NEWS 3 - The World Management

08 October

How Joule Work and SAP Business AI Platform Are Powering the Next Generation of Business AI

The stability and reliability of half the world’s electrical grid partly depend on equipment built and maintained by one company.

Reinhausen has been innovating for over 100 years, and its spirit of invention continues as demand for its products grows at a stunning 20% a year.

The company also innovates with AI. They use it within their products to create customer value and to automate manual processes for employees. And they are adding more automation to help them meet growing demand amid skilled labor shortages. Reinhausen’s expertise in AI innovation is among the reasons the company joined SAP’s early adopter program for Joule Work.

“The Joule Work desktop early adopter program has delivered more momentum in just a few months than we saw in all the years before,” said Peter Wied, director of Complexity Management at Reinhausen. “What once required up to an hour of manual effort across our SAP S/4HANA environment is now accessible in seconds through natural language, fundamentally changing how our teams interact with business data.”

AI that answers complex business questions while running agent-driven workflows at scale

Soon, all SAP customers will enjoy the benefits of Joule Work when it rolls out later this month. We built it because the promise of AI goes far beyond text generation and fact-finding. It can help people make better decisions, informed by their data, and get answers to complex questions. SAP Business AI Platform ensures those answers are all grounded in the context of how a specific business runs.

These are advantages companies can only get from SAP because SAP Business AI Platform encodes decades of process and industry knowledge right into our applications, knowledge graph, and Joule Work. The platform also combines best-in-class third-party models with SAP’s own foundation models for ABAP code generation and predictions on structured data, alongside SAP’s proprietary domain models, which are pre-trained on SAP’s code, data models, and business processes.

This means every AI interaction can draw on the model best suited for the task—whether that’s generating clean code, predicting a business outcome, or answering a process question—with the accuracy and cost-efficiency that business-critical work demands. And through SAP Business Data Cloud, Joule Work accesses all the data it needs from a single unified source that breaks down silos and unifies data across SAP and non-SAP sources.

Now, SAP Reltio is generally available in SAP Business Data Cloud. It helps organizations eliminate fragmented records with a single trusted view of customers, suppliers, products, and employees across SAP and non-SAP systems.

But we know sharper decisions and reliable business answers are only part of the equation. Organizations need AI to take action and coordinate work across all their business processes. Earlier this year, Deloitte surveyed more than 500 leaders and found 74% said they would redesign or rebuild almost half of their business processes around AI agents.

Through the SAP Autonomous Suite, SAP provides a library of reliable, ready-to-use Joule Agents across every business function, so companies can hit the ground running. And Joule Work brings the most powerful business AI orchestration engine in the industry to run those agentic workflows at scale.

Build and connect anything

Joule Work and the SAP Business AI Platform provide an out-of-the-box competitive advantage for the AI era, but every company has its own unique advantages that should be strategically extended. This is why Joule Work’s Develop capability provides access to Joule Studio, soon to be generally available.

In Joule Studio, customers can customize and build Joule Agents with tools that embed process context and semantically rich data. They can also connect third-party systems with open standards because Joule Studio leverages over 11,800 pre-built business accelerators. Joule Studio is more than five times faster than do-it-yourself options, according to benchmarking done by Constellation Research.

With Joule Studio, anyone can describe what they want to build in natural language, while developers can use pro-code tools all in the same environment. New agents are deployed directly into Joule Work and inherit SAP security and governance.

Warehouse automation company KNAPP used Joule Studio to build an assistant that helps workers identify and solve problems without waiting for an expert. Issue resolution times have dropped by about 90%, while documentation and training times fell by about 80%.

In our industry, AI is not the future anymore; it is already happening. And that is exactly what our AI delivery pilot demonstrates every day. Our partnership with SAP makes complexity simple. When a problem appears on the warehouse floor, SAP Business AI Platform helps us solve it in seconds.

Florian Aufegger, Senior SAP EWM Solution Consultant, KNAPP AG

As organizations build and deploy more agents, governance also has to evolve from compliance checkpoints to an integral part of the entire agent life cycle. Trust remains the biggest barrier to AI adoption for 71% of technology buyers, according to BCG. This is why SAP AI Agent Hub, now generally available, helps organizations govern every agent, LLM, and MCP server across SAP and non-SAP environments. New capabilities, including SAP Signavio Agent Mining, measure the outcomes every agent delivers and identify opportunities to further optimize those outcomes.

Start scaling AI, and your business outcomes, today

BCG’s latest research found that the companies farthest ahead scaling AI deliver 2.4 times the revenue growth and 2.8 times the EBITDA growth of those falling behind.

Our customers, Reinhausen and KNAPP, show what that looks like up close: an hour of manual work reduced to seconds, and problems on the warehouse floor solved without waiting for an expert. Our goal is to make results like these repeatable for every SAP customer.

If you want to see more, the new SAP Connect virtual sessions are now live, and SAP TechEd starts October 27, in person and online. You can also request a demo of Joule Work and SAP Business AI Platform.

Brenda Bown is chief marketing officer for SAP Business AI Platform and Joule.

08 October

BUSINESS NEWS

SAP Expands Joule Assistants and Agents to Advance Autonomous Supply Chain Management

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Supply chain teams never lack decisions to make. What they increasingly lack is time.

I’ve spent most of my career building supply chain technology to drive business outcomes at scale. Earlier in my career, nobody was talking about AI. But I was helping build what we’d now call an autonomous supply chain.

At scale, manual decision-making simply cannot keep pace with growing consumer expectations. That’s why the next phase of supply chain AI needs to move beyond analysis to help organizations turn insights into action across the processes and applications that move goods.

Decision velocity: where supply chain speed is won or lost

Even the most intelligent supply chains can struggle to turn a meaningful signal into a well-governed response. I think of that as decision velocity: how quickly an organization can recognize change and coordinate the right response based on relevant business context.

In supply chain, decisions are inherently interconnected. Planning affects manufacturing, which depends on product and asset readiness, suppliers, logistics partners, and more. I hear this from our customers today: each decision could be rational; the sum of them was not.

AI can automate individual tasks, but isolated intelligence only creates isolated value.

Agents need to understand how a decision in one domain affects the next. That’s where supply chain applications become critical, providing the business context, connected processes, and controls that agents need to act.

New Joule Agents extend AI across the supply chain

This year at SAP Connect, we’re expanding the capabilities of six Joule Assistants introduced earlier at SAP Sapphire and adding specialized Joule Agents that can take on critical supply chain tasks. These capabilities will help organizations respond faster and automate more routine work while keeping people at the center of informed decision-making:

The Product Design Assistant will be able to interpret product designs, recipes, and specifications and orchestrate compliant product changes, helping accelerate time to market.
The Supply Chain Planning Assistant will help planners sense, simulate, and resolve exceptions in a single workspace, helping teams understand downstream impacts and address disruptions before they ripple across the enterprise.
The Manufacturing Assistant will help teams respond to plant-floor disruptions as they happen, while new capabilities in the Logistics Assistant span warehousing, outbound optimization, fulfillment, and transportation dispatching, helping turn logistics insight into action.
New agentic capabilities for the Asset Operations Assistant will help translate equipment and maintenance signals into action by supporting the initiation, screening, and simulation of maintenance requests. And the Business Network Assistant will improve collaboration with suppliers and logistics partners in areas such as sourcing, contracting, and exception handling.

What connects these scenarios is the ability for agents to operate within the business context already governing the supply chain, so an insight in one area can inform the next and, when authorized, trigger coordinated action. General availability for these new capabilities is planned for Q4 2026.

Customer results show autonomy taking hold

Customers are already putting this shift into practice.

Takeda Pharmaceuticals will use the Supply Chain Planning Assistant to help pinpoint likely causes behind planning issues and propose corrective steps, supporting adaptive planning processes over time.

Rebecca Kaufmann, senior vice president and head of Enterprise Platforms at Takeda Pharmaceuticals, said, “We are combining the SAP industry and technology knowledge with our organizational real-life experience. The Supply Chain Planning Assistant will provide us with AI-detected root causes and AI-suggested remediation and also automated performance tracking resulting in a self-healing capability.”

Doehler, a global producer of natural ingredients for the food, beverage, life sciences, and nutrition industries, is applying AI to logistics issue resolution.

Stephan Schissler, CIO at Doehler GmbH, says, “Our people’s greatest value lies in deciding what to do next—and now they can focus entirely on that. The Logistics Issue Resolution Agent detects the root cause, recommends the resolution, and turns a multi-hour firefight into a one-click decision. Our logistics team has recovered roughly a third of the time once lost to troubleshooting, and our processes are becoming self-resolving rather than exception-driven.”

This is how autonomy delivers practical value: moving from manually managing exceptions toward more intelligent supply chain processes.

Building autonomy on a foundation of trust

As AI takes on a greater role in supply chain decisions, trust must be built into how it operates. Leaders need to understand what AI decided and why, define what it is authorized to complete, intervene when necessary, and know who is accountable.

That is the direction behind everything we are introducing at SAP Connect in 2026. By grounding Joule Assistants and their agents in the processes and data of the SAP Supply Chain Management portfolio, we can help organizations move from insight to coordinated action while keeping people at the center of the decisions that matter most.

For supply chain leaders, that is where autonomy becomes tangible: less time spent on routine work and resolving exceptions, faster responses when conditions change, and more time for the strategic decisions that strengthen resilience, efficiency and customer value.

Ultimately, it comes down to decision velocity you can trust.

Devesh Mishra is general manager and chief product officer for SAP Supply Chain Management.

08 October

BUSINESS NEWS

SAP Showcases the Autonomous Enterprise in Action

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Just five months after promising customers that it would enable them to become AI-native autonomous enterprises, SAP has delivered: showcasing it with on-stage demos and live customers at SAP Connect in Las Vegas.

“It’s time to show you the Autonomous Enterprise in action underpinned by great customer stories,” SAP CEO Christian Klein told his keynote audience at the start of the event.

Klein reminded the audience that SAP introduced the Autonomous Enterprise at its SAP Sapphire conference in May 2026 as “the beginning of better.” Since then, he said, SAP has worked with hundreds of customers to implement Joule Work as the AI engagement layer for the Autonomous Enterprise.

A new UI for AI

“This month, we are rolling out Joule Work for all customers,” Klein said, describing it as a new UI for AI. He noted that for decades, users had to learn how SAP worked, but with Joule Work, SAP learns how people work. “From now on, the more than 400 million SAP users can talk in their own language to SAP, and Joule Work gets the job done.”

07 October

BUSINESS NEWS

SAP Accelerates Autonomous HCM

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AI is reshaping jobs, skills, and ways of working at an unprecedented pace, pushing organizations to rethink not only their business models, but the workforce they need to support what’s next.

According to research from the SAP SuccessFactors Future of Work Research Lab, 72% of executives believe organizations claiming to transform work with AI are primarily automating existing processes rather than fundamentally redesigning how work gets done. Yet, 88% say redesigning work and roles creates significant enterprise value. And HR is ranked as the No. 1 owner of that work. As a result, HR and business leaders are looking at how technology can support their need to continuously align people, skills, and work with evolving business priorities.

This is the journey to Autonomous HCM. Autonomous HCM is the future of human capital management, where AI automates end-to-end processes, drives context-aware decisions, and optimizes workforce operations at scale.

As we think about Autonomous HCM, we have defined three pillars:

Automate the HR function to release capacity from administrative work: HR teams currently spend a significant share of their time on operational activities such as payroll, service delivery, recruiting administration, and workforce management. AI can reduce much of that burden, creating capacity for more strategic work. But automation is not the destination. It’s the foundation. The true value comes from what organizations do with the time and resources they regain.
Redesign how tasks, workflows, roles, and teams are structured throughout the enterprise, across both people and AI: For decades, companies optimized around jobs, functions, and fixed processes. AI challenges many of those assumptions. The opportunity is no longer simply to make existing work more efficient. It is to rethink work itself. This is not just a technology initiative. It is one of the most important business transformation challenges organizations face today.
Reinvent how organizations recruit, develop, move, and reward their people: Most talent processes were built for a world characterized by stable jobs and predictable career paths, but that world is rapidly changing. Organizations that succeed will create talent ecosystems that can adapt as quickly as the business itself.

These three pillars are all interconnected: automation releases capacity, work redesign determines how value is created, and talent-system reinvention makes the new model sustainable.

What makes this possible is SAP’s unique ability to bring together trusted workforce data, connected business processes, ontology, and AI within a single business context. Together, this context enables organizations to move beyond isolated HR activities and make strategic workforce decisions that drive the most urgent business outcomes. This context is what matters.

During SAP Connect, SAP announced that it has entered into an agreement for SAP to acquire TechWolf. TechWolf provides a leading AI work intelligence platform, which helps organizations understand the work their people do and the skills they have, giving them the right context and the right grounding. Once the transaction closes, TechWolf is expected to power workforce and talent strategies across the SAP SuccessFactors portfolio, bringing skills mapping, workforce planning, and organizational redesign informed by context from across the Autonomous Enterprise to guide decisions about development, deployment, and workforce transformation.

New Innovations to SAP SuccessFactors HCM Suite

While Autonomous HCM is our vision for the future, we have several new innovations spanning the entire SAP SuccessFactors HCM suite, available this month, including:

A growing portfolio of AI assistants

New AI assistants orchestrate work end-to-end and support decisions in real time. Many of the agents that we announced at SAP Sapphire are available this month, including assistants for payroll, HR service, learning, recruiting, onboarding, and career and development. We have more agents coming soon, including the new Workforce Planning Assistant to support customers using SAP Enterprise Planning. It is powered by connected workforce, contingent labor, and financial data from SAP SuccessFactors, SAP Fieldglass, and SAP Cloud ERP, to help business and HR leaders forecast workforce needs and create plans for the most effective mix of hiring, reskilling, redeployment, and external talent to address changing workforce demands.

Significant updates to our global benefits solutions

Benefits are among the most important decisions employees make, and they can also be some of the most complex for HR teams to support. To help make benefits administration more efficient for HR and benefits decisions more personalized for employees, SAP announced two new innovations built natively into SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central. The new agentic admin console for U.S. benefits provides HR administrators with a centralized view of benefits enrollment activity and exceptions, helping them quickly identify and resolve issues with built-in monitoring and natural language support. By reducing time investigating enrollment issues and navigating reports, organizations can improve oversight and manage complex enrollment periods more efficiently. Additionally, the new benefits decision support tool uses employee data already in the system to recommend coverage aligned to individual needs and budgets, resulting in a more personalized and intelligent enrollment experience for employees.

New integration of WalkMe Learning Arc with SAP SuccessFactors Learning

Creating and deploying learning content can often take weeks, making it difficult for organizations to respond quickly to changing business needs. With this new integration, learning teams can describe learning requirements in natural language, and AI generates courses and quizzes while maintaining author control. Learning experiences can then be created and deployed directly within SAP SuccessFactors Learning in hours rather than weeks.

Shaping Autonomous HCM with our customers

As we look forward, we know that what has worked in the past will not take us to the future. The goal is not simply to showcase technology, but to prove how connected AI can help organizations translate strategic decisions into measurable workforce and business results faster and more effectively. Rather than organizing our innovation around individual products or modules, we are focusing our innovation around the most important outcomes our customers are trying to achieve—and in doing so, leaning into SAP’s strength in connecting data, workflows, and processes across the entire SAP portfolio. We will co-innovate with select customers to define, validate, and measure outcome-driven approaches that connect workforce decisions directly to business value, proving the value of our innovations in real time.

The journey starts now

We are at a defining moment for HR leaders. The future of work will not be shaped solely by technology. It will be shaped by the leaders who can translate transformation into meaningful outcomes for their organizations and their people.

Autonomous HCM is the future of HCM. But it does not start tomorrow. The journey starts today.

To learn more about the latest SAP SuccessFactors innovations and how SAP is helping organizations advance their journey toward Autonomous HCM, watch the Success Connect keynote replay.

Siva Sundaresan is general manager and chief product officer for SAP SuccessFactors.

07 October

BUSINESS NEWS

AI Can Act. Can Your Business Follow Through?

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At SAP Connect, we announced new and enhanced Joule Assistants for SAP Customer Experience, expanded SAP Order Management Services for complex B2B environments, and the general availability of SAP Commerce Cloud, cloud ERP edition.

These announcements build on the Autonomous Customer Experience strategy we introduced at SAP Sapphire. That premise is straightforward: AI must understand customer intent, make context-aware decisions, and execute within business guardrails. Following through on a customer commitment requires AI grounded in real-time, enterprise-wide business data, with a deep understanding of the processes needed to orchestrate work from intent to outcome.

A quote needs accurate pricing and terms. An order depends on inventory, credit, payment, and fulfillment. A service interaction requires information about the customer, the product, and the commitments the company has already made.

Customers generally do not see this operational complexity. They experience whether the company followed through.

Joule Assistants move from providing answers to driving business outcomes

Many AI tools can reason about what should happen next and recommend actions. But executing complex enterprise processes requires more than that.

AI needs to understand the live state of the business, including customer commitments, products, pricing, agreements, orders, payments, policies, and operational constraints. It must then navigate the approvals, exceptions, and cross-application steps required to act. Without that grounding, proposed actions may appear reasonable but can be inappropriate, infeasible, or break down in execution.

This is the direction behind the latest Joule Assistant innovations. New and enhanced Joule Assistants for SAP Customer Experience combine role-specific intelligence with business and process context across marketing, commerce, sales, service, finance, operations, and compensation, helping users move from understanding what should happen to getting the work done.

The innovations apply this approach to moments where fragmented context, manual steps, and handoffs can slow the customer experience.

Campaign Assistant and Content Assistant help teams move from campaign ideas to execution faster by reducing the effort required to plan, create, refine, and activate marketing campaigns.
Shopping Assistant makes product discovery easier and more relevant to what the customer is trying to accomplish.
Quoting Assistant brings customer, pricing, and commercial context together so sellers can prepare quotes faster and spend less time assembling information across systems.
Service Planning and Operations Assistant translates service demand into coordinated plans, reducing the manual work required to align people, resources, and customer commitments.
Incentive Compensation Assistant and Recurring Receivables Assistant bring the same intelligence to critical processes behind the customer experience, helping resolve questions, reduce administrative work, and keep compensation and payment workflows moving.

The goal is not to add another conversational interface. It is to move work forward by bringing together the business context, process knowledge, and controls required to act.

Human judgment remains important where decisions require approval, oversight, or exception handling. Within defined guardrails, AI can assemble context, determine and execute appropriate actions, and escalate when human intervention is needed.

Campaign Assistant brings campaign performance, business context, and recommended actions together to help marketers move from insight to execution.

SAP Order Management Services coordinates execution across ERP landscapes

Order management becomes more difficult when an order crosses ERP systems, legal entities, plants, distribution centers, and business units.

Each transition can introduce different information about pricing, inventory, credit, fulfillment status, or ownership of the next action. Consolidating every ERP system before improving order execution is not always a practical starting point.

SAP is expanding SAP Order Management Services to provide highly scalable, resilient, real-time omnichannel order orchestration across SAP S/4HANA and other ERP systems.

Built on a cloud-native, event-driven architecture, SAP Order Management Services coordinates order execution across channels, systems, business units, and third-party partners without requiring organizations to consolidate their ERP landscapes first.

The expanded capabilities provide a common layer for validating orders, checking inventory across locations, coordinating transactions between business units, and monitoring progress through fulfillment.

This gives organizations greater flexibility to add, remove, and experiment across channels, while enabling the order management layer to detect disruptions, trigger exception workflows, and keep execution aligned with the original customer commitment.

In complex enterprise landscapes, this combination of scale, flexibility, and reliable integration helps businesses deliver consistent omnichannel experiences while improving operational efficiency.

SAP Order Management Services helps teams monitor orders, identify disruptions, and manage exceptions across complex fulfillment environments.

Complete business context across the customer journey

Customer intent enters the business long before an order reaches a fulfillment system. It begins when a customer discovers a product, engages with a campaign, requests a quote, or starts a purchase journey.

To deliver on that intent, customer-facing interactions must remain connected to the pricing, inventory, ordering, fulfillment, and financial systems that support them.

SAP Commerce Cloud, cloud ERP edition, is now generally available. First introduced at SAP Sapphire, the edition allows midsize and growing companies to extend SAP Cloud ERP with commerce capabilities that use ERP data for pricing, availability, orders, invoices, and other transactional processes.

For more than a decade, SAP Commerce Cloud has supported some of the world’s largest and most complex digital commerce environments. With SAP Commerce Cloud, cloud ERP edition, we are extending that approach to companies that want a more standardized, SAP-managed path to ERP-connected commerce.

By using SAP Cloud ERP as the system of record, organizations can connect digital commerce with pricing, ordering, fulfillment, and financial processes without building and maintaining those connections independently. The result is a faster path to value, lower operational complexity, and an ERP-aligned commerce model designed to scale as the business grows.

SAP Commerce Cloud, cloud ERP edition, provides ERP-connected commerce with trusted pricing, availability, and ordering.

The same principle applies as customer interactions move across teams. A new native connection between SAP Engagement Cloud, enterprise edition, and SAP Sales Cloud synchronizes contact and company information while bringing relevant engagement signals directly into sales workflows. Instead of reconstructing customer context, sellers can continue conversations with a clearer understanding of prior engagement.

Customer experience depends on execution

AI can understand customer intent, make context-aware decisions, and act within defined guardrails. The harder question is whether the business can carry that action across the systems, teams, and processes responsible for delivery.

The innovations announced at SAP Connect address different parts of that challenge. Joule Assistants bring business and process context into the flow of work and help execute the next step. SAP Order Management Services orchestrates orders across complex ERP landscapes. SAP Commerce Cloud, cloud ERP edition, connects digital commerce directly with ERP pricing, availability, ordering, fulfillment, and financial processes.

Together, they advance a common principle: Autonomous Customer Experience depends on connecting customer-facing intelligence with the operational context and processes required to act.

Customers ultimately do not experience recommendations, models, or workflows. They experience whether the business followed through and delivered.

As AI begins to act on behalf of the business, the quality of that follow-through will depend on the business context, process knowledge, and operational reality behind every action.

Additional information on the SAP Connect announcements, including availability details and product-specific innovations, is available in the SAP Connect Innovation News Guide.

Balaji Balasubramanian is president and chief product officer of SAP CX.

07 October

BUSINESS NEWS

Spoiler Alert: The Future of Work Is Already Here

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Our Future of Work Research Lab at SAP SuccessFactors studies how jobs, organizations, leadership, and HR are changing and what those changes could mean for the future of work.

Many of the futures we have explored are no longer hypothetical. They are showing up in how work is organized and experienced today. The fundamental question now is whether organizations are shaping those changes deliberately or simply reacting as they unfold.

Our latest research combines monitoring of more than 500 business, academic, government, and economic resources with original global mixed methods research involving 2,718 employees, 500 C-suite leaders, 60 HR executives, and founders of AI-native companies. It points to a fundamental concern: organizations may be optimizing the future of work for efficiency when they should be designing it for value.

The productivity trap

In October 2025, we explored 10 predictions for work, workforces, and work practices, each with two possible futures. A year later, the evidence is strongest for what we call the “AI Upgrade” future, in which AI’s value is measured through efficiency, productivity gains, and time savings. Signals of broader work transformation are emerging, but they remain less established.

The emphasis on productivity is understandable because time savings, output, and cost reductions are relatively easy to measure. The harder question is what organizations do with the capacity AI can create. They can ask employees to produce more of the same work, or they can redesign work, roles, teams, and talent systems around what people and AI can achieve together.

Work transformation needs a north star

Related research from our strategic work redesign program found that 88% of employees said their jobs have changed because of AI, yet half of those changes occurred without meaningful guidance from managers or their organizations. Employees are using AI to simultaneously offload tasks and expand the scope of their work, often without a shared playbook or a clear view of the intended outcome.

Before organizations can transform work intentionally, they need a clear north star for what work should become. Yet between 55% and 70% of employees said they had received no clear organizational guidance on the work shifts they are expected to navigate. At the same time, 72% of C-suite leaders said that most organizations claiming to transform work with AI are really automating existing jobs faster. Without a shared vision for work transformation, organizations risk defaulting to isolated experimentation and efficiency-first use cases, creating uneven outcomes and limiting the combined potential of people and AI.

Six shifts to guide better work design

We endorse six shifts in work and organizational design that are both enabled by AI and associated with work-enriching characteristics well established in organizational psychology as leading to increased employee motivation, effort, performance, and retention:

From specialist to generalist: Apply core expertise across a broader range of problems and tasks.
From static jobs to dynamic roles: Organize work around flexible responsibilities and outcomes that evolve with business needs.
From pyramid to diamond organizational design: Reduce coordination layers and concentrate more people closer to where core work happens, enabling them to own end-to-end delivery.
From output to impact: Evaluate work by the value it creates, not simply by activity or deliverables.
From centralized authority to decentralized decision-making: Move decisions closer to the people and teams with the context to act.
From people management to self-leadership: Give employees greater ownership of their direction, performance, and growth.

Through an experimental study, we validated how all six shifts can enrich work. For example, employees perceived 77% greater autonomy under decentralized decision-making, while dynamic roles were perceived as 49% more challenging than static jobs. The full report examines these effects across all six shifts, compares where organizations are today with where employees believe they need to be, and offers a prioritized path for leaders to get started.

Work transformation requires HR transformation

If work shifts this substantially, the function responsible for the people agenda cannot assume its own role and structure will remain the same. HR was built for fixed jobs, predictable career paths, established hierarchies, and talent systems designed for consistency. AI challenges each assumption.

With this context, we see HR’s new mandate as focused on three interconnected pillars:

Automate: Use automation and intelligent systems to release capacity from administrative work and create space for more strategic contribution. C-suite leaders estimate that 49% of HR work will be fully automated within five years, compared with 35% of enterprise work overall.
Redesign: Lead enterprise work redesign by determining how tasks, workflows, roles, and teams are structured across people and AI. Executives ranked work redesign as the transformation pillar that will create the greatest enterprise value over the next five years and identified HR as its leading owner.
Reinvent: Overhaul recruitment, development, mobility, performance, and rewards to support how work now gets done and who succeeds in the new way of working. Seventy-five percent of executives agree that organizations can succeed in the AI era only if they reinvent how they measure, reward, and grow people.

In the full report, we also explore four plausible futures for how these pillars might come together to shape HR’s strategic contribution, depending on where leaders believe the people agenda can create the greatest value.

The future of work is a choice

The future of work is already being built. The opportunity now is to build it intentionally, creating better work for people and greater value for organizations.

Explore how our 10 predictions from 2025 are tracking, the evidence behind six work shifts for better employee and business outcomes, and four possible futures for how HR can create strategic value in an AI-enabled enterprise. Read the full report.

Dr. Autumn D. Krauss is chief scientist of the Future of Work Research Lab for SAP SuccessFactors.

07 October

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BUSINESS NEWS

Planning Beyond 2030: What SAP Business Suite 7 and SAP NetWeaver Customers Using Third-Party Databases or Java Need to Know

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Customer choice starts with clarity. With more than four years to go, now is the right time to understand what changes are coming at the end of 2030 and what they mean in practice.

The dates for SAP Business Suite 7 maintenance have not changed: mainstream maintenance remains available through December 31, 2027, followed by optional extended maintenance through December 31, 2030.

At the close of the optional extended maintenance period, several support arrangements will expire simultaneously, including SAP’s current reselling and support agreements for third-party databases and Java. What we want customers to understand is what the expiring third-party agreements mean for their systems—particularly for systems running on third-party databases or Java. Customers using these technologies should prepare now and plan accordingly.

According to Michael Bloch, member of the Board at the German-speaking SAP User Group (DSAG), “Early information is essential for companies operating SAP landscapes. We appreciate the open communication about the support implications after 2030. This transparency gives customers an important basis for planning. The significance of these developments will differ across organizations depending on their individual circumstances. What matters now is drawing the right conclusions and establishing a clear strategy for the way forward. However, any decision should be based on a comprehensive assessment of all available alternatives and their respective long-term consequences.”

What ends on December 31, 2030

At the close of the optional, extended maintenance at the end of 2030, several support arrangements expire simultaneously. Here are more details of what this means for our customers.

SAP’s current reselling and support agreements with major third-party database providers for these legacy environments

The existing reselling and support arrangements enable SAP and the technology providers to work closely together to build and improve tooling optimized for SAP workload on third-party databases and to support, when an issue evolves at the integration between SAP software and a third-party database or Java. SAP’s current reselling and support arrangements with major third-party database providers are scheduled to end for these legacy environments. With expiration of these arrangements, the foundation for providing these joint services to SAP customers ceases to exist.

Once these agreements expire, SAP will no longer provide database-specific support for third-party databases in these legacy environments, including for customers that originally licensed their third-party database through SAP and enrolled in SAP Maintenance and Support.

For all affected third-party databases, SAP support will no longer cover the database-related corrections available today. What does that mean in practice? Today, when a customer raises a support ticket on a third-party database issue, SAP handles it end-to-end, routing it through integrated internal processes directly to the database vendor’s team. After 2030, that integrated support path will no longer exist.

SAP’s support arrangements for Java

SAP’s current support arrangements for Java (Java 8/JEE5) used with SAP NetWeaver Application Server Java 7.5 (SAP NetWeaver AS JAVA 7.5) are scheduled to conclude at the end of 2030. This is the central constraint: once these arrangements expire, SAP maintenance, including customer-specific maintenance, cannot replace the support and rights they provide. SAP NetWeaver AS JAVA 7.5 with all the add-ons will fall into customer specific maintenance starting 2031 without a follow-on release.

What happens after December 31, 2030

Implications for customer-specific maintenance

After the extended maintenance period expired at the end of December 2030, on-premise SAP Business Suite 7 systems will run under customer-specific maintenance. However, what SAP can deliver under customer-specific maintenance is even further restricted specifically for the third-party database or Java side.

For such systems, SAP will not be able to provide comprehensive support for issues involving third-party databases or Java. This includes kernel patches and kernel security patches for third-party database environments. Also, SAP may no longer be able to provide support and even downloads of database tooling associated with third-party databases. This includes databases, administration tooling, backup tooling, and upgrade and migration tooling for third party databases.

Again, this is a reminder of an important consequence of the expiring agreements with third parties. An issue may occur that cannot be resolved within the support framework available after 2030. That is, as laid out, especially the case for third party DB or Java issues. Customers should therefore not regard customer-specific maintenance for affected environments as a sustainable long-term operating model of business-critical systems.

Implications for conversion

Timing matters for another reason. A system conversion from SAP Business Suite 7 on a third-party database to SAP S/4HANA or SAP Cloud ERP will only be available before the end of reseller/support agreements end of 2030. After that point, only greenfield transition scenarios (new implementations) will be possible.

For SAP solutions that rely on AS Java, SAP provides solution-specific transition recommendations. Detailed product impacts and technical guidance are documented in the relevant SAP Notes.

Recommended paths for our customers

SAP’s strategic recommendation

Customers should use the time available to move toward SAP Cloud ERP and the SAP Autonomous Suite. This is the path to continued innovation and a fully supported, future-ready environment. The right sequence will depend on each organization’s starting point, business priorities, and landscape complexity.

Customers should plan to complete their transformation to SAP Cloud ERP, together with the appropriate go-to solutions in the SAP Autonomous Suite, by the end of 2030. Starting early gives organizations greater control over scope, timing, and risk.

Transition option for SAP ERP

Qualifying customers whose transformation is underway, but that need additional time can consider Transition Option for SAP ERP. This time-bound subscription offering is intended for the largest and most complex SAP Business Suite 7 customers that may not complete their move by the end of extended maintenance. It is designed to support business continuity from 2031 through 2033 while enabling a structured path to SAP Cloud ERP. Systems must be moved to SAP ERP, private edition on SAP HANA before December 31, 2030, and further eligibility requirements apply. The transition option does not support Java-dependent capabilities.

In select cases, switching to SAP HANA database

Customers that intend to continue operating SAP Business Suite 7 on premise can remove the third-party database dependency by moving the relevant system to SAP HANA before the end of 2030. This does not extend mainstream or optional extended maintenance. The system would still enter customer-specific maintenance, with the limitations that this entails, and SAP does not recommend this as the strategic long-term path.

Moving forward together

Our customers do not need to make these decisions alone. We are working with customers, partners, and our user groups to make the implications transparent and support realistic planning.

The maintenance dates announced in 2020 remain in place. On top, after 2030, dependencies on affected third-party databases and SAP NetWeaver Java cannot be comprehensively supported even under customer-specific maintenance. Our customers have defined paths forward, but some choices must be implemented before the end of 2030.

Now is the time to assess affected systems, clarify dependencies, and discuss the best path together with SAP or an SAP partner. Acting early gives organizations the freedom to sequence the work around their business priorities, reduce uncertainty, and protect continuity.

We will continue to communicate transparently and support our customers as they move towards SAP Cloud ERP and the SAP Autonomous Suite.

Learn more

Maintenance Strategy

2020 announcement

SAP ERP/transition

Updates for SAP ERP, private edition, transition option

SAP Notes

Philipp Herzig is CTO and a member of the Extended Board of SAP SE.

06 October

BUSINESS NEWS

SAP to Acquire TechWolf, Giving Enterprises Evidence-Based View of Work in the Age of AI

by tempuser_3528357508 0 Comments

WALLDORF and GHENT, Belgium — SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) and TechWolf today announced they have entered into an agreement for SAP to acquire TechWolf, provider of a leading AI work intelligence platform.

TechWolf gives enterprises a continuously updated view of the work their people do and the skills they have, using its proprietary data model called context graph for work. The acquisition will bring this context graph, along with TechWolf’s AI models and applied AI research team, into SAP, establishing work intelligence as a strategic SAP asset. The deal is expected to close in Q4 2026, subject to usual closing conditions, including regulatory approval. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

TechWolf works from existing HR and business systems that customers connect. It builds its model of the organization at three levels: the work itself, down to the tasks inside a job; the skills people have and apply; and the external labor market. It maps that against the customer’s business strategy, so the leaders responsible for hiring, reskilling and redeployment are working from better information.

TechWolf is expected to become an intelligent core of the SAP SuccessFactors portfolio, supporting the company’s talent and work intelligence strategy. TechWolf will power workforce and talent strategies across SAP SuccessFactors, bringing skills mapping, workforce planning and organizational redesign informed by context from across the Autonomous Enterprise. Once the transaction closes, TechWolf and SAP will unify skills and work data to inform HR and business leaders to guide decisions about development, deployment and workforce transformation.

“TechWolf’s proprietary context graph for skills and work provides an excellent grounding layer for agent queries regarding work and skills planning and talent management,” said Manoj Swaminathan, president and chief product officer for SAP Autonomous Suite and member of the Extended Board of SAP SE. “This grounding layer perfectly matches our strategy. It makes token usage more efficient, lowers the cost of deploying workforce agents and will make Joule more intelligent in AI-driven HR scenarios such as skills-based hiring, workforce planning and role redesign.”

Joint SAP and TechWolf customers using the technology are seeing measurable results from the partnership the two companies have had. Building on that foundation, SAP and TechWolf will jointly co-innovate a concrete set of new AI-powered workforce and skills optimization products to be designed and developed post-close. SAP plans to integrate TechWolf’s solutions to a greater degree, offering customers even better insights and work intelligence to help organizations plan reskilling, internal mobility and hiring.

“Organizations everywhere are trying to figure out how AI is reshaping work, and what their workforce needs to look like because of it,” said Andreas De Neve, CEO and co-founder of TechWolf. “We have spent eight years building the evidence layer to answer those questions. It’s always been our mission to connect skills, tasks and work to help employers solve AI transformation, and joining SAP will allow us to extend that mission across a broader set of business context and larger scale. In this next chapter, we plan to build a world-class AI company.”

Subject to closing and required consultation, SAP’s current plans are for TechWolf to remain as an independent entity under CEO Andreas De Neve in its Ghent headquarters, with offices in London, New York and San Francisco, and for its platform to remain available to both SAP and non-SAP customers. J.P. Morgan served as exclusive financial advisor to TechWolf.

Visit the SAP News Center. Get SAP news via LinkedIn and Bluesky.

About TechWolf

TechWolf is a leading applied AI company that helps large enterprises understand how AI is transforming work and what that means for their workforce. Its platform brings together skills, work, and market intelligence, into a single context graph for work; Its open-source models have been downloaded more than two million times. TechWolf co-exists with systems enterprises already use, including SAP SuccessFactors and non-SAP applications, and connects with AI tools and agents. Customers include HSBC, Atlas Copco Group, GSK, Ericsson, AMD, MetLife, PayPal and Booking.com. The company offers EU and US data-residency, standard encryption, access controls and certifications including ISO/IEC 42001 and ISO/IEC 27001 that support EU AI Act governance and security. Learn more at www.techwolf.ai.

About SAP

As a global leader in enterprise applications and business AI, SAP (NYSE: SAP) stands at the nexus of business and technology. For over 50 years, organizations have trusted SAP to bring out their best by uniting business-critical operations spanning finance, procurement, HR, supply chain, and customer experience. For more information, visit www.sap.com.

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For customers interested in learning more about SAP products:
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For more information, press only:
Aimée Leabon, +1 (212) 653-9600, aimee.leabon@sap.com, EDT
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SAP Press Room; press@sap.com
Reinhard De Milt, TechWolf, +32 498 495781, reinhard.demilt@techwolf.ai, CEST

This press release was created with the assistance of artificial intelligence and has been reviewed by the editorial team.

This document contains forward-looking statements, which are predictions, projections, or other statements about future events. These statements are based on current expectations, forecasts, and assumptions that are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results and outcomes to materially differ. Additional information regarding these risks and uncertainties may be found in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including but not limited to the risk factors section of SAP’s 2025 Annual Report on Form 20-F.
© 2026 SAP SE. All rights reserved.
SAP and other SAP products and services mentioned herein as well as their respective logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP SE in Germany and other countries. Please see https://www.sap.com/copyright for additional trademark information and notices.

06 October

BUSINESS NEWS

SAP Puts the Autonomous Enterprise to Work

by tempuser_654757941 0 Comments

Joule Work, Joule Assistants and SAP Business AI Platform help organizations turn business AI into trusted outcomes across every core function.

LAS VEGAS — SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) today showcased the Autonomous Enterprise in action at SAP Connect, demonstrating how Joule Work and Joule Assistants generate value for customers across every line of business.

“This is a breakthrough moment for business AI,” said Christian Klein, CEO of SAP SE. “The Autonomous Enterprise has arrived. With Joule and SAP Autonomous Suite, built on SAP Business AI Platform, we’re helping organizations like Novartis, Morgan Foods, Nestlé and PwC connect intelligence across every function to deliver trusted business outcomes.”

At SAP Connect, these customers shared how the Autonomous Enterprise is already driving measurable value across their businesses:

“We’ve co-developed and recently launched a pilot of SAP’s Joule Sourcing Assistant,” said Christoph Buerki, Head of Procurement, Novartis. “Our vision is for AI agents to handle the manual heavy lifting, enabling sourcing professionals to focus on strategy, supplier engagement and value creation.”
“At Morgan Foods, we’re already putting the pieces in place for agentic adoption, especially through our technical foundation. The biggest shift will be moving from reactive to predictive, where agents can connect demand signals, inventory levels and supplier status faster than ever before,” said Steve Hankins, Chief Financial Officer, Morgan Foods, “Our superpower will come from people on top of agents. Our approximately 1,000 employees are what make our supply chains work—the technology helps make them even better.”
“Our SAP S/4HANA transformation across 140 countries is creating a connected digital core with consistent processes, trusted data and greater visibility across markets and functions. With that foundation, Joule and the Accounts Receivable Assistant can automatically prioritize collections work based on risk and business context, recommend the next best action and help our finance teams respond faster to change,” said Luca Dell’Orletta, Global Head IT Innovation & Enterprise Architecture, Nestlé.
“In professional services, billing can be one of the more error-prone processes, with accuracy playing an important role in the client experience. SAP’s Billing Assistant brings greater intelligence to this critical process, helping identify potential issues earlier so our people can deliver better client outcomes and build stronger relationships,” said Jill Notz, Chief Accounting Officer, Controller, Business Services Leader, PwC. Building on the success of the Billing Assistant, PwC and SAP are extending their collaboration into new areas of joint AI innovation.

SAP’s Autonomous Enterprise Scales Up

Joule Work is beginning its customer rollout as a new AI user interface that lets employees interact with SAP solutions in their own language and complete work across SAP and third-party data. Grounded in business context from SAP Knowledge Graph, which maps more than 7 million data fields, Joule provides information users can rely on. At SAP, Joule Work is already live with 110,000 employees, with the company seeing 20% productivity gains across finance, HR and procurement. A select group of customers also is using Joule Work in their business environments.

“After 28 years as an SAP customer, partnering with SAP on our AI journey and the Joule Work desktop early adopter program has delivered more momentum in just a few months than we saw in all the years before,” said Peter Wied, Director of Complexity Management, Maschinenfabrik Reinhausen. “What once required up to an hour of manual effort across our SAP S/4HANA environment is now accessible in seconds through natural language—fundamentally changing how our teams interact with business data.”
“The dedicated team has been phenomenal. Their proactive communication, focus on accelerating architecture activation, rapid remediation of defects and overall support have enabled us to become Joule ready much sooner than would have been possible had we needed to navigate these challenges on our own,” said Keith Smith, SAP Platform Architect, CONA Services. “The CONA team is excited about the progress made to date and looks forward to exploring and testing Joule’s capabilities in greater depth over the coming months as we continue our adoption journey.”

When a query is not enough, Joule Assistants execute operational work directly within business workflows, using established data, authorizations and audit trails. Customers control the level of autonomy. SAP’s approach is also open: through the Agent2Agent protocol, Joule can connect with third-party AI and agents, bringing governed business context into broader AI workflows.

At SAP Connect, SAP showcased how these capabilities generate outcomes across SAP Autonomous Suite:

In finance, controllers can automate revenue recognition, disclosures and trade compliance, with early deployments of the International Trade Assistant reducing trade classification effort by up to 50%.
In supply chain, planners can turn multi-hour disruptions into one-click resolutions across planning, manufacturing and logistics.
In HR, leaders can determine the best way to close workforce gaps, while employees can make smarter benefits choices tailored to their needs.
In procurement, decision-makers can identify savings opportunities against peer benchmarks and manage the full contingent workforce life cycle.
In customer experience, organizations can turn customer engagement into sales opportunities with AI-powered campaigns, quoting and customer workflows.
Across industries, SAP is collaborating with customers to apply AI to specialized industry processes, helping organizations in manufacturing, retail, commodity trading and asset-intensive industries improve decision-making, automate routine actions and build more resilient operations.

The Platform Powering Business AI You Can Trust

SAP Business AI Platform gives organizations one place to build, contextualize and govern AI across SAP and third-party environments. With Joule Studio, business users and developers can build and extend skills and agents from no-code to pro-code workflows, choosing from more than 70 AI models. SAP Business Data Cloud and SAP Knowledge Graph ground those agents in trusted business data and context, helping organizations select the right model for each use case and better manage AI value and consumption.

SAP-managed governance helps organizations scale AI with transparency, accountability and control. SAP AI Agent Hub in SAP LeanIX solutions provides a central inventory of enterprise agents, while SAP’s independently ISO/IEC 42001-certified governance architecture supports regulatory requirements, established authorizations and auditable AI operations.

To help organizations adopt AI at scale, SAP’s Business Transformation Management portfolio, including SAP Signavio, SAP LeanIX and SAP WalkMe solutions, provides the toolchain to analyze processes, govern applications and agents, and drive adoption across the enterprise.

SAP Brings Embedded Payments to Cloud ERP

SAP also announced that it is entering the payments market with SAP Pay, powered by Tereina, an SAP company. Embedded directly in SAP Cloud ERP, SAP Pay executes and reconciles payments within the same workflow when an invoice is due, reducing manual file handling and external processing dependencies, while giving customers greater control.

Partners Expand the Reach of Autonomous Business

SAP is extending the Autonomous Enterprise beyond SAP’s own application portfolio through new partnerships that bring specialized intelligence directly into SAP workflows.

A new partnership between SAP and Moody’s Corporation is designed to embed Moody’s supplier risk monitoring data into SAP Ariba Supplier Lifecycle and Performance. This gives procurement teams continuously updated insights into supplier financial health, operational risk and regulatory status at the point of decision. Organizations will be able to move from periodic risk reviews toward continuous monitoring, enabling Joule Agents to flag supplier risk signals and surface alternatives before disruption affects the business.

An expanded partnership with ORO Labs brings procurement orchestration to SAP customers as a solution extension. SAP Ariba Procurement Orchestration by ORO Labs is a purpose-built orchestration layer that connects procurement workflows end to end across heterogeneous enterprise environments, giving business users a seamless experience for intake, actions and visibility.

Visit the SAP News Center. Get SAP news via LinkedIn and Bluesky.

About SAP

For customers interested in learning more about SAP products:
Global Customer Center: +49 180 534-34-24
United States Only: 1 (800) 872-1SAP (1-800-872-1727)

For more information, press only:
Aimée Leabon, +1 (212) 653-9600, aimee.leabon@sap.com, EDT
SAP Press Room; press@sap.com

This press release was created with the assistance of artificial intelligence and has been reviewed by the editorial team.

This document contains forward-looking statements, which are predictions, projections, or other statements about future events. These statements are based on current expectations, forecasts, and assumptions that are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results and outcomes to materially differ. Additional information regarding these risks and uncertainties may be found in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including but not limited to the risk factors section of SAP’s 2024 Annual Report on Form 20-F.
© 2026 SAP SE. All rights reserved.
SAP and other SAP products and services mentioned herein as well as their respective logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP SE in Germany and other countries. Please see https://www.sap.com/copyright for additional trademark information and notices.
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06 October

BUSINESS NEWS

Innovation News Guide: Advancing the Autonomous Enterprise

by tempuser_3352195158 0 Comments

New innovations are bringing the Autonomous Enterprise to life.