How the RISE with SAP Validated Partner recognition enables partners to unlock the power of SAP Business Suite

Businesses today rightly expect faster value realization, streamlined implementations, and solutions that are flexible, scalable, and embedded with intelligent technologies, such as AI.

With the launch earlier this year of SAP Business Suite, a unified system integrating applications, data, and AI to seamlessly connect and optimize every business function, customers can benefit from a continuous cycle of value and unlock innovation faster and easier than ever before.

By embarking on the RISE with SAP journey, existing SAP ERP customers can modernize with a cloud ERP landscape and realize the full potential of SAP Business Suite. To ensure businesses have the foundation needed to fully leverage the suite’s capabilities, a successful implementation is crucial.

Our RISE with SAP project delivery is undergoing a profound shift, empowering our service partner ecosystem to meet these heightened expectations with innovative methodologies, comprehensive tools, and validation programs.

The new paradigm: customer priorities in SAP projects

Today’s organizations grapple with complex legacy processes, siloed data, and highly customized systems. They seek:

• Speed to value: Building a resilient digital backbone that delivers measurable benefits within weeks or months
• Industry-standard solutions: Minimizing costly customizations to enable faster deployment, simplified upgrades, and easier maintenance
• Reusable intellectual property: Configurations over modifications ensure portability and scalability
• Operational modernization: Leveraging automation and standardized processes to reduce redundancies and risks and improve data access
• Embedded AI and automation: Accelerating decision cycles, reducing manual efforts, and enhancing accuracy

SAP’s response: enabling partners to drive customer success

SAP recognizes that delivering on these expectations requires a strategic partnership approach, combining the future-proof cloud and AI innovations with disciplined governance, clear ownership and accountability, and best practices. Our approach centers on the RISE with SAP Methodology, complemented by an integrated toolchain and a dedicated focus on partner capability enhancement.

RISE with SAP Methodology: framework for agile transformation

The RISE with SAP Methodology provides a comprehensive pathway that emphasizes a clean core architecture, standardized best practices, and collaborative implementation strategies. Included are:

• Standardized framework: Building scalable, repeatable project road maps that cater to diverse industry requirements, from streamlined deployments to complex, multinational programs
• Integrated toolchain: Enabling seamless collaboration with SAP tools, such as SAP Cloud ALM, SAP Signavio, SAP LeanIX, and SAP Build — powered by AI — to ensure data consistency and process automation
• Expert guidance: From discovery to deployment, SAP and qualified partners guide projects, focusing on value creation and risk mitigation

The results speak for themselves. Customer outcomes include:

• Up to 30 percent reduction in transformation costs
• Up to 35 percent faster realization of benefits
• Up to 70 percent increase in business agility
• Up to 40 percent acceleration in innovation cycles

RISE with SAP Validated Partner recognition: elevating our service partner ecosystem

SAP is committed to ensuring our partners have the necessary skills and certifications to stay aligned with this evolving landscape. To that end, we’ve introduced the RISE with SAP Validated Partner recognition. Launched in 2024, this program recognizes partners that demonstrate excellence in delivering SAP large and complex cloud ERP projects with consistency and quality.

Qualified partners that accept SAP’s invitation must adhere to clear guidelines, including:

• Global adoption of RISE with SAP Methodology: Ensuring consistency across all delivery teams and regions
• Focus on clean core quality gates: Partner projects must document the respective clean core quality gates in SAP Cloud ALM
• Enhanced toolchain utilization: A strong emphasis on automation, collaboration, and project governance through SAP’s integrated platform suite
• Professional certifications: Equipping key roles — project managers, developers, architects, consultants — with updated, in-demand skills aligned with SAP’s cloud and AI innovations

Ensuring partner success: tools, training, and innovation

The RISE with SAP Validated Partner recognition is underpinned by a close alignment between qualified partners and SAP teams throughout all engagements, from sales to delivery, ensuring early identification of any potential barriers, to success.

Additionally, SAP invests heavily in supporting partners with resources such as funding and incentives, learning journeys and certification programs, certification academies and live sessions, and a vibrant Partner learning manager community where partners can share best practices, access the latest updates, and collaborate with SAP experts (log-in required).

To help customers harness the full potential of AI to drive value, partners must apply tools like Joule to effectively automate and optimize processes for superior outcomes. SAP Joule for Consultants empowers consultants to work smarter, automate routine tasks, and focus on strategic activities. Given its grounding in terabytes of both public and proprietary data, SAP Joule for Consultants can accelerate customer project delivery by up to 14 percent.  

Looking ahead

By aligning with SAP’s proven methodologies, leveraging our integrated toolchain, and maintaining high standards of certification and expertise, our RISE with SAP Validated partners are uniquely positioned to deliver solutions that truly meet customer expectations in today’s fast-paced, digitally driven environment.

Together, SAP and its service partners are committed to driving innovation, accelerating time-to-value, and enabling sustainable transformation — ensuring our customers remain competitive in a rapidly changing world.

Karl Fahrbach is chief partner officer at SAP.

AI is everywhere today, but it can be difficult for enterprises to cut through the hype to understand how to leverage the latest innovations to gain a real, measurable competitive advantage.

I addressed this challenge in a conversation with Dan Newman at The Six Five Summit: AI Unleashed 2025, hosted by The Futurum Group and Moor Insights and Strategy. We spoke about the blockers that leaders face when determining where to apply generative AI to move their businesses forward and what SAP Business AI is uniquely bringing to market to help.

Flowing from that conversation, here are four steps you can take, among others we touched on, that will help you become an AI front-runner.

1. Prioritize use cases with the most promise

First, focus on areas of your business in which you can use AI to deliver fast, measurable value. Finance, HR, supply chain, and customer experience are among those AI front-runners often start with. As you assess your options, set aside the idea of a “proof of concept.” Instead, develop “proofs of value” by using your and your team’s expertise, data, and imaginations to find areas where more value can be unlocked using automation or AI agents. 

By the way, the term “proof of value” was first coined by AI front-runner Philippe Lalumiere, vice president of IT at Cirque du Soleil, in reference to an AI agent for accounts payable that his team designed in partnership with SAP. The key is to pinpoint what outcomes matter most to your business and choose use cases that quickly prove the value.

2. Deploy intelligent agents to simplify complex tasks

Another practice of AI front-runners is the use of AI agents that span departments and systems to solve end-to-end problems. Their autonomous abilities to handle whole processes is one of the differences between an AI skill and an AI agent. A skill is a single ability, such as the ability to write a message or analyze a spreadsheet and trigger actions from that analysis. An agent independently handles complex, multi-step processes to produce a measurable outcome. We recently announced an expanded network of Joule Agents to help foster autonomous collaboration across systems and lines of business. This includes out-of-the-box agents for HR, finance, supply chain, and other functions that companies can deploy quickly to help automate critical workflows.

AI front-runners, such as Ericsson, Team Liquid, and Cirque du Soleil, also create customized agents that can tackle specific opportunities for process improvement. Now you can build them with Joule Studio, which provides a low-code workspace to help design, orchestrate, and manage custom agents using pre-defined skills, models, and data connections. This can give you the power to extend and tailor your agent network to your exact needs and business context.

3. Embed AI into daily workflows

To truly become an AI front-runner, you need AI woven seamlessly into how your teams work every day. You also need to ensure it works across your broader technology ecosystem. Because of these critical business needs, we created Joule to be your natural language AI interface, built right into your SAP systems. And we’re adding a new Joule action bar to make it even more context-aware and better integrated with third-party tools like ServiceNow and Microsoft Copilot. It doesn’t wait for you to tell it what you need. Instead, it can proactively follow your behavior and suggest helpful next actions in context across multiple SAP and non-SAP applications. This helps remove friction, so your team members don’t have to toggle between tools or relearn interfaces.

4. Foster an ecosystem of interoperable, leading AI tools

Another way to become an AI front-runner is to tackle fragmented tools and solutions by putting in place an open, interoperable ecosystem. After all, what good is an innovative AI tool if it runs into blockers when it encounters your other first- and third-party solutions? This is why we recently announced a tighter integration with Microsoft Copilot for productivity and partnerships with Mistral AI and Perplexity for flexible access to leading AI models. These, and many other partnerships, help teams combine multiple AI capabilities, share trusted data across systems, and drive business outcomes faster, without the headache of manual connections.

Ready to lead? Here’s how to get started

I want to encourage you to lead, not follow, in the AI era. If you’re ready to do that, there are a few ways to get started. First, go deeper on these subjects in the full Six Five Summit conversation. Then see how other companies are innovating with AI and learn what’s possible through SAP Business AI.

Brenda Bown is chief marketing officer for SAP Enterprise AI Business.

WALLDORF — SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) will release its full results for the second quarter of 2025 on Tuesday, July 22.

SAP CEO Christian Klein and CFO Dominik Asam will host a virtual analyst conference to present second quarter financial figures, as well as an outlook on the current financial year.

Media representatives may listen in on the virtual analyst conference via Webcast at 11:00 p.m. CEST/ 5:00 p.m. ET.

In today’s rapidly evolving workforce, onboarding new employees efficiently has become a critical competitive advantage. Every extra week it takes to train an employee is a week of lost productivity.

The rise of AI is an opportunity not just to speed up learning, but to drive lasting organizational efficiency. A 2024 global survey by consulting firm Cegos found that 44 percent of employees already use AI-based learning, and 81 percent of HR leaders are integrating or planning to implement such technologies. This underscores the widespread adoption of AI in corporate learning, but it also raises a vital question: How can organizations ensure that the speed of learning does not come at the expense of depth and sustainability?

Time to competency matters

In corporate learning, time to competency is a central concept. It refers to the time it takes for employees to acquire the skills, knowledge, and confidence to perform their job effectively and independently. It is a critical metric, as shortening time to competency can boost productivity, reduce training costs, and provide a competitive edge. However, accelerated learning may prove counterproductive if the acquired knowledge is superficial or unsustainable.

AI is reshaping the learning experience

Whereas the human ability to learn has developed over millennia, AI capabilities have been developing in leaps and bounds over just a few years. When properly aligned with the best practices in how we learn, AI can transform the learning experience through three key dimensions: personalization, practice, and measurement. Consider, for instance, how field enablement for new sales employees demonstrates these dimensions in practice.

Personalized learning journeys drive engagement

First, AI-powered personalization drives higher engagement. Generative AI tools can help learners explore complex topics based on individual knowledge gaps. In the case of sales professionals, AI can analyze performance patterns and knowledge levels to create customized learning paths that focus precisely on the skills each individual needs to develop — whether product knowledge, negotiation techniques, or objection handling. This personalized approach leads to significantly greater knowledge retention and application as learning experiences become directly relevant to the role.

Accelerating skill development through simulated practice

Second, practice-based learning accelerates onboarding and skill acquisition. For example, sales professionals can use AI-powered simulators to practice customer conversations with virtual buyers who respond naturally to different pitches and approaches, while receiving instant feedback on their communication style, value proposition clarity, and response to objections. These simulated interactions build confidence before real customer engagements, drastically shortening ramp-up time.

Measuring and sustaining competency

Third, measurement ensures the knowledge truly sticks. Sustainable learning requires more than speed. It must embed deep understanding and long-term applicability. AI learning platforms track not just completion, but actual competency development through ongoing assessments. Repetitive, on-the-job training and immersive experiences can help reinforce knowledge. For instance, sales teams can utilize AI tools that analyze real customer interactions post-training, measuring how effectively new techniques are being applied and providing ongoing microlearning refreshers precisely when skills begin to fade — ensuring the investment in sales training delivers lasting performance improvement.

From skill gaps to strategic learning

Yet, even with these tools, learning and development professionals face challenges. The Cegos study reports that nearly half of HR professionals have difficulties adapting their training offerings quickly enough to meet actual needs. Employees, meanwhile, often feel their training needs are addressed too late. AI can close this gap by using learning analytics to identify skill gaps early and deliver timely interventions.

The real opportunity lies in balancing fast-track learning with long-term capability building. Companies must not only measure how fast employees reach competency, but also ensure the competency is durable. Key strategies include microlearning, adaptive content, mentorship, and integration of practical phases — all aimed at anchoring knowledge deeply while reducing unnecessary delays.

Ensuring lasting impact

To truly accelerate time to competency while ensuring deep, lasting understanding, companies need structured, scalable learning solutions. One such solution is SAP Learning Hub, which offers broad access to expert-led resources to both obtain and maintain SAP Certifications. Structured learning journeys support individualized pacing and continuous development, allowing employees to engage in professional growth without disrupting their daily responsibilities. By integrating SAP learning into everyday workflows, organizations can foster sustainable learning habits and equip employees with the skills needed for long-term performance.

In short, AI won’t replace human learning; it will enhance it, but only if we apply it with purpose. As leaders, we must measure success not just in speed, but in sustained capability.

Markus Marsch is global head of Product and Solution Learning for SAP Industries & Experiences.

London Climate Action Week 2025 brought together over 45,000 delegates across 700 events and saw SAP recognized with a Responsible AI Impact Award.

This year’s London Climate Action Week was less about reaffirming action, and more about accelerating it. Now in its seventh year, this is Europe’s largest city-wide climate event, bringing together policymakers, investors, NGOs, and technologists to accelerate plans ahead of COP30 in Belém, Brazil. Three major themes stood out across the week.

1. Decarbonize and build resilience

Business leaders and policymakers are focused on scaling decarbonization while also confronting the reality of escalating physical risks. From industrial heat to infrastructure retrofits, the message was clear: climate disruption is now a core business risk. As resilience is becoming synonymous with competitiveness, organizations are embedding climate data into board decisions and using it to guide strategy.

This shift is urgent: climate-driven losses are no longer theoretical, and businesses should treat physical risk with the same granularity and urgency as margin forecasting.

SAP has focused on turning physical climate risk into actionable intelligence for customers. By integrating sustainability metrics with financial models, companies can frame adaptation investments as cost-avoidance with measurable return on investment.

2. Mobilize climate finance

The gap between climate capital and real-economy transformation remains wide, especially in emerging markets. But momentum is building. London’s mayor announced a new climate finance task force aimed at crowding in public-private investment, while investors discussed blended finance models and sustainability-linked instruments. To stay investable, companies must present decision-grade sustainability data and show credible transition plans.

SAP is working with customers to bridge the divide between macro-level climate finance signals and operational decisions. That means using our systems to unify environmental data with financial and risk metrics, so sustainability reporting isn’t just about compliance, but about surfacing value. With green bonds and adaptation finance accelerating, businesses that can connect site-specific risk to capital expenditure planning will be best placed to access new funding streams.

We’re helping customers uncover the hidden costs of climate disruption — whether that’s increased cooling, transport volatility, or water constraints — and link them to balance sheet impacts. The result is a stronger business case for resilience investments, and more relevant data for financial partners.

3. Digital innovation and AI

A wave of sessions focused on the power of digital tools to accelerate climate action. SAP and fellow sustainability leaders highlighted how AI is enabling everything from emissions forecasting to supply chain optimization, while digital twins are helping companies and cities simulate disruption, model trade-offs, and optimize resources in real time.

Central to this story is responsible AI. At London Climate Action Week, SustainableIT.org recognized SAP with the Responsible AI Impact Award for its cross-functional work to embed ethical, human-centered AI into enterprise systems, driving outcomes that are not only efficient, but also equitable and sustainable.

This approach is guided by SAP’s Global AI Ethics Policy, which is grounded in the UNESCO recommendations on the Ethics of AI, and shapes how we build and deliver AI across all our sustainability and business solutions.

At SAP, we’re designing AI to assist, not replace, human activity — to scale climate action with integrity. We are focused on delivering embedded business AI tools that turn complexity into clarity, while preserving transparency and auditability.

Applying SAP’s tech lens: from insight to impact

London Climate Action Week 2025 made one truth unavoidable: climate leadership now hinges on trusted data and innovative technology, including human-centred AI. Across sessions, AI and unified data were repeatedly cited as the accelerants of climate progress, whether mapping Scope 3 emissions or modelling extreme weather scenarios.

Drawing on these insights, businesses can look to three main areas to boost their sustainability efforts:

• Make sustainability data first-class business data: SAP Green Ledger posts auditable carbon and financial entries side by side, turning emissions into actionable profit and loss drivers. When linked with site-level climate risk data, SAP Green Ledger allows businesses to understand the cost of disruption — from heatwaves to resource scarcity — and align sustainability with enterprise planning.
• Augment teams with responsible AI: With SAP Green Token, AI-assisted declaration image analysis automates thousands of supplier documents; with SAP Sustainability Footprint Management, AI-assisted emission factor mapping links thousands of materials to high-quality emission factors in minutes. In SAP Sustainability Control Tower, AI now also supports environmental, social, and governance (ESG) report generation, using best-practice templates to draft audit-ready reports, complete with data visualizations. This frees up sustainability teams to focus on strategy while increasing speed, accuracy, and regulatory confidence.
• Unify processes, finance, and sustainability in the cloud: SAP Sustainability Control Tower will become an intelligent application within SAP Business Data Cloud later this year, which will unify sustainability data and business operations on a single platform, enabling consistent reporting, deeper insight, and smarter decision-making across the enterprise.

By breaking down silos among sustainability, finance, procurement, and operations, SAP is enabling businesses to act faster on everything from climate disclosure to adaptation investment. When ESG data is managed like financial data — with rigor, governance, and relevance — it becomes a strategic asset.

Together, these capabilities turn the rallying cry of London Climate Action Week 2025 “from morality to materiality” into a practical playbook: embed sustainability where business happens and use responsible AI to scale impact without compromise. From emissions to adaptation to finance, the future of climate leadership is not just digital, it’s enterprise-deep.

Monica Molesag is global head of Sustainability Communications at SAP.