Artificial intelligence can do far more for public administration than answer questions or digitize individual interactions.

Its real potential emerges when AI connects with the data and processes behind public services, turning a citizen request into coordinated action across the administration.

For public institutions, there is another essential requirement: innovation must go hand in hand with transparency, accountability, and digital sovereignty. SAP combines decades of process expertise with enterprise applications, data, AI, and sovereign cloud technologies.

S.Public, the new SAP Experience Center location for the public sector, brings these capabilities to life. It officially opened in Berlin on October 12, 2026.

From a citizen request to coordinated action

Damage in a public space can be reported digitally in a matter of moments. But that is where the actual administrative process begins: determining responsibilities, planning the work, checking resources and budgets, procuring materials if needed, and closing the case. SAP solutions can connect citizen engagement, maintenance, procurement, and financial management across this end-to-end process.

At S.Public, a playground scenario makes this tangible. A citizen notices damage, such as a broken swing, and reports it by smartphone. The steps that follow show how a single report becomes coordinated action. The real innovation is not the reporting form itself, but the intelligently connected processes behind it.

When AI understands the administrative context

The same principle applies to public funding. Applications involve documents, eligibility requirements, and financial information. AI can check submitted materials for completeness and consistency, flag missing information early, and provide employees with an explained recommendation for further review. The final decision remains with the responsible public authority.

A funding application for a solar installation illustrates this approach in Berlin. The SAP capability behind it is broadly applicable: AI is embedded where employees evaluate information and manage processes. Rather than automating isolated tasks, it supports the broader administrative context.

When digital sovereignty meets AI

How can sensitive data be used with AI while remaining under an organization’s own control? SAP Sovereign Cloud addresses four dimensions of digital sovereignty: data, operational, technical, and legal sovereignty.

At S.Public, this concept becomes something visitors can actually walk through. The new Sovereign Cloud Showroom makes SAP’s security and sovereignty concept physically tangible for the first time. Visitors pass through three security zones: administration, control, and restricted zones. They experience firsthand how the operating environment for SAP Sovereign Cloud and the protection of classified information work together.

A public sector scenario at a seaport shows how this can be combined with intelligent analysis. SAP solutions and the AI assistant Joule bring together selected data from internal and external systems in a sovereign environment. Data on vessel arrivals, terminals, containers, and available inspection capacity is turned into a prioritized overview. Analysts can query it in natural language, while the responsible public officials decide which inspections to carry out.

More than a place for demonstrations

The three examples point to a common development: public services become more intelligent when applications, data, and AI work together across organizational and functional boundaries while accountability remains clear.

S.Public creates a place where customers, partners, and experts can explore and discuss these possibilities. The SAP capabilities behind them extend far beyond Berlin.

The future of public services will not be determined by how much technology public administrations adopt, but by what they enable for people and society.

Andre Bechtold is president of SAP Industries & Experiences and chief revenue officer of Industry AI at SAP.

Major security incidents can quickly affect enterprise value, operational continuity, regulatory standing, and reputation.

As organizations become more dependent on connected infrastructure, cloud services, AI, and third parties, weaknesses in one part of the ecosystem can cascade across the business.

A Board is not expected to make technical decisions. Its role is to exercise informed oversight: set expectations, test whether accountability is clear, require evidence of resilience, and ensure that management integrates security and compliance into strategy, investment, operations, and crisis preparedness.

The following questions are designed for a Board of Directors and its relevant committees. They broaden the original cybersecurity focus to include compliance, privacy, data governance, third-party assurance, regulatory change, and demonstrable control effectiveness. 

1. Are security and compliance roles, decision rights, and escalation paths clearly defined?

Treating security or compliance as an isolated specialist function weakens governance. Accountability should extend across executive leadership, business operations, technology, legal, risk, privacy, internal audit, and the security organization. The Board should understand who owns material risks, what is the risk appetite who can accept them, and how significant incidents, control failures, vulnerabilities, or regulatory concerns reach the appropriate committee or full Board.

Evidence to request:

• Does the security and compliance leadership team have direct access to executive management and the Board?
• Are material risks escalated before they materialize into active incidents?
• Do responsibilities cover prevention, detection, response, recovery, regulatory obligations, and assurance?

2. Are security and compliance built into strategy, investment, and transformation decisions?

Security and compliance should shape strategic choices from the beginning, not be added after commitments have been made. Major investments, cloud programs, acquisitions, new products, AI initiatives, and supplier selections should be assessed alongside security and compliance considerations. Early involvement helps identify structural risk while decisions are still practical to change. 

Evidence to request:

• Which strategic decisions require a documented security and compliance review?
• What risks or control requirements influenced the final decision?
• Are funding and accountability aligned with the risk created by the initiative?

3. Do we have a transparent, decision-ready view of security and compliance risk?

Boards need more than technical activity reports. Management should translate important threats, vulnerabilities, control gaps, legal obligations, and business dependencies into clear enterprise risk scenarios. Reporting should show potential operational, financial, legal, and reputational consequences, as well as the residual risk that remains after controls are applied. 

Evidence to request:

• Which scenarios could materially affect our strategic objectives?
• How are likelihood, business impact, and control effectiveness assessed?
• What residual risks have been accepted, by whom, and for how long? 

4. Is our compliance strategy prepared for regulatory change?

Compliance should be managed as a continuing capability rather than a periodic response to individual requirements. The Board should assess whether regulatory developments are monitored, interpreted consistently, assigned to accountable owners, and translated into controls, technology roadmaps, evidence, and reporting. This includes requirements affecting security, privacy, data sovereignty, operational resilience, AI, and third-party services. 

Evidence to request: 

• Which emerging requirements could materially affect the business?
• How quickly can new obligations be translated into operational controls? 
• Can management demonstrate compliance consistently across regions, business units, and technology environments?

5. Are legacy systems and technical debt creating unacceptable security or compliance exposure?

Systems that are no longer fully supported can accumulate security weaknesses, limit monitoring, complicate recovery, and make compliance evidence harder to produce. The Board should view aging critical systems as an enterprise risk and investment issue, not just an IT lifecycle matter. Where modernization is delayed, management should document compensating controls, ownership, and a time-bound plan. 

Evidence to request: 

• Which critical systems are out of support or approaching end of support?
• What business processes and regulatory obligations depend on them?
• What is the modernization plan and how is interim risk independently validated?

6. Are AI security, compliance, and governance embedded in the operating model?

AI introduces security, legal, privacy, data, ethical, and operational questions that require coordinated governance. Whether AI is developed internally or obtained from a third party, management should know what data it can access, how outputs are used, which decisions remain subject to human review, and how systems are tested and monitored as they change.

Evidence to request:

• Who is accountable for approving and monitoring AI use cases?
• What controls protect sensitive data and prevent unauthorized use?
• How are legal, ethical, security, compliance, and human-rights considerations evaluated and evidenced?

7. Are identity and access management strong enough for our risk profile? 

Compromised credentials and excessive access can allow attackers or insiders to reach critical systems and data. Identity and access management should be treated as a business control, not simply an administrative technology process. Strong governance connects employee, contractor, third-party, and system identities to reliable business records and removes access when it is no longer required. 

Evidence to request: 

• Are strong authentication and least-privilege access applied to critical systems?
• How quickly is access changed when roles, employment, or supplier relationships change?
• Are privileged and non-human identities monitored, reviewed, and time-limited where appropriate? 

8. Does our culture measurably reduce human and conduct risk?

Policies and technical controls depend on people making sound decisions. A mature program goes beyond annual training by addressing role-specific exposure, leadership behavior, phishing and social engineering, secure ways of working, speak-up channels, and consequences for repeated noncompliance. The Board should seek measurable evidence that behavior and risk are improving. 

Evidence to request: 

• Which roles face the highest security and compliance exposure?
• What do simulations, incidents, training results, and behavioral indicators show over time?
• How visibly do leaders reinforce expected behavior and accountability?

9. Are third-party and supply-chain risks continuously assessed and governed? 

Security and compliance obligations do not stop at the enterprise boundary. Critical suppliers, cloud providers, software dependencies, advisers, and other partners can create operational, regulatory, data, concentration, and geopolitical exposure. Third-party risk should be integrated into enterprise risk management and monitored throughout the relationship, not treated as a one-time procurement exercise. 

Evidence to request: 

• Which third parties are critical to operations, data, or regulatory obligations?
• What independent evidence supports their security, compliance, and resilience claims?
• How are concentration, subcontractor, geographic, and exit risks managed? 

10. Are we prepared to detect, contain, disclose, and recover from a major incident? 

Prevention alone is not enough. The Board should understand whether the organization can identify significant events early, contain their impact, make timely legal and regulatory decisions, communicate credibly, restore priority services, and learn from the event. Readiness should cover ransomware, account takeover, data compromise, fraud, third-party disruption, and other plausible business scenarios. 

Evidence to request: 

• When were crisis, incident response, business continuity, and recovery plans last exercised together?
• Are decision rights clear for regulatory disclosure, law enforcement, ransom demands, customer communication, and service restoration?
• What gaps were found in recent exercises or incidents, and are remediation actions closed?

From reactive oversight to demonstrable resilience 

These 10 questions help a Board move the discussion from technical activity to governance, accountability, evidence, and business outcomes. Effective oversight requires an ongoing dialogue with management, constructive challenge of assumptions, and decisions that reflect the organization’s risk profile, regulatory obligations, and digital maturity.

Modernization can be an important governance lever when it improves standardization, transparency, control automation, resilience, and the ability to produce reliable compliance evidence. Responsibility, however, remains shared across leaders, business owners, technology teams, security, compliance, legal, risk, audit, employees, and critical partners. 

Board takeaway

Security and compliance are not separate from business strategy. They are essential to continuity, lawful operation, stakeholder trust, and long-term value protection. 

Marielle Ehrmann is chief security officer and a member of the Supervisory Board of SAP SE.

Note: This piece has been adapted from the German article “Cybersicherheit – Zehn Leitfragen für den Aufsichtsrat” by original authors Dr. Friederike Rotsch and Sebastian Lange alongside Marielle Ehrmann.

In many B2B organizations, creating a customer quote still involves a familiar sequence of emails, approvals, contract reviews, and manual handoffs. The process can take days or even weeks, creating delays for customers and additional work for employees.

Ericsson knows this challenge well.

As a global leader in telecommunications technology operating in more than 190 countries, Ericsson manages highly complex commercial relationships involving products, services, customer-specific contracts, pricing agreements, and global fulfillment operations. Behind every quote is a web of business rules, approvals, and dependencies that must be coordinated accurately and efficiently.

For years, that complexity created friction in the quoting process. In some cases, generating a quote could take more than two weeks. Today, many of those same requests can be completed in minutes or even seconds.

The hidden complexity behind every quote

At Ericsson, many customer transactions are tied to multi-year framework agreements that include negotiated pricing, contract-specific products, and customer entitlements. Sometimes customers return months or even years after an agreement is signed and need to understand what products, configurations, and pricing are available to them before placing an order.

Historically, that process often required customers to contact their account representative, who would manually gather information, validate contract terms, and prepare a quote. Depending on the complexity of the request, responses could take days or even weeks.

Ericsson’s objective was straightforward: make it easier for customers to do business with the company.

“We want to be easier to work with as a partner to our customers,” said Aaron Thomas, global product owner at Ericsson.

Using SAP Commerce Cloud, Ericsson introduced digital commerce capabilities that allow customers to access contract-specific products, generate quotes, and place orders through self-service channels. Customers can now access dedicated storefronts built around their agreements, browse available products, generate quotes, and complete transactions without relying on manual intervention from account teams.

What once took days or weeks can now be completed in minutes or even seconds, helping improve accuracy and reduce rework across commercial operations.

Beyond automation: Exploring the role of AI agents

Once the quoting process became digitized and streamlined, Ericsson began exploring how AI could take commercial execution to the next level.

“We’ve moved from manual processes to digitized and automated processes,” Thomas explained. “Now we’re asking: can an agent perform those tasks?”

Rather than using AI solely as a productivity tool, the company started evaluating how AI agents could actively participate in commercial processes.

One area Ericsson is exploring is quote creation. The company is evaluating how AI agents could analyze customer requests, identify relevant contract information, assemble recommendations, and prepare proposed quotes for human review.

Employees remain responsible for oversight and decision-making, while AI helps reduce administrative work and allows sales and account teams to spend more time advising customers, solving business challenges, and strengthening relationships.

The company is also exploring other AI-driven capabilities, including agents that can improve product descriptions and search experiences across its internal product portfolio, helping employees find information more quickly across a large and complex catalog.

Defining the next chapter of B2B commerce

For Ericsson, AI is becoming more than a productivity tool. It is creating new possibilities for how commercial work gets done.

Reducing quote creation from weeks to seconds delivered immediate value for customers and employees alike. But the company’s exploration of AI agents points to a broader shift, one where intelligent systems help businesses execute complex processes faster, more consistently, and at greater scale.

For Ericsson, the journey from weeks-long quoting cycles to AI-assisted execution is about more than efficiency. It is about creating a simpler experience for customers and helping employees focus on the work that matters most. As the company continues exploring how agents can support commercial operations, it is helping redefine how complex B2B processes can be executed in the age of AI.

To learn more about Ericsson’s approach to AI and the future of agentic commerce, watch the webinar: Agentic B2B Commerce: Finding the fast track to profitable growth. You can also explore SAP’s vision for unified commerce at sap.com/unified-commerce and learn how organizations are connecting commerce, customer experiences, and operational execution to drive better business outcomes.

The Germany-based logistics company DACHSER has set itself an ambitious goal: to become the world’s most digitally integrated logistics service provider by 2030, seamlessly aligning its resources, experience, and modern digital operational capabilities with the needs of its customers, employees, and partners.

Following eight months of close collaboration with SAP, DACHSER has reached a major milestone on this journey: the successful migration of human capital management (HCM) to SAP S/4HANA via RISE with SAP.

Nearly a century has passed since Thomas Dachser founded the company in 1930 with a single truck, transporting cheese from the Allgäu region to the Rhineland and returning with steel. Yet, logistics and warehousing remain the core business of the transport logistics company, which is headquartered in the town of Kempten in south-west Germany. “Our core business is what we call our road business, meaning everything transported by road, across both dry goods and food segments,” says Herbert Egner, head of the IT Products Finance/HR division at DACHSER, who has nearly 40 years of experience in software development at the company.

Currently, DACHSER operates globally with approximately 427 company-owned branches across 43 countries. Out of its roughly 37,500 employees worldwide, 19,000 are based in Germany. Total revenue in 2025 reached €8.3 billion. “On one hand, we are a deeply tradition-conscious family business, now managed by the third and fourth generations. On the other hand, we place a massive emphasis on innovation—and not just at the executive level,” Egner notes. “Every single employee should have the opportunity to contribute here.”

In terms of digitization, the company is currently replacing a multitude of small, manual processes with IT-based solutions. Following DACHSER’s licensing of the SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) in 2024, employees can now leverage its low-code tools to build apps for their own workflows. For instance, instead of using physical clipboards and paper checklists to document damage to transport vehicles, DACHSER inspectors now use low-code applications to capture that information digitally.

SAP BTP and the SAP Integration Suite also played a vital role in helping DACHSER move HCM to the cloud—which, alongside the license conversion to SAP S/4HANA, marks one of DACHSER’s most significant IT upgrades in recent years. “While we are a long-standing SAP customer, we are certainly not your typical SAP user,” Egner explains. “For transport and warehouse management, we still rely on our proprietary systems, which we began developing back in the 1980s. At the time, SAP did not yet offer the specific system depth we required for our logistics processes.”

Finance software from SAP has been in use at DACHSER since 2009, with journal entries transferred from the company’s internal systems to SAP via an interface. In October 2024, the finance solution was migrated from an on-premise environment under SAP ERP Central Component (SAP ECC) and SAP HANA to the Microsoft Azure cloud. As part of RISE with SAP, DACHSER then successfully migrated its HCM payroll and time management modules for its 19,000 employees in Germany to the cloud in June 2026. This intensive eight-month collaboration between SAP and DACHSER successfully established a cornerstone of the company’s global HCM transformation.

“For HCM, we chose RISE with SAP. However, when we decided to move to the cloud three years ago, it wasn’t yet mature enough to meet our specific needs,” Egner says. “Once our three-year contract with Azure expires, RISE with SAP could become a viable model for our finance environment as well.”

The go-live was flawless: the very first payroll run for all employees in Germany in July 2026 went off without a hitch, and all payments were distributed on time. The system then entered a four-week hypercare phase, during which the project team closely monitored ongoing operations before regular support took over in August. With this step, DACHSER has established the necessary future-proof SAP architecture for its HR operations. This opens up new possibilities for the company, allowing it to focus heavily on implementing new features within the SAP SuccessFactors HCM Suite.

SAP S/4HANA transformation

“When we say we want to be the world’s most digitally integrated logistics service provider by 2030, this applies not only to digitizing our processes but also to integrating our acquisitions, which bring their own SAP systems with them,” Egner says. “Under our ‘SAP First’ strategy, we roll out finance and HCM in these countries before deploying our proprietary transport and warehouse management systems.” This approach was recently executed in Italy and is currently planned for several acquired companies in the Iberia region.

DACHSER’s goal is to integrate the SAP licenses of acquired companies into a global enterprise agreement with SAP, regardless of the country in which the systems are running. In the future, this will be handled via a semi-automated workflow. “When it comes to licensing in particular, it is crucial for us to have a unified agreement moving forward on how to manage these assets, ensuring that neither side faces these administrative overheads anymore,” Egner explains.

In connection with the license conversion from SAP ECC to SAP S/4HANA, both companies sat down once again to realign on their future path to mutual success. “Here at DACHSER, we are noticing a new openness from SAP, as well as a deeper understanding of us as a customer,” says Egner. “This has been received very positively on our end. People are working on both sides, and we want to shape this partnership in a way that allows both parties to benefit based on mutual respect.”

SAP Cloud ERP Private 2025 Feature Pack Stack 02 (FPS02) delivers new capabilities that help organizations move from AI experimentation toward intelligent, governed business execution faster.

The release combines AI agents that can work directly with core business processes and adds new regulatory compliance capabilities and industry-specific innovations across asset-intensive industries, retail, and energy sectors. Together, these enhancements help strengthen the foundation for organizations that need to scale AI responsibly.

Building the foundation for enterprise AI

As organizations explore how AI can drive business outcomes, one challenge keeps surfacing: AI alone is not enough. To operate at enterprise scale, AI needs access to trusted data, process context, business rules, and governance.

This is why the conversation about AI increasingly becomes a conversation about ERP. AI agents require more than information. They need to understand what actions are permitted, which controls must be respected, and when decisions require human review. SAP Cloud ERP Private can provide this foundation through integrated business processes, harmonized data, and enterprise-grade governance. FPS02 helps extend these capabilities, bringing intelligence directly into the processes where business happens.

AI embedded within business processes

FPS02 introduces AI agents and AI-assisted capabilities across key business domains, helping organizations automate routine work while maintaining oversight and accountability.

In finance, agents and AI-assisted capabilities help support processes spanning planning and forecasting, period-close activities, working capital management, tax processes, and compliance operations. Rather than requiring employees to manually identify issues and coordinate follow-up activities, SAP Cloud ERP Private and analytical business insights can surface risks, recommend actions, and help manage exceptions.

In sales order-to-cash processes, agents enable sales teams to quickly identify fulfillment issues, receive resolutions, and create or update sales orders directly in their workflow, which helps minimize delays and improve customer satisfaction.

Joule and SAP Document AI help streamline quality management by uploading, extracting, and matching certificate data, flagging exceptions, and creating pre-filled defects from natural-language inputs and source documents to help accelerate review, accuracy, and inspection release.

By receiving key observations, recommendations, and a clear action plan directly within business processes, employees can focus on judgment and expertise rather than information gathering and exception management.

Compliance built into the core

FPS02 also delivers important regulatory capabilities directly within SAP Cloud ERP Private.

The release includes support for IFRS 18 indirect-method cash flow statement reporting, helping organizations prepare for evolving financial reporting requirements. Additional updates include support for Germany’s AUSWIB1M foreign-trade reporting requirements and Canada First Nations Tax determination with GST499-1 return generation. By incorporating these capabilities into standard business processes, organizations can address compliance obligations while maintaining consistent governance and operational efficiency.

Industry innovation across critical operations

FPS02 deepens industry-specific capabilities across asset-intensive operations, upstream oil and gas, defense and security, and retail.

For asset-intensive industries, enhancements further integrate permit-to-work processes into maintenance operations, helping ensure operational controls are embedded directly within workflows. Upstream oil and gas organizations can gain new capabilities that extend Joule into production and revenue accounting, while SAP Document AI helps interpret gas plant statements and propose accounting entries for review. Defense and security organizations can benefit from innovations supporting equipment allocation and ERP operations in limited-connectivity environments.

Retail organizations gain four new data products that help expose retail master data through SAP Business Data Cloud, working to create a stronger foundation for future AI-driven processes. FPS02 also introduces operational enhancements including support for partial order fulfillment scenarios, GS1 2D barcode enablement, and expanded product traceability through serial-number integration between point-of-sale and inventory processes.

Advancing the Autonomous Enterprise

The Autonomous Enterprise is not built through a single AI breakthrough or software release. It emerges through the combination of trusted business data, integrated processes, governance, and intelligent capabilities working together across the enterprise.

SAP Cloud ERP Private 2025 FPS02 helps advance that foundation in concrete terms: by embedding intelligence within business processes, strengthening compliance capabilities, and expanding industry-specific innovation.

To explore the full FPS02 release and its implications for your business, visit SAP Community.

Maura Hameroff is chief marketing officer for SAP Cloud ERP Private and RISE with SAP.

New innovations in payments, enterprise performance management, and AI automation help finance teams move quickly from insight to execution while maintaining governance and control.

Finance leaders today are expected to do far more than report results. They’re expected to shape business outcomes, guide decisions, and respond quickly to change. Yet many finance processes still operate in isolation rather than in concert. Invoice approval and payment execution happen in separate places.

Planning, consolidation, and reporting often rely on separate systems and workflows. And governance often misses critical information by operating in a silo. The result is delays between identifying an issue, making a decision, and taking action.

This year at SAP Connect, SAP announced new capabilities designed to help close those gaps. These include SAP Pay, a new payment service embedded in SAP Cloud ERP; SAP Enterprise Financial Consolidation, a new addition to SAP’s enterprise performance management portfolio; and an expanded set of Joule Assistants that bring AI-powered support to finance, governance, and compliance processes.

While each innovation addresses a different challenge, they share a common objective. Finance teams should spend less time moving information between systems and more time acting on insights.

Embedding payments into finance operations

One of the most persistent sources of friction in finance is the payment process itself.

An invoice may be approved in the ERP system, but completing the payment often still involves banking portals, payment files, middleware, and reconciliation activities. Each additional handoff introduces complexity and can slow execution.

SAP Pay is designed to simplify that process by embedding payment execution directly into SAP Cloud ERP. When an invoice is approved, payment and reconciliation can occur within the same workflow and the same business context.

The launch also marks SAP’s entry into payment services through Tereina, a wholly owned SAP subsidiary established earlier this year. As a regulated payment-service provider, Tereina enables SAP to deliver services natively within finance workflows rather than relying solely on third-party providers. This helps keep payment execution, reconciliation, controls, and auditability connected to the underlying business transaction.

The service supports EFT, wire transfers, checks, and stablecoin-based settlement for cross-border transactions. More broadly, SAP offers customers a wide range of payment options, spanning bank API integrations, connectivity to more than 10,000 financial institutions through SWIFT, digital-currency payments, and now natively embedded payment services.

For finance organizations, the opportunity is not simply faster payment execution. It is reducing the effort required to connect systems, manage exceptions, and reconcile information after the fact while keeping payment processing, reconciliation, controls, and auditability within a single workflow.

SAP Pay is now generally available in the United States and the United Kingdom.

Connecting performance management across the enterprise

The same challenge appears across enterprise performance management.

Planning, consolidation, close processes, and external reporting all rely on the same financial reality. Yet they are often managed through separate tools, data models, and processes. Maintaining a consistent view of performance can become increasingly difficult as organizations grow and business conditions change.

At SAP Connect, we announced SAP Enterprise Financial Consolidation to help address that challenge.

Built on SAP Business Data Cloud, the solution brings together statutory and management consolidation with close and disclosure capabilities on a common governed data foundation. By connecting these activities more closely, finance teams can spend less time reconciling information and more time understanding performance and responding to change.

The solution also includes new Joule Assistants for consolidation and disclosure processes. These assistants help identify anomalies, resolve exceptions, and support disclosure preparation while maintaining auditability and human oversight.

For organizations operating mixed environments–some SAP, some non-SAP environments–SAP Enterprise Financial Consolidation provides flexibility by supporting data from multiple sources. It also offers a path forward for customers looking to modernize existing consolidation environments and adopt a more AI-enabled approach to performance management.

SAP Early Adopter Care is planned for the first quarter of 2027.

Expanding AI across finance and governance

AI’s potential in finance extends beyond answering questions or generating summaries. The larger opportunity is helping teams complete work that has traditionally required significant manual effort, specialist knowledge, and cross-functional coordination.

At SAP Connect, SAP expanded its portfolio of Joule Assistants to address these opportunities.

The new assistants support areas including accounting, revenue recognition, pricing, disclosure management, project operations, governance, and trade compliance. Embedded directly into existing workflows, they are designed to help teams complete tasks more efficiently while preserving review processes and accountability.

Some focus on helping finance professionals understand complex calculations and reporting requirements. Others support pricing decisions, disclosure preparation, project execution, and continuous monitoring of risks and controls.

Just as important is governance.

As organizations deploy more AI agents across business functions, they need assurance that those agents operate within the same boundaries that govern human users. New governance, security, and compliance assistants are designed to extend existing controls, access management, and monitoring capabilities to AI-driven activities, helping organizations apply consistent oversight across both human and digital actors.

General availability for the Governance Assistant and International Trade Assistant is planned for Q4 2026.

From financial insight to immediate action

Finance has always played a central role in helping organizations understand performance. Increasingly, it is also expected to help organizations respond in real time.

That makes speed, visibility, and execution just as important as reporting accuracy.

The innovations SAP announced at SAP Connect reflect that shift. Whether simplifying payments, connecting performance management processes, or embedding AI directly into everyday finance work, each reduces the operational distance between identifying an issue and acting on it.

For finance teams, the ultimate goal is not simply faster processes or faster reports. It is making better decisions with greater confidence and executing those decisions with less friction.

Learn more about how SAP is helping organizations modernize finance operations across ERP, planning, treasury, payments, and accounting here.

Lawrence Martin is general manager and chief product officer for SAP Finance & Spend.
David Imbert is chief marketing officer for SAP Financial Management.