Across industries and geographies, organizations are operating in an environment defined by uncertainty. Geopolitical volatility, supply chain disruption, regulatory complexity, and accelerating technological change are no longer exceptional circumstances. They are the new baseline.
In this context, innovation is not about experimentation on the sidelines. It is about building the operational foundation required to remain effective, trustworthy, and competitive under pressure.
For many years, enterprise technology focused primarily on optimization, improving efficiency, reducing cost, and increasing speed. These goals still matter, but they are no longer sufficient for business success. Today, leaders must ensure that their organizations can adapt in real time, integrate seamlessly across ecosystems, and maintain control over their most critical data and processes.
Recognizing organizations innovating with purpose and achieving meaningful outcomes with SAP technologies
This shift, from readiness for known scenarios to resilience in the face of the unknown, is what unites the 19 winners of the 2026 SAP Innovation Awards.
From technology adoption to institutional capability
Earlier this month, we announced the finalists for this year’s awards. Today, it is my privilege to recognize the winners, organizations that have moved decisively from ambition to execution.
What distinguishes these companies, public institutions, and organizations is not the novelty of the technologies they use, but the way they apply them. They treat business processes as strategic assets. They design for interoperability, transparency, and trust. And they understand that digital transformation is ultimately about strengthening institutional capability, not simply deploying software.
Across hundreds of submissions, the winning projects consistently demonstrated three priorities that are increasingly inseparable:
Operational effectiveness, where strategic intent is translated into measurable outcomes
Control and sovereignty, ensuring compliance, security, and ownership of data while operating at global scale
Ecosystem orchestration, connecting partners, suppliers, and stakeholders to reduce fragmentation and increase responsiveness
By leveraging the depth and breadth of the SAP portfolio, from cloud ERP and business AI to industry solutions and SAP Business Technology Platform, these organizations have shown that stability and innovation are no longer mutually exclusive.
The 2026 SAP Innovation Award winners
The following organizations represent the action side of transformation. Each demonstrates how disciplined execution and a clear architectural vision can deliver tangible value for customers, employees, and society.
AI Excellence
Harnessing SAP Business AI to fundamentally improve productivity and decision-making:
Martur Fompak International
Cloud ERP Champion
Embracing cloud ERP as the backbone for long-term agility and scalability:
PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC)
Vedanta Limited
Customer Experience Innovator
Redefining customer engagement through integrated, cloud-based business processes:
IBM
Financial Futurist
Modernizing financial operations to increase transparency, resilience, and trust:
Ministry of Defence of Ukraine
Industry Leader
Applying multiple SAP solutions to transform business models, collaborate across ecosystems, and generate societal or environmental impact:
Accenture (Service and Financial Services Industries)
People Experience Pioneer
Reimagining the employee experience through data-driven and human-centric transformation:
Capgemini
Procurement Visionary
Using automation and insight to strengthen spend control and supplier collaboration:
TASNEE (National Industrialization Company)
Services Superstar
Accelerating business outcomes through the effective use of SAP services:
Federal Tax Authority, United Arab Emirates
Supply Chain Catalyst
Building resilient, compliant, and transparent supply chains:
Sasol
Ericsson
Sustainability Hero
Leveraging data to enable responsible decision-making and support a more sustainable economy:
ArcelorMittal SA
Technology Pathfinder
Solving complex business challenges with measurable impact using SAP Business Technology Platform:
Promocean The Netherlands BV
Land O’Lakes, Inc.
Transformation Impact
Driving enterprise-wide change and strengthening long-term transformation capability:
KPMG International
Recognition and responsibility
All of our winners have set a clear benchmark for what resilient, future-ready organizations look like in practice.
We look forward to recognizing their achievements at SAP Sapphire, where customers and partners from around the world will come together to share insights, compare experiences, and continue shaping the ecosystems that underpin global business.
Looking ahead
The SAP Innovation Awards are more than just a moment of recognition. They signal that digital sovereignty, operational resilience, and responsible innovation are achievable across industries, sectors, and regions. The organizations recognized this year demonstrate what is possible when technology choices are guided by clear priorities and long-term thinking.
May these examples encourage others to take the next step, moving with confidence from readiness to resilience.
Welcome to the SAP Business AI product updates for Q1 2026. I’m new in the chief AI officer role, but the mission hasn’t changed: helping our customers get real value from AI.
Joule is now live across 35 solutions and will continue to meet our customers where they are: across the applications they use, with a firm understanding of their business context and data. That’s why in Q1 we are embedding Joule into more applications—from SAP Datasphere, where it can now execute tasks or explain specific functionalities, to SAP Intelligent Clinical Supply Management, where users can use natural language to retrieve critical data and navigate to relevant applications.
Achieve company-wide ROI and transform how work gets done with agents grounded in your business data
Joule Agents, such as the Tender Analysis Agent, are boosting customer revenue growth by extracting critical requirements and flagging risks in complex documents. While project managers in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition are saving time setting up projects with the new Project Setup Agent. Plus, there are many more agents to discover below.
Agents are becoming a key new user—and enabler—of enterprise software, joining humans as the only other non-deterministic operators while simultaneously expanding enterprise software’s scope and usefulness. Our agents will continue to deliver trustworthy, repeatable, and auditable results every time.
We now have over 40 specialized agents and more than 2,400 Joule Skills. The agent-to-agent protocol means our agents work across SAP and non-SAP systems. As the number of agents grows across both, SAP AI Agent Hub already today provides customers with the essential infrastructure and guardrails to manage, govern, and discover agents in this new ecosystem.
Some highlights from Q1 2026:
SAP Joule for Consultants is a conversational AI solution that provides expert guidance on cloud transformations, drawing on SAP’s knowledge base. To improve trust and traceability, citations are now displayed in a dedicated side panel and can be grouped for clarity. Administrators can enable web search, allowing Joule to draw from public content while maintaining clear source attribution. For tailored answers to problems where the system may not have customer-specific documentation, consultants can now upload up to 10 PDF or text files directly into the chat. This is further enhanced by the inclusion of content from the SAP Enterprise Architecture Reference Library, which provides more complete and accurate answers to complex queries. Get started here.
SAP Business AI for supply chain minimizes disruptions and simplifies planning. The Project Setup Agent allows project managers to rapidly establish new projects by drawing on data from past initiatives. SAP Integrated Business Planning users can now generate complex formulas in Microsoft Excel with natural language. SAP Digital Manufacturing can distill complex manufacturing issues into clear descriptions. Joule is also helping SAP Integrated Product Development users create problem reports and requirement models with simple, natural-language commands. Explore more below.
SAP Business AI for finance offers greater efficiency and insight across critical processes. Joule now translates complex e-invoicing errors into plain language. The Dispute Resolution Agent automates root-cause analysis for invoice disputes, while payment advice processing significantly reduces document processing time. Unstructured data, such as PDFs, can now be automatically transformed into sales orders, and accountants can access natural language explanations for complex fixed asset calculations. Users can personalize their home page and easily understand system errors using natural language across SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition. Learn more below.
SAP Business AI for procurement and customer experience enhances the entire commercial journey with new capabilities. In procurement, automated statement of work (SOW) creation in SAP Fieldglass reduces the time to define deliverables. The Catalog Optimization Agent means e-commerce managers can continuously improve product data quality. In retail, managers can get instant, conversational answers from Joule on order management data. There’s so much more to learn below.
SAP Business AI for IT and developers puts the latest tools and greater control directly into the hands of developers and data professionals. Joule is now generally available in SAP Datasphere, enabling users to navigate the platform, get answers, and execute tasks using simple conversational language. The generative AI hub in AI Foundation continues to expand, offering developers access to the newest models, including OpenAI GPT 5.2, Gemini 3.0 Pro, Anthropic Claude Opus 4.6, and Claude Sonnet 4.6. Developers also gain greater power through enhancements such as advanced prompt optimization, metadata filtering, and declarative orchestration configurations in the prompt registry. Additionally, SAP Document AI now offers more granular control with custom confidence thresholds and expanded document support. Dive into everything below.
SAP Business AI for industries delivers specialized intelligence to solve unique business challenges. Sales teams can accelerate their response process with the new Tender Analysis Agent, which automates the review of complex RFQ documents to improve win rates. Joule now works with SAP Commodity Management to turn verbal or written negotiations directly into detailed draft deals. In life sciences, clinical supply professionals can use predictive analytics to reduce inventory waste costs, and Joule dramatically cuts information search time. SAP Self-Billing Cockpit automates invoice data extraction from any format, significantly reducing manual processing time. Discover more for industries below.
SAP Business AI for business transformation management provides the critical insights needed to navigate and accelerate organizational change. Joule is now in SAP Signavio, enabling natural-language searches that cut information discovery time. Business process model and notation simulations in SAP Signavio provide clear, actionable summaries directly within process diagrams. Meanwhile, enterprise architects can leverage guidance in SAP LeanIX to surface actionable insights directly from their architecture inventory, accelerating transformation execution and reducing the time to uncover them. Read more about transformation management below.
Joule
Joule, enhancements
User experience is improved by streamlining startup times and introducing cross-thread search functionality that lets end users find information across all conversation threads without manually checking individual histories. The document grounding capability has also seen a substantial upgrade, now supporting seamless integration with Google Drive.
Furthermore, scalability has been greatly improved, as the system now supports up to 8,000 documents per pipeline, enabling large-scale data repositories to be processed and utilized efficiently.
Enhanced Citation Visibility SAP Joule for Consultants has improved how citations are displayed for all identified sources returned by the product. Citations have been relocated to the right side in a dedicated panel for clearer visibility, and now also include public web search results when applicable (see below).
A new grouping feature has also been added, allowing citations to be grouped. This update provides users with a more transparent view of where information originates, strengthens trust, and improves traceability across all responses.
To see the sources and panel, click the sources button below each message; the panel will open on the right, showing all grouped sources.
Enable Web Search Administrators can now enable/disable web search via the control panel for all assigned end users in SAP Joule for Consultants.
When enabled, SAP Joule for Consultants will consider public web content in its reasoning and cite relevant public sources in responses when they contribute to the answer. This enhancement gives organizations greater flexibility and transparency by enabling broader coverage of information while maintaining clear source citations for all sources used.
File Uploads in the Joule Message Input End-users can now upload up to 10 files directly from the conversational message input box and reference them throughout the entire conversation.
Supported file types include PDF and TXT. Each file should be no more than 10 MB/600K characters; for PDFs, an approximation. A 100-page limit applies; if your file is larger, split it into multiple documents. Image files are currently not processed and will be ignored. We are working diligently to make this feature even more useful to end users. This enhancement enables richer, context-aware interactions by allowing you to incorporate your uploaded documents into its conversational responses throughout the session. Please be aware that the standard data privacy terms apply. See also the help documentation for additional information on the free user quota.
Content: SAP Enterprise Architecture Reference Library SAP Enterprise Architecture Reference Library data has been ingested and is now available for use in conversations. As more data is added, relevant portions may be included in SAP Joule for Consultants’ responses, enabling more complete, accurate, and context-rich answers to user queries. Since SAP Enterprise Architecture Reference Library content cannot be link-referenced, you won’t see the additional content listed under sources, even though it will be referenced.
Project managers can now rapidly establish new projects by drawing on data from similar past initiatives. The agent bypasses complex interfaces and reduces reliance on the project management office (PMO) to facilitate the swift allocation of key resources needed to launch projects effectively. With a 10% reduction in project creation time, 16% faster resource allocation, and 30% less time spent reworking projects due to incorrect templates, teams can shift focus from operational coordination to improving project profitability and driving efficiency.
SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition, AI-assisted retrieval of equipment information in service management General availability
Service managers using the AI-assisted retrieval feature in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition gain a complete 360-degree view of customer equipment. The feature provides instant access to warranty information and a full history of service transactions, complemented by an AI summary and actionable recommendations. This allows service managers to more efficiently oversee service schedules, reduce potential downtime, and ensure customer equipment operates at peak performance.
SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, AI-assisted input recommendations for returns order creation General availability
Returns clerks can accelerate the creation of customer returns with data field recommendations powered by historical data. This feature analyzes past return documents with similar process variants to automatically suggest the most common input values and return reasons, minimizing manual data entry and reducing errors. Organizations benefit from a one percent reduction in data management costs and a five percent decrease in business and operations analysis expenses, enabling returns teams to process orders more efficiently while maintaining accuracy.
SAP Integrated Business Planning, AI-assisted MRO inventory analysis General availability
Inventory planners get a new analytical assistant in the MRO inventory analysis feature for SAP Integrated Business Planning. The feature accelerates root cause analysis by generating clear, natural-language summaries that explain the key drivers behind recommended safety stock and reorder points. By translating complex calculations into understandable insights, this capability enables planners to reduce time spent analyzing inventory runs by 30%, leading to faster adoption of outputs and ensuring that inventory parameters align with strategic business goals.
SAP Integrated Business Planning, add-in for Microsoft Excel, AI-assisted planning General availability
Supply chain planners can now simplify their work with a new AI-assisted planning add-in for Microsoft Excel. Instead of manually creating complex formulas or formatting rules, which often require technical expertise, they can simply describe their needs in natural language, and the system automatically generates the correct syntax. This intuitive way of interacting with the system removes technical barriers and improves a planner’s efficiency by 10%, freeing them to focus on strategic analysis rather than implementation details.
SAP Integrated Business Planning, AI-assisted system security check General availability
Supply chain planners and security analysts gain a robust way to assess system configurations against established security recommendations. The feature evaluates compliance states and provides clear guidance on required adjustments, helping administrators identify and address potential gaps while aligning configurations with SAP best practices. Organizations can expect a 27% increase in compliance with hardening guidelines and a 32% reduction in the effort required to meet security recommendations. This feature strengthens the protection of sensitive data and reduces the risk of security breaches.
SAP Integrated Product Development, AI-assisted problem report creation General availability
Maintenance engineers can simplify the creation of formal problem reports by leveraging AI capabilities in SAP Integrated Product Development. By describing an issue in their own words to Joule, it intelligently extracts key details like the problem name, tags, and priority, and then automatically generates a structured report. This streamlined process dramatically reduces manual data entry and ensures all reports are consistent and compliant with organizational standards, improving overall efficiency.
SAP Integrated Product Development, AI-assisted requirements model creation General availability
Requirements managers now have a more direct path to creating requirement models within SAP Integrated Product Development by using natural language commands with Joule. This feature allows them to initiate new models, specify names, and apply templates in a single step, completely bypassing the need to navigate through complex folder structures. This streamlined approach provides a much faster starting point for new projects and empowers users to begin their work immediately without requiring deep knowledge of the repository layout.
SAP Field Service Management, AI-assisted automated scheduling analytics General availability
Field service dispatchers and consultants can now access clear, on-demand explanations of auto-scheduling results that demystify complex system logic. The new feature interprets scheduling reports and translates technical scoring details into business-friendly insights, explaining why specific technicians were assigned, why alternatives were passed over, and why certain activities remained unscheduled. This transparency drives a 12.5% increase in dispatcher productivity and a five percent reduction in erroneous resource allocations, strengthening trust in automated decisions while significantly reducing analysis time.
SAP Digital Manufacturing, AI-assisted description enhancement General availability
Quality managers documenting complex manufacturing issues can now generate clear, objective, and structured descriptions with minimal effort. SAP Digital Manufacturing for issue resolution offers description generation that refines rough initial inputs, removes bias and subjective language, and produces balanced, factual problem statements. With support for multilingual translation and enhanced clarity, organizations can achieve up to five percent improvement in quality engineer efficiency during issue handling and up to 10% reduction in errors throughout the problem resolution process.
Dispute Resolution Agent (for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition) Beta release
When invoice disputes arise, accounts receivable specialists need to act quickly without sacrificing accuracy. SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition introduces an agent that automates root-cause analysis, scanning invoices, sales orders, delivery records, pricing agreements, and tax rules to identify the source of discrepancies. The agent detects incorrect charges and recommends compliant solutions, such as credit memo creation, enabling finance teams to resolve disputes faster, minimize manual investigation, and cultivate stronger vendor relationships through transparent, efficient processes.
SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, AI-assisted smart personalization of my home for applications General availability
SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition users can easily configure their home page with the most relevant applications through AI-assisted smart personalization. By describing their task in natural language, the system identifies the appropriate app, which can then be added to their home screen with a single click. This intuitive capability reduces the cost of personalizing the home page by 33%, shortens the learning curve for new users, and improves satisfaction by keeping frequently needed tools readily accessible.
SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, AI-assisted error explanation General availability
When encountering system errors, SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition users can turn to a new feature that generates clear, natural language explanations and resolution recommendations. This capability transforms cryptic error messages into easy-to-understand guidance, helping users of all experience levels quickly rectify issues and continue with their work. By reducing error resolution time by five percent, organizations benefit from increased productivity, improved data quality, and shorter training cycles for new team members.
SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, AI-assisted sales order creation from unstructured data General availability
Sales representatives benefit from a streamlined order creation process in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition that handles unstructured data like PDF or image-based purchase orders. After uploading a file, SAP Document AI automatically extracts the relevant information and proposes the data for a corresponding sales order request. This automation significantly reduces manual data entry, minimizes errors, and improves overall operational efficiency, allowing teams to process orders faster and enhance customer satisfaction.
SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, AI-assisted processing of payment advices with SAP Document AI General availability
Accounts receivable clerks can accelerate their workflow using the SAP Document AI-powered payment advice processing feature in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition. The system automatically extracts payment amounts, references, and currencies from diverse invoice formats across multiple languages, with a self-learning capability that continuously improves recognition accuracy. Organizations implementing this feature can reduce document processing time by 70%, cut template maintenance time by 83%, and decrease value loss from manual processing delays by 40%.
SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition, AI-assisted fixed asset key figures explanation General availability
Asset accountants gain clarity on complex fixed asset calculations through a new AI feature in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition. The feature generates natural-language explanations that detail the origins of displayed values and how figures such as depreciation are calculated; for example, illustrating the impact of mid-year acquisitions with specific depreciation keys. This transparency reduces the effort required to analyze asset values, enables faster responses to asset-related questions, and helps mitigate compliance risks.
SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition, AI-assisted settlement rule proposal for asset capitalization General availability
Overhead and asset accountants can now streamline the complex process of creating settlement rules for investment measures, eliminating the traditionally time-consuming, error-prone manual configuration. The solution automatically determines receivers, calculates percentages, and proposes feasible rules based on contextual data and user-defined instruction profiles. Organizations reduce the effort required to create full settlement rules by 50% while simultaneously improving accuracy in asset capitalization and enhancing overall operational efficiency across their financial processes.
SAP Document and Reporting Compliance for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition, AI-assisted electronic document error handling General availability
Tax accountants navigating the growing complexity of e-invoicing mandates across multiple countries gain an easy way to decode technical errors without wading through intricate XML or JSON formats. Joule, integrated with SAP Document and Reporting Compliance, delivers plain-language explanations of electronic document errors, enabling faster root-cause identification and more efficient resolution. Organizations get an 80% reduction in time spent understanding and resolving errors, dropping from 150 minutes to approximately 30 minutes. This results in faster processing cycles, reduced penalty risks, and improved cash flow.
SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, AI-assisted error resolution for cost accounting General availability
Operations managers in retail organizations can now access Joule via SAP Order Management Services, enabling them to query order data and receive real-time, role-specific operational guidance across order processing, orchestration, sourcing, availability, returns, and fulfillment flows. Joule surfaces instant insights and recommended actions directly in the workflow, reducing the need to navigate multiple systems. This enables proactive intervention before issues escalate. The feature offers faster transaction access, improved responsiveness and accuracy, and lower operational risk, which support smarter, quicker decisions across the order lifecycle.
Expense Report Validation Agent General availability
Business travelers can enjoy a smarter, guided approach to expense report completion with an agent that proactively identifies missing items, prompts for necessary details, and clarifies confusing alerts throughout the submission process. By simplifying how users understand and resolve issues, the agent ensures accurate, policy-compliant reports with minimal effort required. This means a 30% reduction in time spent preparing and submitting reports, a 24% increase in first-pass approvals, and a noticeably improved employee experience that removes friction from the expense management process.
Expense Pre-Submit Audit Agent SAP Early Adopter Care
Expense report submitters can now catch receipt accuracy issues and policy breaches before hitting the submit button, avoiding the frustration of rejected reports and delayed reimbursements. This agent automatically reviews expenses during creation, surfacing compliance problems and offering smart suggestions for quick corrections. The agent uses a non-blocking design that keeps users in control of final decisions. Organizations benefit from a 10% decrease in sent-back expense reports, reduced rework for travelers, managers, and auditors alike, and a noticeably smoother reimbursement process that enhances the overall employee experience.
Employees burdened by the administrative chore of creating expense reports can now delegate the heavy lifting to a Joule Agent. This agent automatically builds expense reports by aggregating transactions, populating custom fields based on contextual details and user history, and preparing everything for a quick review before submission. The outcome is up to 30% reduction in time on task for auto-generated expense reports. This offers a modern expense management experience that slashes manual data entry, accelerates the submission process, and frees employees to focus on high-value work rather than paperwork.
Concur Expense, AI-assisted configuration for audit rules General availability
Expense administrators responsible for managing complex audit rule setups can now interact with their configuration environment in plain language, eliminating the need for deep technical expertise or tedious manual adjustments. This AI-assisted feature enables admins to search existing rules, create new ones, and receive real-time explanations simply by asking questions like “What rules apply to meals in France?”, delivering clear, actionable guidance instantly. The outcome is a 40% reduction in audit rule configuration effort, fewer support tickets, and empowered administrators who work with greater independence, accuracy, and confidence in maintaining compliance logic.
Business travelers seeking quick answers to company travel and expense policies no longer need to sift through lengthy documents or wait for admin responses. Policy navigator in Joule allows employees to ask questions in natural language and receive clear, contextual guidance grounded in approved policies, whether planning a trip, in the middle of a journey, or completing an expense report. The result is in-the-moment policy clarity that prevents non-compliant spend before it happens, reduces support tickets, and empowers travelers to make confident, compliant decisions without disrupting their workflow.
SAP Fieldglass Services Procurement, AI-assisted SOW deliverables creation General availability
Procurement specialists can accelerate the development of their statements of work using the deliverables feature in SAP Fieldglass Services Procurement. The feature analyzes the defined project scope and automatically generates precise, relevant deliverables that ensure tight alignment between buyer expectations and supplier commitments. By adopting this capability, organizations can reduce the time required to manually create SOW deliverables by 70% and cut the risk of poor outcomes by 50%, while fostering stronger collaboration during the negotiation process.
E-commerce product managers tasked with maintaining large SAP Commerce Cloud catalogs gain an always-on agent that continuously reviews product descriptions, attributes, and translations against company quality standards. This agent pinpoints merchandising gaps and delivers actionable recommendations to enhance catalog accuracy, ensure consistency across languages, and improve product discoverability. The business impact is a 70% reduction in time to translate catalog data, 65% less time spent adding descriptions per asset, and a five percent reduction in data quality costs, all of which contribute to higher conversion rates and a more agile merchandising operation.
SAP Revenue Growth Management, AI-assisted trade promotion creation General availability
Key account managers in consumer industries can benefit from a streamlined, single-view promotion-creation experience in which simply naming a promotion automatically populates key fields. Drawing on master data, historical promotions, and learned preferences specific to each retailer, the system suggests dates, types, durations, and sell-in periods, then continuously refines its recommendations based on user edits over time. The impact is a 75% reduction in promotion setup time, 30% fewer data-entry errors and rework, and increasingly personalized suggestions that eliminate repetitive manual effort across promotion cycles.
Building on the transformative capabilities of Joule studio low-code, SAP is expanding the Joule studio family with two powerful new offerings designed to meet developers exactly where they work: Joule Studio code editor, a Visual Studio Code IDE extension, and Joule Studio CLI, a versatile command-line interface. Together, these tools deliver a unified, AI-assisted development experience that spans the full spectrum of development personas and preferences on Joule.
Joule Studio code editor brings the intelligence of Joule directly into Visual Studio Code, the world’s most popular development environment, empowering pro-code developers with AI-guided scaffolding, contextual code generation, intelligent recommendations, and seamless integration with Joule, all without leaving their preferred IDE.
Joule Studio CLI extends this same power to the terminal, enabling developers and DevOps teams to automate project creation, manage configurations, execute deployments, and orchestrate CI/CD workflows through scriptable, command-line commands—ideal for headless environments, automation pipelines, and teams that value speed and precision at the command line.
Data professionals working within SAP Datasphere can now accomplish informational, navigational, and transactional tasks through natural conversation with Joule. Whether asking how to use specific functionalities, retrieving details about a SAP Datasphere instance, or switching system settings like language preferences, users receive instant answers with direct references to product documentation. Joule can even execute tasks directly from the conversation without requiring interaction with the standard interface. This direct execution reduces reliance on internal IT support and enables faster, more intuitive navigation throughout the platform.
Document level confidence Customers now set confidence ranges for fields in the Schemas feature. When customers edit field settings, they can define their own thresholds for low, medium, and high confidence. These custom settings are reflected in the extraction results displayed for the relevant fields on the document details screen. See Settings for Fields and View and Edit Documents Needing Review.
Expanded Transportation Management Customers can now use the Transports feature to export and import channels and workflows. See Supported Objects.
Metadata Customers can now manage metadata for documents, collections, and chunks created with the Vector API to enable advanced filtering and organization of their content. For more information, see Metadata.
Retrieval API Customers can merge and rank search results across multiple data repositories using the Retrieval API’s post-processing capabilities. For more information, see Retrieval Search.
Prompt optimizations Custom metrics are supported in prompt optimizations, enabling customers to define and optimize prompts based on their specific evaluation criteria. Only LLM-as-a-judge metrics with numerical or Boolean output types can be used in optimization tasks.For more information, see Create a Custom Metric and Create a Configuration for a Prompt Optimization. Customers can provide separate test and train datasets for prompt optimization. For more information, see Create a Configuration for a Prompt Optimization.
Prompt registry The prompt registry now enables customers to create and manage orchestration configurations declaratively, allowing them to version and track complex AI workflows alongside their prompts for better governance and reproducibility.For more information, see Create an Orchestration Config (Imperative).
Secrets Customers can now enter generic secrets using a form instead of JSON. The form appears in the Add Generic Secret dialog when you activate document grounding. A dropdown menu lets them choose the type of document repository. Depending on their selection, the remaining fields adjust dynamically, allowing them to complete the data. Some fields are already prefilled.If they prefer working directly with JSON, switch to the code view by clicking the icon. For more information, see Add a Secret.
New models available New models are supported, including OpenAI GPT 5.2, Gemini 3.0 Pro, Perplexity Deep Research, and Anthropic Claude Opus 4.6.For more information on new and deprecated models, see the SAP Note.Try generative AI hub for free for 30 days.
SAP Joule for Developers, ABAP AI capabilities, enhancements
New ABAP AI capabilities mean developers can expect a 20% reduction in time and effort to write ABAP/JAVA code, 25% reduction in time and effort to test ABAP/JAVA code, and 4.4% faster time to realized value.
This quarter, developers can now easily generate ABAP Unit tests for:
Public, protected, and private methods of global ABAP classes
Public methods of local classes within global class pools
In addition, the documentation chat allows developers to interact with documentation on the SAP Help Portal, providing context-aware answers and links to relevant documentation. This capability enhances productivity by offering quick access to related documentation directly within the development environment. See Documentation Chat.
Sales teams can elevate their tender response process with the Tender Analysis Agent, which automates the review of complex RFQ documents. The agent extracts critical product requirements, flags potential risks and policy gaps, and suggests optimized configurations tailored to customer needs. By reducing the effort to process incoming tenders by five percent and improving win rates, organizations can achieve measurable revenue growth while accelerating sales cycles and uncovering valuable cross-sell and up-sell opportunities.
SAP Commodity Management, AI-assisted commodity work center General availability
Commodity traders can transform how they capture and manage complex deals using the commodity work center in SAP Commodity Management. Working alongside Joule, the feature converts verbal or written negotiations into detailed draft deals, automatically populating the numerous fields that traditionally require extensive manual entry. This enables traders to redirect their focus toward negotiating better commercial outcomes, while improving data accuracy and driving greater operational efficiency across their trading activities.
SAP Intelligent Clinical Supply Management, AI-assisted predictive subject dynamics General availability
Clinical trial coordinators seeking to boost their supply planning capabilities will find a powerful ally in SAP Intelligent Clinical Supply Management. The predictive subject dynamics feature analyzes historical and real-time data to forecast patient enrollment trends and dropout rates, automatically generating insights that would otherwise require extensive manual analysis. This enables supply chain teams to redirect their focus to strategic decision-making, while reducing clinical inventory waste costs by up to two percent and improving demand forecasting accuracy across their trial operations.
Joule with SAP Intelligent Clinical Supply Management General availability
Clinical supply professionals juggling multiple tasks and complex systems need quick access to information without disrupting their workflow. Together with Joule, SAP Intelligent Clinical Supply Management delivers an intuitive, conversational interface that understands natural-language requests, enabling users to retrieve critical data and navigate to relevant applications effortlessly. This streamlined experience results in an 83% reduction in time spent on information searches, freeing teams to concentrate on higher-value activities and significantly boosting overall productivity.
SAP Self-Billing Cockpit, AI-assisted document processing General availability
Billing clerks managing self-billing workflows frequently encounter invoices arriving in a mix of formats—Excel, PDF, CSV, or text files—often unstructured and spanning multiple languages. SAP Self-Billing Cockpit addresses this challenge by leveraging intelligent document processing to parse and extract invoice data from virtually any format, converting it into structured payloads ready for automated billing. The result is significantly reduced time spent processing invoice line items, fewer customer-specific interfaces for integration specialists to build and maintain, and improved extraction accuracy through minimized manual intervention.
SAP Business AI for business transformation management
Joule with SAP Signavio solutions General availability
Process analysts and optimization specialists working across complex organizational workflows require rapid access to diagrams, documentation, and performance metrics. SAP Signavio solutions integrate with Joule to enable natural-language keyword searches across process diagrams, dictionary items, and help resources. At the same time, best-practice KPI recommenders guide users to the most relevant success measures. This intuitive approach delivers 50% faster information searches and navigation, ensuring teams make data-driven decisions with improved search quality and an enhanced overall user experience.
SAP Signavio solutions, AI-assisted business process model and notation simulation insights General availability
Process analysts leveraging SAP Signavio can now access embedded business process model and notation simulations directly within their process diagrams, eliminating the need for fragmented tools and manual interpretation. Key metrics such as costs, cycle times, and resource utilization are automatically translated into clear, actionable summaries that highlight bottlenecks and opportunities for improvement. This streamlined approach reduces time to access process modeling insights by 50%, empowering teams to compare scenarios effortlessly and communicate findings to stakeholders with greater confidence and clarity.
SAP LeanIX solutions, AI-assisted architecture guidance General availability
Enterprise architects seeking to accelerate transformation initiatives can leverage SAP LeanIX to surface actionable insights directly from their architecture inventory. The feature analyzes enterprise architecture data to identify opportunities and guides users through the workflows and tasks needed to efficiently act on recommendations. Organizations benefit from a 95% reduction in time to discover insights, 80% faster transformation execution, and a five percent reduction in value erosion from delayed action. Overall, this feature drives greater architectural productivity and more agile decision-making.
*Disclaimer: This article provides estimated benefits. All calculations are estimates based on SAP customer case studies, SAP benchmarks, and other research. Actual benefits may vary and may be affected by additional factors not considered by this article. The information is provided “as is” without warranty of any kind, expressor implied, and in no event shall SAP be liable for any damages whatsoever in relation with the use of this article. See Legal Notice on https://www.sap.com/legal-notice for use terms, disclaimers, disclosures, or restrictions related to this material.
As organizations navigate rising complexity, speed alone is no longer enough. What matters is connection across people, processes, data, and decisions.
With the SAP SuccessFactors 1H 2026 release, we’re deepening those connections across the HR lifecycle. This release focuses on four core priorities: connected, suite-wide AI; unified experiences that adapt to how organizations work; processes designed for clarity, accuracy, and compliance; and stronger foundations for skills and long-term growth. Together, these innovations help organizations anticipate needs earlier, reduce friction in daily work, and move forward with greater confidence.
Make your workforce unstoppable with AI-powered applications that connect your people, your business, and your goals
AI in HR delivers the greatest impact when it works continuously across the entire workforce lifecycle—not as isolated features, but as connected capabilities that share context and insight.
The 1H 2026 release expands suite-wide agentic AI across SAP SuccessFactors solutions, helping employees get clearer answers, act sooner, and keep work moving across roles and responsibilities. A connected network of AI agents now supports areas such as recruiting, workforce administration, payroll, learning, performance, and talent development—working together behind the scenes to help anticipate next steps and surface relevant guidance.
Employee Data Integration Agent
This release also introduces a growing workforce knowledge network, bringing trusted external expertise and research directly into the flow of work through Joule. Teams can now access expert-backed global employment guidance and research-driven insights without leaving their workflows—supporting faster, more confident decisions.
To further support learning in the flow of work, intelligent Q&A in SAP SuccessFactors Learning now helps employees find information more easily. AI can deliver instant, context-aware responses drawn directly from an organization’s learning content, along with relevant links and resources, so employees can get answers quickly without searching through courses or documentation.
Unified experiences that adapt to how work gets done
As HR tasks become more embedded in day-to-day work, experiences need to feel intuitive, connected, and responsive wherever work happens. In the 1H 2026 release, SAP SuccessFactors solutions continue to unify experiences across the suite, giving employees, managers, and HR teams what they need in the moment.
Connected recruiting and onboarding: Native integration between SmartRecruiters solutions, SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central, and SAP SuccessFactors Onboarding can bring AI-enabled recruiting, core HR, and onboarding together into a single, continuous experience, helping hiring teams move faster while maintaining consistency from candidate through new hire.
SmartRecruiters for SAP SuccessFactors
Tailored experiences, built faster: The new extensibility wizard can provide guided, step-by-step support for creating custom extensions on SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) directly within SAP SuccessFactors solutions, making it easier to adapt experiences to unique business needs while preserving governance.
Simpler, clearer employee moments: A redesigned, configurable 401(k) experience in SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Global Benefits for U.S. employees helps simplify enrollment and management by clearly explaining employer contributions and guiding deferrals and beneficiary setup, helping employees make informed decisions with confidence.
Processes designed for clarity, accuracy, and compliance
In the 1H 2026 release, SAP SuccessFactors introduces new capabilities that help organizations bring greater clarity and rigor to pay practices.
Preparing for what’s next requires trusted, consistent skills data that organizations can rely on across HR, talent, and workforce planning.
In the 1H 2026 release, we are strengthening the talent intelligence hub with enhanced skills governance, providing a centralized interface to help manage skills, apply governance standards, and ensure alignment across SAP SuccessFactors solutions and partner applications. This helps organizations improve skills data quality, maintain consistency at scale, and make more confident, skills-based decisions.
Skills governance in the talent intelligence hub
A connected foundation for the future
This release reinforces SAP’s continued focus on an intelligent, connected HCM foundation—one designed to evolve with your organization and support confident decisions at every stage of work. By bringing together data, AI, and experiences across the HR lifecycle, these enhancements help organizations reduce friction today while laying the groundwork for tomorrow.
WALLDORF — SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) today announced that it has extended the contract of Gina Vargiu-Breuer (51), Chief People Officer of SAP SE, for another three years until January 31, 2030.
“In her role as chief people officer, Gina Vargiu-Breuer has laid important foundations for SAP’s continued success by strengthening how we attract, develop and lead our people,” said Pekka Ala-Pietilä, Chairman of the Supervisory Board of SAP SE. “We appreciate her energy and dedication and are convinced she will further drive SAP’s transformation into the age of AI.
“I am grateful for the trust of the Supervisory Board and look forward to shaping SAP’s transformation in the age of AI,” said Vargiu-Breuer. “This is about rethinking how we operate as a company: how we work, make decisions and deliver value to our customers. Together with my People & Culture team, we will continue what we started two years ago and turn this transformation into tangible business impact at scale.”
Vargiu-Breuer became a member of the Executive Board of SAP SE in 2024. Prior to joining SAP, she served as Senior Vice President of Human Resources at Siemens Energy. Earlier in her career, Vargiu-Breuer held multiple roles at Siemens AG.
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Since the release of ChatGPT as the first large language model in 2022, much of the conversation around AI and the future of work has focused heavily on what automation might eliminate: jobs, tasks, and early-career opportunities.
But new research from SAP and Wakefield* suggests a different reality is emerging. AI isn’t making early talent irrelevant. Instead, it’s accelerating how quickly they become productive, reshaping the earliest stages of work, and raising expectations far earlier in the employee lifecycle.
According to the findings, 88% of CHROs say AI is making early-career talent role-ready faster. This acceleration raises the stakes on both sides. While organizations benefit from faster productivity and earlier impact, early‑career employees are entering roles with heightened expectations and fewer traditional learning buffers—forcing leaders to rethink how success is defined and supported from day one.
AI as an accelerator of readiness
Entry-level roles have long relied on repetitive, lower-stakes tasks that helped new employees learn how work gets done. Today, AI automates much of that foundational execution.
This shift is increasingly common: 79% of surveyed CHROs report that their early-career talent receives enterprise AI tools within their first month on the job. Additionally, 87%expect new hires to be comfortable with AI on day one or learn the tools immediately after joining.
Drive the success of every employee and achieve organizational agility with AI
With AI absorbing traditional tasks, early-career talent is stepping into meaningful work sooner—and CHROs are already seeing the impact, with 56% reporting improved confidence and 55% citing increased productivity among those using AI.
This acceleration reflects themes we first explored in the 2025 SAP SuccessFactors Future of Work Predictions report, where we examined how AI might reshape entry‑level roles. As foundational tasks continue to be absorbed by AI, the question becomes not whether early‑career roles will exist, but how organizations can redesign them to build capability in new ways.
When productivity accelerates, expectations follow
As early talent ramps faster, the expectations placed on them are rising just as quickly. Several structural factors are contributing to this shift: organizations are hiring fewer early-career talent, and those who do join are expected to take on more complex work earlier in their tenure. Our upcoming research from our Future of Work Research lab makes this clear, as one research participant summarized, “Entry level roles used to be focused on mundane tasks—what should they do now? They bring an incredibly unique perspective; we want to hire early talent to challenge our norms and help us find better ways of working.”
But with AI removing the mundane work, it may also remove many of the gradual, hands-on learning moments that once helped new hires build experience over time.
With these rising expectations, it’s easy to see how the cognitive load of entry level roles could increase substantially. CHROs report heightened performance pressure and increased mental effort as new hires try to keep pace with AI-accelerated work. Some researchers refer to this dynamic as “AI brain fry,” the cognitive strain that comes from managing rapid, AI-driven workflow.
Together, these shifts create several risks for both employees and organizations:
Shadow AI use rises: 56%of CHROs say early-career talent turns to unsanctioned AI tools when formal guidance is unclear. This behavior may reflect entry-level hires trying to keep pace rather than intentionally breaking policy.
Inconsistent enablement creates talent risk: 44% of CHROs say uneven access to AI tools increases attrition risk, especially for early talent who may feel unable to live up to new performance expectations without tools to automate routine tasks.
Foundational skills may erode: Even as AI boosts productivity, 38%of leaders worry early-career talent are not building long-term skills like communication, critical thinking, judgment, and collaboration. That concern is echoed in qualitative feedback from HR leaders as well. As one noted, “We’ve observed gaps in professionalism in business settings for entry‑level talent, from collaboration and stakeholder management [to] ownership and accountability.”
Infographic: Click to Enlarge
Rethinking the first step into work
As traditional early‑career learning pathways narrow, organizations must now redesign how those learning moments happen. Our research points to several areas where HR leaders can intentionally strengthen the early-career ramp:
1. Build foundational skill development intentionally.
As repetitive tasks disappear, organizations have the opportunity to deliberately create new ways for early talent to build communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and decision-making skills. This can include structured, project-based experiences, clearer decision-making frameworks, and more frequent coaching that focuses on judgement and prioritization, not just task completion.
2. Design entry-level roles around higher-value work.
Early-career employees are capable of contributing more strategically when roles are designed with the right balance of scope and support. Redesigning entry‑level positions to include clear ownership—supported by explicit expectations, mentoring, and well‑defined guidance for decisions and escalation—helps early‑career talent build confidence while managing risk.
3. Establish AI governance from day one.
Without clear guidance, early talent may struggle to understand how to use AI responsibly. Introducing AI expectations during onboarding, reinforcing role-specific best practices, and normalizing manager-led conversations about AI use can reduce shadow AI and build trust in new technologies early on.
4. Ensure equitable AI access across teams and managers.
As expectations rise, uneven access to AI tools can quietly increase workload pressure and stress for early-career employees. Providing consistent access, training, and enablement helps ensure new hires are equipped to meet accelerated demands without increasing burnout or attrition.
The bottom line
AI isn’t eliminating early-career talent from the workforce; it’s reshaping the path they take to become effective and increasing the value of the work they contribute. While entry-level roles may be fewer, expectations for impact are higher, placing greater importance on pairing AI fluency with strong human skills. For new graduates, developing both will not only help them land a job but also enable them to contribute quickly and build lasting capabilities.
When early‑career talent becomes productive sooner, companies can move faster, innovate earlier, and operate more efficiently, but only if that speed is matched with structure, coaching, and intentional development. Organizations that navigate this transition successfully will ensure early talent doesn’t just ramp up faster, but also builds the judgment, collaboration, and critical‑thinking skills that AI can’t replace.
*The SAP AI Talent Survey was conducted by Wakefield Research (www.wakefieldresearch.com) among 100 US CHROs (or CPO equivalent) at organizations with a minimum annual revenue of $500m where employees are using AI-enabled tools in their day-to-day responsibilities, between February 19th and March 2nd, 2026, using an email invitation and an online survey.
Meaningful innovations rarely announce themselves. More often, they are built into how an organization runs, absorbed into its operations, its culture, its sense of what’s possible. They quietly perform, deliberately building toward outcomes that matter long before anyone is watching.
For 13 years, we have been shining a light on the people and organizations doing breakthrough work. Today, it’s my pleasure to announce the 2026 SAP Innovation Award finalists.
What distinguishes this year’s innovators is their ability to use SAP technology to run, adapt, and innovate in the face of change and complexity. From using AI to unify financial and sustainability data to redesigning value chains for resilience and predicting risks rather than reacting to them, they are closing the “say-do” action gap and making innovation real.
Recognizing organizations innovating with purpose and achieving meaningful outcomes with SAP technologies
The day we announce these finalists is always a highlight because we see how organizations are leveraging the SAP landscape to make a tangible difference. This year, our finalists are setting benchmarks across 11 key categories:
AI Excellence: harnessing SAP Business AI to revolutionize processes and unlock new levels of productivity
Cloud ERP Champion: embracing cloud ERP to future-proof operations
Customer Experience Innovator: transforming businesses with cloud technologies to create standout experiences
Financial Futurist: revolutionizing financial processes to deliver new business models and reduce risk
People Experience Pioneer: reimagining the employee journey through digital transformation
Procurement Visionary: automating procurement to manage spend for better control and greater value
Services Superstar: leveraging SAP services to accelerate business goals and enhance productivity
Supply Chain Catalyst: building strong, well-orchestrated supply chains that are resilient and compliant
Sustainability Hero: harnessing the power of data to build an inclusive economy and shape a sustainable future (My personal favorite!)
Technology Pathfinder: implementing SAP Business Technology Platform to solve business problems with measurable impact.
Transformation Impact: generating critical business value and strengthening transformation capabilities to remain resilient
Industry Leader: leveraging multiple SAP solutions to reinvent business models, collaborate across ecosystems, and create meaningful societal or environmental impact (Note: All entries are also automatically considered for the Industry Leader category, recognizing modernization within specific verticals from consumer industries to public services.)
You were selected by our distinguished panel of judges because you aren’t just comparing today against the peak of the hype cycle; you are building for the reality of the future. You have demonstrated case creativity, tangible outcomes, and the true spirit of the intelligent enterprise.
What comes next? The winners will be announced on April 14, 2026. Winners will receive a trophy and the option of a $1,000 charitable donation voucher or an admission ticket to SAP Sapphire Orlando or Madrid, where we will hold the SAP Innovation Awards reception.
But beyond the trophies, these finalists represent a signal to the market. They show us that while short-term risks are noisy and reactive, long-term value is built by those who integrate, automate, and adapt.
Let’s stay engaged, stay inspired, and keep closing the gap between saying and doing.
Sophia Mendelsohn is chief sustainability and commercial officer at SAP.
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We believe this recognition reflects SAP’s continued focus on helping organizations run resilient, efficient, and increasingly intelligent transportation operations in a rapidly changing global logistics environment.
Magic Quadrant reports are a culmination of rigorous, fact-based research in specific markets, providing a wide-angle view of the relative positions of providers in markets where growth is high and provider differentiation is distinct.
We believe SAP’s placement as a Leader underscores our commitment to ongoing innovation across transportation, logistics execution, and supply chain orchestration.
Addressing today’s transportation challenges
Transportation operations are under constant pressure, from cost volatility and capacity constraints to sustainability requirements and rising customer expectations. Organizations need solutions that help them plan, execute, and adapt across increasingly complex networks while maintaining visibility and control.
SAP Transportation Management and SAP Business Network for Logistics are designed to support these needs through a holistic, end‑to‑end approach. By connecting freight procurement, planning, execution, and settlement on a single platform, SAP helps organizations respond more effectively to disruptions, align transportation decisions with broader supply chain objectives, and support compliance with regional and industry‑specific requirements.
A platform built for complex, global operations
SAP Transportation Management supports organizations operating across multiple modes, regions, and industries. Built to scale with business growth, the solution is designed to support complex, global transportation networks while enabling standardization and process consistency across operations.
Customers across industries—including consumer products, chemicals, agriculture, mining, retail, wholesale distribution, and industrial manufacturing—use SAP Transportation Management to manage complex transportation networks at scale. Industry‑specific capabilities from SAP, such as support for automotive and mill and mining operations, along with integration with SAP Joule for Consultants, help organizations address specialized requirements while accelerating time to value. Dedicated industry business units further tailor go‑to‑market strategies and solutions to industry‑specific challenges.
Advancing transportation management with AI
Data-driven decision-making is increasingly essential for transportation operations. SAP continues to invest in AI-driven capabilities that help automate processes, improve responsiveness, and increase productivity.
Recent innovations include AI-assisted use cases such as goods receipt processing, as well as the integration of conversational planning into transportation planning workflows. These capabilities are designed to help planners and operators work more efficiently by reducing manual effort and supporting faster, more informed decisions across execution and settlement processes. SAP Joule for Consultants is another recent AI innovation that accelerates solution adoption by offering instant, expert-level guidance and best practice recommendations for solution configuration.
Supporting a connected logistics landscape
Transportation does not operate in isolation. SAP’s logistics portfolio brings together transportation, warehousing, and business network collaboration on a cohesive foundation.
This includes the recent general availability of SAP Logistics Management, a new solution designed to support regional and local distribution operations by combining transportation execution, warehouse processes, and carrier collaboration in a single offering. SAP Logistics Management complements SAP Transportation Management by helping organizations extend standardized logistics processes to satellite locations and growing operations, supporting broader adoption while reducing complexity. SAP Logistics Management can be deployed alongside SAP Transportation Management to support multi-tier transportation operations, providing the right tool for each level of complexity.
SAP Transportation Management, together with other logistics solutions from SAP, helps organizations modernize their logistics operations in a way that aligns with their broader ERP and supply chain strategies as they progress on their transformational journeys via RISE with SAP or SAP GROW.
Why organizations choose SAP Transportation Management
Organizations choose SAP Transportation Management to support complex transportation requirements across global and regional operations. The solution offers broad functional coverage, deep integration across the SAP supply chain portfolio, and the flexibility to support both advanced transportation networks and evolving business needs.
With continued investment across SAP Transportation Management, SAP Logistics Management, warehousing, and SAP Business Network for Logistics, SAP remains focused on helping organizations operate resilient transportation processes while supporting both global complexity and localized execution models.
*Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Transportation Management Systems, Brock Johns, Oscar Sanchez Duran, Manav Jain, 30 March 2026.
Gartner does not endorse any company, vendor, product or service depicted in its publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s business and technology insights organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this publication, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. Gartner and Magic Quadrant are trademarks of Gartner, Inc., and/or its affiliates.
Last week, the Executive Board of SAP SE announced the 2025 winners of the Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award, the company’s most prestigious employee recognition. Named after SAP co-founder Hasso Plattner, the award honors teams whose innovation, collaboration, and execution create exceptional value for customers and help shape the company’s long-term success.
The 11th cycle of the Hasso Plattner Founders‘ Award saw an evolution of the award itself. With a refined structure and this year’s strong thematic focus on AI, the award now recognizes achievements in two categories: Emerging Ideas, honoring visionary concepts that explore new architectural directions and long-term opportunities for customers and the business, and Scaling Innovation, celebrating innovations already delivering proven impact at scale.
The jury received a total of 254 submissions from all over the globe, from which 41 finalists representing nine different countries were chosen. Six teams made it to the final round, highlighting the breadth of innovation across teams worldwide.
The winning teams were formally recognized and celebrated during a red carpet award ceremony on March 26 at SAP headquarters in Walldorf, Germany. Executive Board Members Christian Klein and Sebastian Steinhaeuser introduced the finalists and announced the winners in the Emerging Ideas and Scaling Innovation categories, respectively.
Emerging Ideas winner: SAP Cognitive Twin Enterprise
The Emerging Ideas category honors bold thinking and visionary concepts that explore the future of enterprise software. This year’s winner, SAP Cognitive Twin Enterprise (SAP CTE), embodies this forward-looking spirit by presenting a new way of how organizations plan, simulate, and execute in an increasingly complex and fast-changing world.
SAP CTE introduces the idea of an ever-learning, AI-powered intelligence layer built on a continuously updated model of the entire organization. It unifies data, simulation, and AI on SAP’s foundation to help deliver guided autonomy across functions, supporting the shift from keyboard-centric SaaS to governed decision-making and agent-led execution.
Acting as a constant observer of the business landscape, SAP CTE evaluates an organization’s position against anticipated trends and potential changes. It runs what-if simulations and provides governed recommendations on SAP applications and data across finance, spend, supply chain, HR, and customer experience, with selective, low-risk auto-execution and human-in-the-loop control for high-risk steps. By doing so, it can transform ERP into an AI-native system of foresight and elevates workforce intelligence.
The solution helps organizations move from reacting after events occur to proactively and continuously testing scenarios, anticipating risks, and evaluating options. This provides the information they need to make critical decisions, allowing them to anticipate what’s next, shape it, and execute in a single, connected environment.
“Winning the Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award validated SAP Cognitive Twin Enterprise’s vision,” Natalia Aksakova, Strategy & Portfolio at Global Finance and Administration, says on behalf of the team. “It reinforced that we are on the right path and gives us the momentum to bring the next era of ERP to life faster, with the ambition to help define how organizations operate in the years ahead.”
Scaling Innovation winner: SAP Document AI
The winner in the Scaling Innovation category demonstrates how breakthrough innovation becomes truly transformative when it is embedded into everyday business processes and adopted at global scale. The SAP Document AI solution can fundamentally change how organizations process and understand the vast volume of documents that power daily operations.
Across industries, enterprises continue to grapple with the rapid growth of unstructured data. Invoices, purchase orders, contracts, shipping documents, and many other business records still require significant manual handling in many organizations, creating bottlenecks, delays, and avoidable errors. The SAP Document AI team addressed this challenge by bringing intelligent document processing directly into core business applications, enabling customers to automate document workflows seamlessly and securely.
What sets this achievement apart is not only the technological innovation but the scale of real-world adoption. The solution has become deeply embedded across SAP’s portfolio and is used by tens of thousands of customers worldwide to process billions of documents. By integrating advanced AI capabilities directly into existing workflows, the team has made automation accessible without the need for complex integrations or specialized expertise. This approach enables organizations to accelerate business processes, reduce manual effort, and improve the quality and speed of decision-making.
The award recognizes the team’s ability to translate research excellence and engineering innovation into measurable business impact. Their work demonstrates how embedded AI can move beyond experimentation to become a trusted and reliable component of everyday enterprise operations. By operationalizing AI responsibly and at scale, the team has helped strengthen SAP’s position as a leader in enterprise automation and intelligent applications.
Equally important is the long-term perspective behind the innovation. The continued evolution of document understanding capabilities, combined with growing adoption across SAP’s platform, illustrates how scalable AI can serve as a foundation for future innovation. The recognition celebrates not only the impact already achieved but also the momentum created for the next generation of intelligent enterprise processes.
“Winning this award is a tremendous honor for our team,” Tobias Weller, chief product owner and team lead, says. “It validates years of hard work, close collaboration, and a shared belief in the transformative potential of AI to accelerate essential business processes and capture true business value for our customers.”
Celebrating innovation across the AI spectrum
The Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award has long celebrated the people and ideas that drive SAP forward. By recognizing both scaled impact and visionary thinking, the award highlights how innovation thrives at every stage of the journey—from early exploration to global adoption. It underscores the belief that long-term success depends on both delivering value today and continuously reimagining what is possible.
At the ceremony in Walldorf, employees around the world came together or joined virtually to celebrate the winning teams and the many contributors who helped bring their ideas to life. Their work reflects the creativity, dedication, and passion that define SAP’s culture of innovation. As the company continues to advance its AI-driven strategy, this year’s winners demonstrate how teams across the organization are turning ambition into reality—helping customers run better, adapt faster, and prepare for the future.
The winning teams will be given the opportunity to pitch their project to the Executive Board in 2026. The projects will be recognized in the permanent Founders’ Exhibits in Walldorf and Palo Alto. In addition, the members of the winning teams will receive a personalized trophy.
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Nearly every enterprise leader today thinks about how to leverage AI to accelerate business outcomes—where to get started is another matter.
A great way to break through that roadblock is to listen to leaders who jumped in early to use AI to transform outcomes. Eli Lambert, a managing director of Finance in the Global IT division at Accenture, is one of those people.
The professional solutions and services company employs nearly 780,000 employees across 52 countries, who work with 350 partners to serve over 9,000 clients. The idea of transformation at Accenture’s scale might be intimidating to some, but not Lambert. He’s leading an ongoing transformation of Accenture’s finance function, which he calls “the heartbeat” of the company.
The results he’s achieved— including saving the finance team a combined 57,000 hours annually by having AI generate narrative summaries for reporting—shine a spotlight on what’s possible. And he’s just getting started.
Accenture is a multinational professional services firm that specializes in IT and management consulting
780,00 employees in 52 countries
350 partners
9,000 clients
Recognized for 20 years by Fortune’s “most admired companies” list
Ranked first in industry, and fifth overall, on “Just Companies” list
I had a chance to speak with him about how he became a leader in AI-driven transformation, and what others can learn from his achievements. This is a lightly edited version of our conversation
Q: As you know, innovating with AI is about reshaping how a business delivers value. But not every business leader is leading the charge. Some are watching and waiting. Why did you roll up your sleeves and decide to be on the forefront?
A: Taking a leadership position on AI is important to keep moving forward and shaping new services and capabilities. For example, across a company our size, even though we’re hyper focused on emerging technologies, we can find small problems across our technology landscape. There are processes and data living in different places and silos develop over time. Most large companies have this challenge. But those are valuable processes, and the business data we have is especially valuable. AI opens up new opportunities to bridge those gaps and deliver more end-to-end outcomes, so that our finance function can meet the growing business expectations of our stakeholders.
Eli Lambert and Brenda Bown at SAP Connect in October 2025
For many companies, the key to getting impactful results from business AI is to start with one function that’s central to business performance. Why was finance the right place for you to begin, and what did you want to achieve?
I always say finance is the heartbeat of our organization. I heard one of our global IT leaders use that phrase, and while it was inspirational, it also made me think, “Let’s not accidentally cause a heart attack for the organization.”
Jokes aside; he was right. Your transactional and operational data flows through finance, and management decisions sit on top of it. Starting there gave us the ability to make end-to-end impact across processes that touch procurement, liquidity, forecasting, receivables, and more. And SAP gives us a digital core where all that transactional data is harmonized.
The bottom line is that finance is the natural starting point if you want to move from reactive reporting toward more proactive, AI-driven insights that you can use to help move the business forward. So, we set out to unify data and transform finance processes in a way that scales across the whole value chain.
Cash and liquidity are so important in the finance function, and to an entire company. But managing it requires bringing together data, forecasting, and decision-making across many teams. How did AI help?
If finance is the heartbeat of a company, cash and liquidity are the lifeblood of your systems. Here’s a great example: Accenture engages in a lot of acquisitions, and we run operational cash in 50-plus countries, so it’s easy for decisions to default to historical, manual reviews. That’s what was happening at Accenture before a forward-thinking leader stopped by and asked if we could apply machine learning to the problem. Great leaders often ask great questions, and that one really got us thinking.
[AI] freed up 20% of our idle cash, which we could then move into global operations to fund acquisitions and strategic growth.
Eli Lambert
We took inspiration from retail: how stores treat inventory based on discounts and sales. If you treat cash like stock, you can apply those same learning models to figure out how much you really need to hold onto at any point in time. That’s how we built what we call “Intelligent Cash.” It brings all the business data together into a single data mart, a repository for structured data for a specific department or line of business, and uses machine learning to generate recommendations that our teams can act on.
AI is so good at this, and here’s what’s incredible: It freed up 20% of our idle cash, which we could then move into global operations to fund acquisitions and strategic growth. Now what used to take months, or even more than a year to build, we can now do it in days or weeks because SAP’s data cloud brings [SAP] Datasphere, Databricks, and our machine-learning workloads into one place. The result is faster decision-making, better visibility, and much more accurate forecasting.
I love hearing about how you were able to use gains, delivered through strategic AI innovation, and then channel those gains into a high-value activity for the organization. I know you also worked on receivables, something that impacts cash flow and customer relationships. What pain points did you face, and how did automation and machine learning transform the process?
Receivables were highly manual compared to payables. Clearing was inconsistent, and reconciliation took a lot of time because payments often come incomplete or with partial data. Anyone who works in or near finance knows exactly what I’m talking about. So, we co-developed on the SAP platform a machine-learning-based receivables solution. It more than doubled the automation rate for receivables processing and tripled automatic reconciliation, about a 300% improvement.
As part of that, we introduced high-confidence, one-click matching recommendations that reduce errors and cut down the manual work. We saw a seven percent uplift in auto-clearing with a cash application scheduler built on the SAP platform that delivers matches about 77% faster. All of that adds up to a more efficient receivables process, improved cash-flow visibility, and better productivity for the team.
In a global organization like Accenture, reconciling financial data and surfacing meaningful insights can be a huge amount of work. You turned to generative AI to help, which is really smart. What led you to that approach, and how is it changing your team’s day-to-day experiences?
We were dealing with balance sheet reconciliations across 50-plus countries, and the process was decentralized. I know a lot of companies face this problem. So, first, we moved everything online. Then we brought in machine learning and generative AI to analyze cost categories, summarize data, and surface important shifts.
[Our] Intelligent Financial Advisor, built on the SAP platform, can generate narrative commentaries that are so accurate that over 90% are simply approved with little or no revision. That’s saved about 57,000 hours globally. Our teams can focus on higher-value analysis instead of manual reconciliation.
Eli Lambert
We then deployed an Intelligent Financial Advisor built on the SAP platform that can generate narrative commentaries that are so accurate that over 90% are simply approved with little or no revision. That’s saved about 57,000 hours globally, just in controllership work, and helped us move to a three-day global close instead of five. The insights come faster and clearer, and the teams can focus on higher-value analysis instead of manual reconciliation. It’s also helping create more consistent roll-ups across regions and letting us use our talent more strategically.
I’m hearing this theme of not only measurable business gains from outputs, but the ability to better allocate time from manual, rote tasks to ones that deliver far more value for the business. That also applies to planning and forecasting. How did you bring AI into that part of the finance function?
Our planning work had grown too complex. Remember, we’re a large-scale, multifaceted global business. So, we replaced old models with SAP Analytics Cloud, which gives us multi-year planning models enhanced by AI.
We applied it first to merger and acquisition modeling, where accuracy really matters. It lets us model very complex data sets and helps our finance team collaborate more easily across the business. The results have been more accurate forecasts, reduced risk of errors, and much better collaboration between executives and practitioners. Early results were strong, and that encouraged us to expand AI use in planning more broadly.
What advice do you have for leaders who are not as far along in using AI to supercharge business results?
First, start with a high-impact function tied to real outcomes. Then focus early on data quality and harmonization; it’s the foundation for everything that comes after. Then get your cadence right and your team working together. Hone in on the use cases that really matter to you—the best vendors can help you identify those—and make sure to get the help you need from those vendors and their partners.
Use AI to spur growth. At Accenture, we’ve been able to use AI to save significant cash in one area, which we then invest in another, high-growth process—acquisitions in our case. That’s how you use AI to really rethink your business and move it to the next level.
Eli Lambert, on advice to other enterprises
As you go, take a crawl-walk-run approach: start slow then increase the pace of scale and adoption over time. Be sure to invest in change management and upskilling as you go to spur learning and adoption. And partner closely with technology providers and system integrators who’ve been there before. That accelerates everything.
The final suggestion I have is to use AI to spur growth. At Accenture, we’ve been able to use AI to save significant cash in one area, which we then invest in another, high-growth process—acquisitions in our case. That’s how you use AI to really rethink your business and move it to the next level. And that’s possible today in ways that were not, even five years ago. Seize that opportunity.
SAP Business AI: Achieve company-wide ROI and transform how work gets done with agents grounded in your business data
In some of the world’s most dangerous industrial environments, including oil refineries, offshore wind platforms, cement plants, and chemical facilities, human access is often limited, risky, or prohibitively expensive.
ANYbotics, a Swiss robotics company, has stepped into this space with a vision to shape a safer future for industrial inspection, one where robots operate as autonomous members of the inspection team, running inspection operations integrated into plant maintenance workflows.
This vision is embodied in the company’s “ANYmal”: a four-legged inspection robot designed specifically for heavy industry.
Unlike general-purpose robotics platforms, ANYmal is engineered to operate in “big, dirty, dusty, and dangerous” environments, says Nicole Zingg, director of Technology Partnerships at ANYbotics. Places where stairs, corrosion, heat, and unreliable connectivity are the norm, not the exception.
But hardware, Zingg says, is only one part of the puzzle that makes ANYmal indispensable to customers.
Inspection robotics is about data
“We build a hardware platform,” Zingg explains, “but inspection robotics is really about data that is consistent and trustworthy.”
ANYmal autonomously navigates industrial sites to collect data that goes beyond what a human can collect alone. Beyond just visual inspection, its sensors also collect multi-modal data, including thermal imaging, ultrasonic leak detection, gas concentration detection, acoustic anomaly detection, and more. The observations are fed into what ANYbotics calls “inspection intelligence,” which transforms the collected data into actionable operational insights. The result is higher uptime, longer asset lifecycles, and, most importantly, safer working conditions for humans.
ANYmal can make a huge impact on operations. One offshore wind customer, Zingg says, has used ANYmal to manage all inspections and has eliminated the need to send personnel to a remote platform for months. When human intervention was eventually required, ANYmal’s data from prior inspections made all the difference. The customer already knew exactly what was wrong, which expert to send, and what equipment to bring—avoiding costly and risky trial-and-error site visits.
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Yet for ANYbotics, delivering insights is not enough if those insights are not integrated in the software systems customers use.
“SAP is where ANYbotics needs to be native”
Through extensive user research, ANYbotics discovered that many plant operators, maintenance managers, and field service teams already run their daily operations in SAP. Work orders, asset histories, performance trends, and decisions all flow through SAP systems. “If customers are using SAP, SAP is where ANYbotics needs to be native,” Zingg says.
Meanwhile, SAP’s Project Embodied AI was looking for robotics companies to partner with. The project focuses on extending the impact of SAP Business AI into physical operations by enabling robots to autonomously perform complex tasks with an understanding of the broader business context.
It was clearly a perfect fit and has delivered advantages for both companies.
On the system side, a continuous, unbroken digital thread connects ANYbotics insights from industrial inspections to data in SAP systems, helping inform key business and operational decisions across the organization.
For end users, embedding ANYmal directly into familiar SAP workflows can also help ease adoption, since introducing robotics into already stretched industrial workforces can trigger anxiety. Concerns about job security, workflow disruption, and complexity are common, but embedding ANYmal directly into familiar SAP workflows can help reduce that friction, Zingg explains.
Treating robots as part of the workforce
The first major integration point was SAP Field Service Management. Rather than sending only human technicians, customers can now dispatch work orders directly to ANYmal as they would to any other field team member. The robot then autonomously executes inspection tasks, gathers data, and reports the results directly back into a company’s SAP system.
From there, the integration expanded into asset-related scenarios and is now moving toward broader enablement via SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP), with the goal of allowing robot-generated data to land wherever customers need it in their SAP landscape.
The ambition is not to force humans to adapt to robots, but for robots to adapt to human workflows. “ANYmal has to put data in the SAP system, just like human team members,” Zingg notes. ANYmal becomes another worker in the same operational system of record.
Project Embodied AI in practice
This combination of ANYbotics robotic technology with SAP bridges the gap between physical operations and enterprise applications and tangibly reflects the goal of Project Embodied AI.
On the SAP side, AI agents operate on ANYmal’s robotic systems to execute physical tasks, such as safety inspections.
On the ANYbotics side, ANYmal is a physical object that moves through space, perceives its environment, and acts within real-world constraints. ANYmal uses SAP historic and time-series data to inform decisions while at the same time remaining fully autonomous even in environments with no connectivity.
It’s important to note, Zingg stresses, that ANYbotics has control over ANYmal’s behavior and inspection execution, while SAP has control over the business context such as work orders, asset data, or operational priorities. It is the SAP business context that informs how ANYmal’s insights are consumed and acted upon while ANYbotics controls ANYmal’s physical interactions.
Scaling safely and responsibly
Today, more than 200 ANYmal robots are already in productive use worldwide, with inspection deployments in heavy-industry environments that would otherwise require constant human exposure.
Safety remains central to ANYbotics. Each deployment includes extensive testing and an on-site field engineer who helps ANYmal learn and validate its environment and trains customer teams on safe operational procedures. While ANYmal is built to work independently, humans remain firmly in the loop.
A glimpse into the future
As industries face labor shortages and aging workforces, undocumented expertise can all too often be lost. With autonomous inspection robots such as ANYmal, this knowledge is captured and turned into programs that can run day in and day out across multiple sites. The captured data flows into SAP to become organizational intelligence that survives any workforce turnover.
ANYbotics’ partnership with SAP shows that this combination of robotics and enterprise software is moving swiftly from the experimental stage to real-world implementation.
In the future, industrial inspection will be powered by AI, not as disembodied dashboards or isolated machines, but as an integrated intelligent system where physical robots and digital workflows in SAP systems operate as one.
In that future, robots like ANYmal are no longer novelties. They are coworkers, albeit mechanical four-legged ones, quietly extending human capability into places humans were never meant to go. These robots, together with SAP, are shaping for a future where dirty, dangerous, and dusty industrial inspections are being transformed into business insights.
Top image courtesy of ANYbotics
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