, especially as it undergoes reinvention in challenging market conditions.  

2. Evaluating technologies for long-term benefit and efficiency 

According to the recent CFO Insights research by SAP Concur, 94 percent of finance leaders say that AI has already helped improve decision-making. Also, 73 percent see a positive impact on cost and risk reduction. In 2025, CFOs need to lead the business-wide charge on delving deeper into the technologies they are investing in. As a number of companies are rushing to adopt AI, CFOs are uniquely positioned to ensure this adoption is truly valuable to the company. To do so, they can drive establishing ROI measures to ensure it is used productively and ethically.  

They will need to be involved in critically evaluating the technologies that businesses invest in, ensuring that risks are properly assessed and in accordance with compliance or responsible-use frameworks.

With AI becoming an essential business tool across many industries, CFOs will need to make sure that it adheres to federal and international AI regulatory frameworks. They should also continue investing in new capabilities to strengthen their compliance, auditing, and planning toolkits. Because CFOs have a holistic view of their business’ data and needs, they have a unique insight into the most efficient ways to use AI.  

3. Prioritizing cybersecurity  

The global average cost of a data breach in 2024 is $4.88 million – 10 percent up on 2023, according to IBM’s 2024 Cost of a Data Breach report. The ubiquity of generative AI provides bad actors with more tools to commit complex fraud schemes. Consequently, in 2025, CFOs will need to dedicate resources to protecting their organizations from cybercrime in the coming year and onwards. According to CFO Insights research, 59 percent of finance leaders plan to increase their cybersecurity budget to respond to growing threats.

Because CFOs understand business risk and reporting, they are well-placed to take an oversight role. This best positions them to work with their business’ Chief Information Security Officers (CISO) to assess investments and the maturity of security arrangements, as well as budgets dedicated to this. 

Another way that CFOs can protect their organizations’ financial assets and data is to appropriately prepare their teams. Since human error remains the biggest risk for a cyber-attack, it is essential that CFOs educate their teams on best practices and develop incident response plans.  

4. Integrating ESG reporting 

Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) frameworks are becoming increasingly important for businesses as wider regulation schemes are established globally. For CFOs to set up their business for success in 2025, they should embrace ESG as more than just a set of rules, but as a means to build a data base and strengthen their business’ profile. 

Forty-eight percent of finance leaders are focusing on sustainability and ESG to drive growth this year. Not only does collecting ESG data help boost a business’ revenue, but it presents them with a unique opportunity to see how they are performing and inform future related decisions. For example, giving employees sustainable business travel options and recording their decision can help inform future reporting. CFOs ​​​should also set measurable goals for how sustainability data will be used to enhance the business’ performance and value creation. These goals will guide the development of the organization’s staff and its infrastructure. 

A CFO’s focus on integrating ESG reporting is one element of an even bigger shift – a shift from carbon counting to carbon accounting. In the future, organization’s entire carbon impact is going to become an integral part of its balance sheet, measured and managed with the same precision as the financial bottom line. A green ledger will form part of a more integrated view of reporting that goes way beyond financials. Adding this green ledger will help companies to a more holistic approach uniting financial and carbon accounting, making sustainability profitable and profitability sustainable.  

5. Retaining employees despite the “talent crunch“

In 2025, the workforce will continue to evolve, as baby boomers retire and young finance professionals re-evaluate their working priorities. CFOs will need to retain employees and keep them enthusiastic. They can do this by better understanding younger employees’ values and adapting development, training, and recruitment policies accordingly.  

They will also need to collaborate with HR to foster continuous learning, reskilling, and adaptability for staff. This same flexibility should be applied to bringing in new technology. By accepting to adopt these, businesses can drive more competition for the right talent.  

Similarly, CFOs can embrace using technologies such as AI to automate certain tasks, freeing people for more meaningful work. This not only resonates with the values of younger workers but will highlight to employees that their time is valued, boosting retention.  

A CFO’s role continues to evolve in challenging market and macroeconomic conditions, so adaptation and flexibility are key to unlocking rewards for themselves, their teams, and their organizations. Embracing the outlined strategies promises CFOs can continue to secure the business’ future and steer it toward success.

Victor Domingos is chief financial officer for SAP Concur.

Bring your own identity (BYOI) is an innovative transformation designed to enhance interactions with SAP’s digital platforms. Our vision is to enable straightforward digital interactions and processes for customers from their initial contact to known user status, consistent across all digital touchpoints and cloud products.

This approach will be implemented without the constraints of scaling, performance, compliance, and security issues inherent in legacy identity management systems.

Customers and partners adopting BYOI will gain complete control over user management, ensuring smooth integration and increased security. They can tailor identity and access management setups to their specific needs while ensuring compliance and mitigating risks of data breaches in a cloud-ready environment.

This initiative represents a strategic enhancement designed to improve interactions with SAP’s digital platforms by allowing customers and partners to connect their corporate identity providers with SAP. Our development teams are actively working on its implementation to make authentication more efficient across all SAP touchpoints.

To facilitate this transition, we are optimizing our identity and access management systems for seamless registration and integration of corporate identity providers. This will enable customers and partners to use their existing corporate credentials, providing unified access to both corporate applications and the SAP ecosystem.

We are undertaking these comprehensive changes to meet the growing expectations of our customers and partners for a modern, secure, and cohesive digital experience with SAP. This effort is crucial not only to ensure up-to-date security, but also to provide smooth user interactions and build trust across our digital platforms. The goal is for customer identities to be onboarded once and utilized across all SAP products and digital services, enabling secure and compliant management of authorizations.

Implementing BYOI is a detailed process. To ensure a smooth transition, we are planning a pilot phase with a selected group of pilot customers starting in the third quarter of 2025. Following the pilot, we will aim for a global rollout later in 2026. This phased approach will help refine and perfect the system to better meet the needs of all users worldwide.

The target audience for the global rollout includes all customers and partners equipped with their own corporate identity provider and prepared to embrace BYOI.

Join an SAP Continuous Influence program session here to share detailed ideas and requirements on BYOI, S-user management, and SAP Universal ID, ensuring clarity and effective review by SAP (an S-user is required to submit improvement requests).

Inge Marg is product manager for Customer Identity Management at SAP.

The SAP Pinnacle Awards, our prestigious global partner recognition program, shine a spotlight on our top-performing partners.

By demonstrating successful alignment with SAP’s business strategy, these partners are celebrated for notably delivering innovative artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud services and solutions to customers.

For more than two decades, award recipients have been recognized for their outstanding achievements and excellence, and in continuing that tradition we are pleased to announce this year’s winners and finalists.

SAP partners are an extension of our team, and we empower them to lead the way across the Customer Value Journey and help customers bring out their best. This year’s winners and finalists exemplify a stronger commitment to our evolved criteria for customer success, which extend to every stage of the Customer Value Journey.

These influential partners have illustrated their unique industry expertise, implementation methodologies, and complementary solutions that helped customers thrive and succeed in business. Their significant contributions are helping to propel the acceleration of innovative services, products, and solutions to meet the specific needs of the customer, especially as they transition to the cloud.

Across the 24 categories being recognized for 2025, 19 partners have been named winners and 28 partners named finalists of this esteemed award. As in previous years, selections were made using system-generated data on core metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs). A steering committee of global SAP representatives then reviewed, vetted, and ranked the achievements according to internal criteria based on SAP’s communicated business strategies.

Being recognized as an SAP Pinnacle Award winner or finalist offers qualified partners a unique opportunity for additional global exposure. To amplify this achievement, winners and finalists will receive a communication package to help them promote their success. Additionally, SAP will list the winners and finalists on its website for a year and through its communication channels promote these winners and finalists to joint prospects and customers.

Congratulations to this year’s winners and finalists. We look forward to celebrating your success at at SAP Partner Summit and SAP Sapphire.

Karl Fahrbach is chief partner officer at SAP.

In today’s fast-paced business world, suppliers often face significant challenges growing their business. The process can be time-consuming, expensive, and fraught with obstacles.

SAP’s game-changing solution, SAP Business Network, promote subscription, is now available globally to help suppliers overcome these hurdles.

This innovative commercial offering is designed to amplify a supplier’s discoverability and provide a comprehensive suite of value-added features. The promote subscription empowers suppliers to differentiate themselves on SAP Business Network, attract new customers, and ultimately grow their business in ways previously unimaginable.

Building trust, streamlining procurement

At the heart of this new offering is the understanding that trust is paramount in any new business relationship. Suppliers that opt for the promote subscription can verify their company details, establishing a solid foundation of trust for buyers seeking new sources of supply. This verification process not only enhances credibility, but also sets the stage for more meaningful and productive business interactions.

The promote subscription goes beyond traditional supplier discovery methods by seamlessly integrating with buyers’ SAP procurement applications. This integration enhances and simplifies the entire procurement process, creating a more streamlined and efficient experience for all parties involved. Moreover, the subscription leverages leading technology, including two generative AI features, to take supplier visibility and effectiveness to new heights.

Key features

Let’s delve into some of the features that make the promote subscription standout in the world of B2B commerce.

• Verified status and profile badge: Subscribers gain a competitive edge by showcasing a verified badge on their company profile within SAP Business Network. This badge appears in search results and SAP procurement applications, such as SAP Ariba Sourcing and SAP Ariba Supplier Management, instantly boosting credibility and attractiveness to potential buyers.
• Dedicated insights and analytics: The subscription provides suppliers with powerful tools to enhance their catalog performance. Through contextual calls to action, suppliers can leverage keyword recommendations, track profile traffic, and gain insights into the types of buyers viewing their company. This data-driven approach allows suppliers to increase their visibility in search results by taking actions, such as verifying their profile with targeted keywords and sustainability ratings.
• Enhanced network catalog tools: Promote subscribers can effortlessly respond to inquiries, receive new orders, and upload their full suite of products and services onto the SAP Business Network catalog. This comprehensive catalog becomes searchable by SAP buyers, dramatically increasing exposure. Additionally, subscribers gain access to generative AI for enhancing product descriptions and summaries, as well as open APIs for automatic loading and maintenance of network catalogs.
• Match and respond to qualified leads: The subscription enables suppliers to match with leads from SAP Business Network Discovery, SAP’s intelligent matchmaking solution. Suppliers can swiftly respond to requests for information by using generative AI to create their responses. They can also track performance with new discovery insights and take advantage of contextual calls to action, such as updating recommended keywords for better matching.

Revolutionizing supplier-buyer connections

The global availability of the promote subscription represents a significant leap forward in SAP’s commitment to fostering meaningful connections between suppliers and buyers. With this offering, SAP is improving the procurement process by leveraging generative AI to enhance supplier profiles and product descriptions. This provides valuable insights and analytics while creating a trusted environment where verified suppliers can showcase their offerings to potential buyers.

With millions of companies conducting more than $6.3 trillion in commerce annually on SAP Business Network, the promote subscription presents a substantial opportunity for suppliers worldwide to accelerate growth and expand their reach. As of now, all suppliers can easily access the new network storefront and add the promote subscription to their account with the simple click of a button. This annual subscription empowers suppliers with enhanced visibility and tools to boost their presence on SAP Business Network, regardless of their geographical location.

By simplifying complex processes, leveraging AI technology, and providing crucial insights, we’re not just facilitating transactions — we’re fostering lasting business relationships on a global scale. As we continue to fuel the largest B2B network in the world, we invite suppliers to join us in this exciting new chapter of digital commerce, where opportunities are boundless and success is within reach for businesses of all sizes.

Val Blatt is chief revenue officer for SAP Supply Chain Management.