The age of artificial intelligence (AI) is here, creating unprecedented opportunities to reshape industries. Yet, the path to meaningful adoption is riddled with challenges ranging from data complexity to organizational resistance.

This is where the latest update of the SAP Preferred Success offering comes in. It now offers a workshop designed to transform AI adoption into a structured, achievable process. Tailored support focuses on scaling AI initiatives confidently and responsibly in cloud solutions from SAP.

Adding a business AI accelerator workshop to SAP Preferred Success demonstrates SAP’s commitment to going beyond advancing technology adoption. Combining deep expertise, strategic frameworks, and cutting-edge AI capabilities, the workshop helps empower companies to unlock their full potential with bold innovations and measurable business outcomes.

Setting a transformative foundation for AI integration

Supported by a comprehensive framework, the business AI accelerator workshop provides essential knowledge, strategic frameworks, and a clear action plan to leverage AI for improved business processes, data-driven decision-making, and enhanced customer experiences. But what makes this new addition remarkable is its focus on delivering reliable, relevant, and responsible AI.

Enhanced with the software industry’s broadest data sets, the service can integrate AI into business processes while upholding the highest standards of ethics, data privacy, and governance. This can enable companies to embrace AI with trust and transparency while achieving tangible outcomes.

Accelerating time to value is another key benefit of the workshop. By rapidly deploying AI models and solutions, organizations can quickly realize the benefits of automation, optimization, and data-driven decision-making. They can participate in tailored sessions to identify high-impact use cases that align with their unique needs and plan a road map for simplifying the complexities of integrating AI capabilities into existing processes.

Beyond its technical strengths, the workshop emphasizes effective change management and comprehensive governance. These practices can foster organizational buy-in, strengthen compliance, and support a smooth transition to AI-driven operations. And when combined with SAP’s scalable, cloud-based AI services, businesses can gain the flexibility to grow sustainably, adapt to evolving demands, and future-proof their operations.

Guiding the path to bold innovation and simplicity

The workshop can provide a structured approach for organizations seeking effective AI adoption. It begins by introducing foundational business AI concepts, SAP’s AI strategy, and the AI services available from SAP. This initial overview highlights AI’s possibilities, helping organizations understand its potential impact on business operations.

Building on this foundation, the workshop conducts an AI readiness assessment of the customer’s SAP landscape, IT infrastructure, and overall consumption behavior. This evaluation identifies suitable AI use cases and establishes a tailored road map for AI adoption.

In parallel, the workshop can strengthen governance, compliance, and ethical considerations by establishing a comprehensive data governance framework. This helps ensure data accuracy, legality, privacy, and security across AI applications, enabling organizations to maintain high data quality, regulatory compliance, and stakeholder trust while mitigating legal risks.

Change management is another essential component of the workshop. Organizations can learn best practices for AI adoption in SAP solutions, including strategies to secure organizational buy-in, reduce resistance, and transition smoothly into AI-driven operations.

Next, a resource and skill set evaluation is conducted to help identify gaps in AI expertise. Organizations can leverage this information to build a skilled team capable of effectively adopting AI solutions and sustaining long-term success.

The workshop then focuses on strategic use-case identification, guiding participants through interactive sessions to uncover high-value AI opportunities aligned with business goals. This process can provide customers with AI use cases tailored to meet each organization’s specific needs and strategic objectives.

By the end of the workshop, organizations can gain a comprehensive action plan that helps transform insights into execution—driving AI adoption with confidence while fostering co-innovation and collaborative growth.

Shaping the future with AI and innovation at the core

We at SAP and our customers can work together to shape a future where technology drives meaningful impact with the business AI accelerator workshop. Whether identifying impactful use cases relevant for business or adopting AI-driven solutions, organizations can maximize the value of their technology investments and help ensure lasting outcomes with greater agility, scalability, and efficiency.

Discover how the SAP Preferred Success offering can guide your organization toward bold innovation, measurable outcomes, and lasting success.

Kiron Satyavarapu is global solution owner of SAP Preferred Success at SAP.

WALLDORF, Germany — The Supervisory Board and Executive Board of SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) recommend that shareholders approve a dividend of €2.35 per share for fiscal year 2024. This is an increase of €0.15, or 6.8% compared to the dividend paid for fiscal year 2023 (€2.20).

If approved by shareholders and assuming the same level of treasury shares at the time of SAP SE’s Annual General Meeting of Shareholders on May 13, 2025, and as at December 31, 2024, the total amount distributed in dividends would be approximately €2.741 billion (2023: €2.565 billion), representing a pay-out ratio of 51.9% (2023: 43.0%).

SAP believes that its shareholders should benefit appropriately from the profit the Company made in 2024. The Company’s dividend policy is to pay a dividend totaling at least 40% of non-IFRS profit after tax from continuing operations.

The following dates are relevant for the dividend payment:

     Record date for dividend payment: May 13, 2025
     Ex-dividend date: May 14, 2025
     Payment date: May 16, 2025

Note to holders of SAP ADRs (American Depositary Receipts):
One SAP ADR represents one SAP SE share. The final dividend amount per ADR is dependent upon the euro/US dollar exchange rate. Since SAP SE pays cash dividends on the ordinary shares in euro, the exchange rate fluctuations will affect the US dollar amounts received by holders of ADRs. The final dividend payment by SAP SE to the depositary bank is scheduled for May 16, 2025. The depositary bank will then convert the dividend payment from euro into US dollars as promptly as practicable.

Visit the SAP News Center. Follow SAP on Twitter at @SAPNews.

About SAP
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In 2016, Paris-based consultancy firm Capgemini was looking for ways to better manage its global network of employees using existing technology. At the time, the company had limited visibility into its contingent workforce, and its procurement team wanted a tool that would help consolidate insights and track metrics such as headcount, performance, capabilities, compliance, and more. Additionally, with legislative requirements changing rapidly in different regions, the company needed technology that could quickly adapt.

This challenge reflects broader trends in the SAP-sponsored Economist Impact report titled “Flexible Futures: Navigating the Evolving External Workforce,” which dives into how companies like Capgemini are leveraging external workers to meet skill deficits and productivity demands. The report highlights how organizations are turning to innovative technologies and strategies to seamlessly integrate external talent, ensuring they stay competitive in a rapidly changing workforce landscape.

In Capgemini’s case, it used SAP Fieldglass solutions to help manage its contingent workforce program across more than 30 countries. The cloud-based solutions can integrate with other SAP solutions and leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to help optimize external workforce management, helping companies stay resilient in an evolving talent landscape. With the addition of SAP Fieldglass solutions, Capgemini has managed contractors and temporary workers across its entire supply chain. The company has successfully leveraged data from over 50 countries, seeing a 26% increase in unitary cost savings with a 50% increase in productivity from the internal procurement services team.

“The increased visibility into all external workforce-related outcome and process steps has enabled sharpened insights, along with smaller fulfillment time frames, higher fill rates, and improved compliance,” says Andreas Hettwer, group procurement category director at Capgemini. “We have truly optimized functions around the external workforce.”

Smart and efficient talent acquisition

In today’s dynamic business environment, the external workforce—comprising freelancers, contractors, consultants, and gig workers—has become a critical component of many organizations. However, efficiently hiring and managing this diverse talent pool while staying adaptable to future workforce needs can be daunting.

This is because talent acquisition for an external workforce requires finding the right people at the right time, often under tight deadlines. The Economist Impact report also shared that internal skills and talent gaps have increased the demand for proper recruitment of the external workforce.

Capgemini serves as a prime example of how this approach works in practice. When it experiences a surge in demand, its preferred suppliers are notified and SAP Fieldglass solutions pull recommendations from distribution lists of candidates who have the necessary skill sets. This helps accelerate the hiring process and can ensure Capgemini is choosing from the best possible pool of potential candidates. The data is developed in SAP Fieldglass solutions and extracted into Capgemini’s various dashboards, instantly providing a comprehensive snapshot of each supplier’s performance.

Robust data maximizes ROI

Managing an external workforce is a delicate balancing act that involves countless variables. Beyond sourcing talent, it requires tracking budgets, ensuring compliance, and measuring performance. AI-powered automation can help streamline these processes, making it easy to capture, compare, and collaborate on critical information about non-payroll labor. This empowers companies to make informed decisions that maximize their return on investment (ROI).

When inflation surged in 2023, Capgemini fielded a large volume of rate increase requests. Through constructive and fact-based discussions with its supply base, the company managed a cost-rate evolution and shared inflation impact KPIs with its board. This increased executive trust in the global contingent workforce’s ability to deliver productivity. At the end of the implementation, Capgemini fulfilled 80% of its eligible contingent worker demand.

“We have full visibility,” Hettwer says. “We know the number of contractors, we know our demand per geography, per business line, and we know the cost rates we pay for certain roles, and we measure how the cost rates evolve over time.”

Capgemini is also exploring new ways to use the large amount of data coming from the global deployment of SAP Fieldglass solutions, including AI. Economist Impact data reinforces Capgemini’s perspective, as executives cited integrating traditional systems with AI and machine learning as a top priority over the next three to five years.

“AI will certainly be an important factor in our business,” Hettwer says. “We’re being patient and methodical in order to make sure that we introduce it safely and effectively.”

Driving workforce excellence through innovation and insights

Capgemini’s journey with the SAP Fieldglass portfolio demonstrates the transformative power of leveraging advanced technology to manage and optimize an external workforce. By enhancing visibility, streamlining processes, and utilizing AI-powered insights, Capgemini has achieved significant improvements in talent acquisition, supplier performance, and cost efficiency. This resulted in the firm capturing 98% of its global contingent workforce spend with a 60% quicker fulfillment time compared to the start of the program.

As the workforce landscape continues to evolve, SAP Fieldglass solutions can equip organizations with tools that enable them to manage the complete lifecycle of their external employees, from requisition and engagement to offboarding and evaluation. These capabilities are vital to remaining resilient, agile, and data-driven while transforming external labor into a versatile, value-driving resource.

Capgemini’s strategic focus on innovation and compliance sets a benchmark for businesses aiming to unlock the full potential of their contingent workforce in today’s competitive global environment.

Amber Roth is vice president of Global Presales & Strategy for SAP Fieldglass.

Security is in our DNA. SAP security measures meet the highest standards for cybersecurity, operations, and privacy protection tailored to the individual needs of our customers.

We manage security and compliance risks and operate cybersecurity and physical security programs across our technology landscape, including cloud environments, facilities, events, and employees. We apply our security framework for every customer, all the time.

Recent geopolitical shifts and technological advancements have heightened the challenges for organizations responsible for society’s most critical functions, such as government, defense, and essential infrastructure. These security-sensitive organizations face growing threats from malicious actors targeting their mission-critical operations. As national security and sovereignty become top priorities, regulatory requirements are rapidly tightening. Any lapse in security could have serious consequences not only for the organizations themselves but also for the states and societies they serve.

Many security-sensitive organizations may face obstacles in their digital transformation due to these unique requirements and challenges. This has consequences, because in today’s environment, leveraging data to its full potential is just as relevant for national security and sovereignty as the highest level of protection.

At SAP, the needs and success of our customers are our focus. SAP understands the challenges these security-sensitive organizations are facing and is committed to supporting them in their sovereign digital transformation. Thereby, we are convinced that we need a new view on sovereignty in the digital age. One that goes beyond eliminating risk by actively creating value. With SAP Sovereign Cloud, we are implementing this approach.

With SAP’s Sovereignty Commitment, we underline what we at SAP consider also critical for sovereignty in the digital age: a commitment to contribute to building a secure and sovereign future, together.

SAP has been living this commitment through actions for many years. Starting in the U.S., UK, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and Germany, we have highlighted our commitment to sovereign cloud solutions. The announcements of several billion-dollar investments in SAP Sovereign Cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) alone in the past months underline that.

With SAP’s Sovereignty Commitment, we underscore this commitment and dedication to supporting even the most security-sensitive organizations with specific sovereignty requirements to navigate their unique challenges in their sovereign digital transformation in the selected countries. Recognizing the urgent need for transformative action, we are determined to cooperate with those organizations on building a strong pillar for a more secure and sovereign tomorrow.  

In the Sovereignty Commitment, we outline how we do it and what we plan in the future.

“In today’s complex geopolitical landscape, digital sovereignty is not just about reducing risk; it’s about actively creating value,” said Thomas Saueressig, member of the Executive Board of SAP SE, Customer Services & Delivery. “SAP is proud to be a trusted partner for most security-sensitive organizations around the world. With SAP Sovereign Cloud, even the most security-sensitive organizations are enabled to maintain control over their mission-critical workload while unlocking its full potential.”

We are an experience and trusted partner

Most security-sensitive organizations with specific sovereignty requirements need a partner that can flex to their specific regulatory needs and unlock operational value without compromising on sovereignty, protection, or control.

Backed by the world’s leading business data and a more than 50 year legacy of enterprise innovation, SAP is pioneering sovereign cloud transformation to help leaders in government, defense, and highly regulated industries comply with sovereignty requirements and seize new opportunities.

Pioneering sovereign cloud transformation, our sovereign cloud portfolio includes Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).

SAP Sovereign Cloud: A holistic approach based on national requirements

At SAP, we take a holistic approach to sovereign cloud, in which we consider four major dimensions based on the national requirements: data sovereignty, operational sovereignty, legal sovereignty, and technical sovereignty.

With SAP Sovereign Cloud, we tailor solution delivery to the regarded countries’ specific national requirements — a sovereign cloud transformation is not empowered with a one-size-fits-it-all approach. We build on ​the SAP solution portfolio, which is secure by design. We offer with SAP Sovereign Cloud bespoke solutions on dedicated​ in-country infrastructure ​and operations covering the central sovereign cloud capabilities in line ​with our customers’ needs and deliver state-of-the-art solutions based on our innovation pipeline.

With SAP Sovereign Cloud, our customers can simultaneously unlock the potential of technological advancements, ensuring competitiveness and innovation in fulfillment of the national sovereignty requirements. SAP invests in and expands the SAP Sovereign Cloud portfolio, recognizing our most security-sensitive customers’ urgent demand.

Today, SAP Sovereign Cloud is available in six countries​. We are planning to further expand our established footprint with additional geographies and SAP solutions.

We take a forward-thinking approach

At SAP, we strive to think ahead, focusing on the unique and evolving needs of our most security-sensitive customers.

• Dedicated leadership for national security: Recognizing the critical importance of national security, the Supervisory Board of SAP SE has established a dedicated Government Security Committee. This committee ensures that the specific requirements of our security-focused customers remain a strategic priority at the highest levels of our organization.
• Centralized unit for sovereign solutions: To better serve security-sensitive customers, SAP has established the Sovereign Services & Delivery unit. This dedicated team consolidates expertise across cloud infrastructure, regulatory compliance, and digital transformation to address the most stringent sovereignty requirements. The unit ensures seamless collaboration along the entire value chain, enabling faster and more tailored responses to market demands. By fostering closer integration, we empower customers to achieve secure, compliant, and scalable sovereign cloud solutions.
• Investing in sovereignty: We are making bold investments to support cloud sovereignty. SAP plans to invest more than double-digit billion into AI and research and development, as well as cloud infrastructure, over the next five years in Europe. In Germany alone, we plan to invest €2 billion in SAP Sovereign Cloud, underscoring our commitment to strengthening digital independence and the sovereignty of the societies we proudly serve.

Martin Merz is president of Sovereign Services & Delivery at SAP.

AI agents mark the next era of AI and a quantum leap in business productivity. They stand ready to address one of the biggest roadblocks to your business growth and competitive agility — friction in true collaboration across end-to-end processes.

Every day, your people spend too much time aligning data, decisions, and actions across functional silos. AI agents can help bridge these silos, so that core processes run flawlessly and the entire organization operates more efficiently.

However, capturing this opportunity is not about creating lots and lots of siloed agents across the enterprise that help reinforce more functional independent tasks. Instead, it’s about having the right agents, grounded in the correct business context and data, that can work together, supporting human collaboration and improving end-to-end processes.

At SAP, we have been investing heavily to deliver the full promise of AI agents. From the start, we’ve architected SAP Business AI with a Suite-first principle that ensures an integrated AI strategy that brings exceptionally more value with every skill, feature, or scenario added to our portfolio of applications and platform.

Joule, our generative AI copilot, provides one seamless integrated experience across the suite, providing a unified user interface across all business functions and more than 1,300 skills to perform work across the organization. You can ask any question or present any business problem, and Joule will work across every part of your business to solve it like no other solution in the market.

These investments set a strong foundation for realizing our vision for Joule agents — a vision we first shared at SAP Sapphire in 2024. Joule agents are uniquely capable of working together and with business users in various roles to execute complex cross-functional processes with speed and reliability.

Watch the video: How Joule Agents Work

With today’s announcement of SAP Business Data Cloud, the foundation for Joule agents becomes even stronger, because AI agents are only as powerful as the data in which they are grounded.

SAP Business Data Cloud equips Joule agents with a single trusted data layer that breaks down data silos, unifying data across SAP and non-SAP sources. With SAP Business Data Cloud, Joule agents access the most complete and context-rich data sets, allowing them to reason more deeply and act with more insight to solve problems.

SAP Knowledge Graph, previously announced at SAP TechEd in 2024, serves as the semantic bridge between Joule agents and SAP Business Data Cloud. SAP Knowledge Graph reveals the connections between data and processes, helping Joule agents find all the most relevant data to ground their decisions and actions.

While knowledge graphs are not a new concept, combining them with new advanced technologies makes them extremely powerful. SAP Knowledge Graph is rapidly advancing to make SAP’s unique 50-plus years of business process expertise available to Joule agents. This process grounding further enables Joule agents to be aware of the context in which they operate and, therefore, to solve more challenging problems that involve multi-step processes spanning supply chain, procurement, finance, and more.

All these innovations turn our long-held AI agent vision into a reality, with more innovation to come, faster. Today, we announced the availability of a collection of ready-to-use Joule agents across finance, service, and sales, with more across the SAP Business Suite portfolio in 2025.

The announcement includes the planned first quarter availability of a cash collection Joule agent previewed at SAP TechEd in 2024. The cash collection agent will analyze disputes and work across finance, customer service, and operations to validate details and recommend resolutions. This Joule agent exemplifies the full promise of agentic AI — delivering new levels of operational efficiency by working cross-functionally to complete a complex, multi-step process that usually takes hours in just a few seconds.

Watch the video: Joule Agents Demo – Dispute Resolution

Today’s announcement also includes new ready-to-use Joule agents that advance efficiency across multi-step sales and service tasks. This includes a Q&A agent that continuously monitors opportunities and customer cases, proactively spotting questions and surfacing relevant answers from approved knowledge sources; a knowledge creation agent that automatically identifies novel case resolutions and creates structured knowledge articles that scale expertise across your organization; and a case classification agent that understands case context — for example, recognizing a tax-related inquiry even if the word “tax” isn’t mentioned — and correctly routes the case to the correct team.

This class of functionally focused Joule agents will become part of Joule’s collaborative agent architecture, making them available to team with other Joule agents to solve problems across cross-functional processes. For example, when the case classification agent identifies a customer billing dispute, it can route it to the cash collection agent, autonomously kicking off the dispute resolution multi-agent workflow. Through such agent teamwork, a dispute can not only be resolved in seconds but also within seconds of its receipt, further increasing process efficiency and delighting customers with unmatched response time.

In addition, SAP also previewed a custom agent builder capability for Joule studio in SAP Build. The new agent builder will make it simple for users such as citizen developers to create custom agents for their company’s unique business needs. A guided no-code workflow, informed by SAP’s business process expertise, helps ground custom AI agents in business processes and data, allowing them to solve problems through autonomous actions across a customer’s SAP and non-SAP applications. With the unique foundation provided by Joule, Joule agents, SAP Business Data Cloud, and SAP Knowledge Graph, the agent builder enables organizations to build powerful custom AI agents.

Watch the video: Building Custom Joule Agents in Joule Studio

With Joule agents, Joule is not just an AI copilot, but becomes an AI orchestrator across all your organization. Joule can now adaptively assemble and orchestrate teams of agents — including out-of-the-box as well as customer’s custom-built AI agents — from multiple business functions to perform complex end-to-end processes. With Joule agents, teams work more seamlessly, work moves faster, and businesses operate more efficiently.

To learn more, visit the Joule agents page.

Brenda Bown is chief marketing officer of SAP Business AI at SAP.

It was a special moment when Caroline Hanke began her new role as global head of Organizational Growth and Health at SAP in early October 2024—though in an unexpected way. At the same time, Florida, where her and her family had moved into a new home three months earlier, was struck by Hurricane Helene, followed by Hurricane Milton two weeks later.

“We were evacuated and, fortunately, came out unscathed,” Hanke recalls. “But I had to hold the first all-employee meeting with the knowledge that we’d have to rebuild a flooded house, all while staying in a hotel with an unstable power supply.”

In her role, Hanke oversees strategic workforce planning, health, safety, and well-being, as well as the HR Trends and Innovation, People Insights, Organizational Design, and New Work departments.

Hanke also leads a new area of great importance for SAP’s future: the skills-led organization. But what exactly is a skills-led organization, and why is it important to focus on the capabilities of employees?

“A skills-led organization means moving away from rigidly defined job roles with a limited set of key qualifications and instead focusing more on the individual with their specific skills,” Hanke says. “The personal skill sets of employees will shape internal mobility, professional development, and our hiring strategies as a company.”

The skills-based approach recognizes that current job profile structures often fail to fully reflect employees’ competencies.

Hanke herself is a prime example of a personal skill set that extends beyond what a job description suggests. While she spent the past five years in the People & Culture Board area, her professional roots lie elsewhere.

Born in Germany, at the age of four Hanke moved to the U.S. with her parents for her father to work as a professor in computer science and software engineering at the University of Maryland. The planned one-year stay turned into nearly 10.

“I believe those formative childhood years in the U.S. not only gave me native-level English skills but also a deeper understanding of how culture shapes people’s thinking—and the importance of wanting to understand those differences,” she says.

While studying business information management in Mannheim, Germany, she joined SAP as a working student and gained experience in development. She later supported Daimler-Chrysler, initially as a technical quality manager and later as an engagement architect, where she served as a key SAP contact.

She then developed and led a customer management program for the private cloud, which at that point was still in its infancy. In that role, she reported weekly to the Executive Board of SAP SE and then-CEO Bill McDermott, which eventually led to discussions about her becoming his chief of staff.

“When I got the call, I thought there must be a misunderstanding because I hadn’t applied,” Hanke remembers. “The colleague on the other end laughed and said, ‘It seems someone recommended you.’”

This role took Hanke and her husband, along with their son born in Heidelberg, Germany, back to the U.S., where she had grown up. “I’ve never regretted it,” she says. “All in all, I’ve spent almost half my life in the U.S. and feel very at home here. I’d describe myself as half American, half German.”

After McDermott left SAP, Hanke worked in several roles for the new CEO, Christian Klein, before becoming COO in the then-new People & Operations Board area. Though she initially had little contact with HR, she quickly found the topics as engaging as they were challenging, especially given their impact on people and the organization.

“I think my own career path shows how much more experience and skills each of us brings beyond the role officially assigned to us,” she says. “The skills-based approach allows both the company and its employees to make better decisions. Employees want to stay relevant, and as an employer SAP aims to minimize disruptions for its people during changes.”

Skills Development with SAP SuccessFactors HCM

Two key areas impacted by the skills-based approach are training and hiring. Skills-based hiring means that while degrees won’t become irrelevant, the search for candidates will increasingly focus on individual skills and prior experiences.

But how can a company gain a clear picture of each employee’s range of skills?

This is where the growth portfolio, part of SAP SuccessFactors HCM, comes into play. All employees can conduct a skills inventory and add additional skills unrelated to their current role. These skills, often gained outside their formal roles, can now be documented.

Since it’s part of SAP SuccessFactors HCM, the growth portfolio can integrate seamlessly with functionalities like hiring, learning, career development, and talent management—areas that benefit the most from maintaining up-to-date skill data. Based on this information, the system can offer employees personalized, AI-driven recommendations for training and development, paving the way for their next career step.

The skills-based approach also brings significant advantages for workforce planning.

As Hanke explains: “For example, we want to avoid looking externally for skills that already exist within the company but haven’t been utilized or are in the wrong areas. That’s why transparency is so crucial.”

The more accurately workforce planning reflects the skills within the company, the better decisions can be made.

“Business and HR Need to Work More Closely Together”

“HR is one of those areas where everyone thinks they can weigh in,” Hanke says. “Looking back, I must admit I initially approached it with a typical business mindset: HR—how hard can it be? But I quickly learned otherwise. The topics are incredibly complex because there’s no right or wrong answer—solutions must be tailored to individuals. My respect for the HR organization has only grown since then.”

Hanke made a deliberate decision to stay in the People & Culture Board area. For her, HR is more than just a reporting or operational function; it must be deeply integrated into business decisions.

“I believe that people transformation can be a significant competitive advantage in today’s dynamic world,” she says. “And with my mix of business and HR knowledge, I can add value here because these two areas can no longer be separated.”

Hanke also emphasizes the strategic importance of health, safety, and well-being. “Employee well-being is one of the fundamental requirements for a functioning organization.”

SAP’s award-winning health management program, Run Healthy, is set to expand globally to additional countries in 2025. Mental health, especially in the context of COVID-19 and global political developments, remains a critical focus.

“I’m continually impressed by how advanced and diverse SAP’s offerings are,” Hanke says, who has personally benefited from some of them. As a leader, she feels particularly responsible for addressing health-related topics appropriately.

“It’s important to us to see employees as whole individuals and support their holistic development,” she emphasizes. “The skills-based approach, which enables employees to fully leverage their potential, offers exciting new possibilities. We’re embarking on this journey together—and I’m looking forward to it.”