Turning 30 is a good reason to look back—and an even better moment to ask what comes next. For SAP Business One, SAP’s solution for small- and medium-sized customers, that means building on three decades of growth with small and mid-size businesses and adopting AI to open new possibilities for customers to prosper in the future.
Growing together
Customer satisfaction has long been a hallmark of SAP Business One, with an enviably high customer retention rate in the upper 90% range. Customers typically only leave the solution when a business ceases to exist, for example through bankruptcy or acquisition. “Looking back at the last 30 years, we’ve had almost no customer churn,” said Darius Heydarian, global head of Partner Enablement for SAP Business One. “Some customers started with a handful of employees and stayed through two or three decades of change, growing with the solution.”
Heydarian named two main reasons for the high customer retention: ongoing innovations in the solution itself and the SAP Business One partner ecosystem. SAP Business One operates on a fully indirect model: the solution is sold and implemented solely by partners, who also support customers during their day-to-day operations. Those partners are autonomous, locally present, and in many cases have been building solution expertise and knowledge for over 20 years.
Customer voices
Vereens Stores: adapting the software as operations evolve
Vereens Stores, a U.S.-based supplier of fertilizers and turf management solutions, has been with SAP Business One for over 20 years. Andee DiCola, chief financial officer and co-owner, points to one thing above all else as the reason for staying: the customization capabilities of SAP Business One. “Rather than having to change the way we operate to fit the software, we have been able to adapt SAP Business One to meet our needs,” she said. Looking ahead, she expects AI to help her company work smarter with information already available today. “I see opportunities around reporting, data analysis, identifying unusual transactions or exceptions, and helping automate repetitive processes.”
Design Resources, Inc.: using the same core platform across new ventures and markets
Design Resources, Inc. (DRI), which designs and sources branded apparel, runs multiple intradependent businesses on SAP Business One. Joe Leimer, chief information officer at DRI, said the solution’s flexibility has followed each new opportunity: “Whenever ownership is exploring a new venture, the flexibility of SAP Business One hasn’t been a limit for us. We know our core ERP needs will be handled and backed by SAP.” For Leimer, choosing an ERP platform “is a decision you only want to make once.”
Staying current: three decades of technology shifts
The roots of SAP Business One are in a business management solution built for small companies by an Israel-based startup called Top Manage, which was bought by SAP in 2002.
Renamed SAP Business One after the acquisition, the solution kept pace with—and sometimes led—technology shifts inside SAP. In 2011, it was one of the first SAP solutions to integrate the new SAP HANA in-memory database. That early adoption gave customers speed and analytics capabilities that traditional databases couldn’t match at the time. In 2020, SAP Business One, Web client, was introduced, encapsulating core business logic in a fresh and modernized user experience. Since then, the Web client has continued to evolve, delivering a growing scope of business processes alongside innovative analytics, integration, and customization capabilities.
SAP Business One version 11, open for initial partner preview in 2027, will introduce a new generation of cloud management tools for SAP partners, such as containerized lifecycle management, which allows software updates without system downtime. It also adds native deployment support for hyperscaler platforms including AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, as well as native cloud storage integration via Google Drive and OneDrive.
Adopting AI
In August 2026, SAP Business One introduced integrated generative AI capabilities: “Ask AI” and AI user-defined query. Ask AI allows users to select business data within SAP Business One, based on their individual user authorization, and ask contextual questions about it, such as researching shipping costs, delivery times, or alternatives for a product. AI user-defined query allows non-technical users to generate sharable lists using natural language; for example, “Show me the top five customers by outstanding payments.”
The partner AI ecosystem: two examples at work
Beyond native AI features within SAP Business One, a growing ecosystem of partner-built AI solutions is already live. MCP (Model Context Protocol) server integration offers partners new ways to build their own agents and AI-powered extensions for SAP Business One. SAP’s Global AI Partner Innovations Playbook lists 54 solutions to date, with many more to come. The following examples shine a light on the quality of solutions offered by the ecosystem.
Third Wave, a U.S.-based SAP partner, built Forge AI, an agentic AI that embeds seamlessly into SAP Business One, Web client. Users interact in natural language via a copilot window inside the SAP Business One user interface. They can search for a specific invoice, create a goods receipt, raise a support call, or cancel an order. The agent reads and writes data within SAP Business One, with a human confirmation step for any irreversible action.
SAP partner Cloudiax took a different approach. Best known as an SAP Business One hosting provider, Cloudiax built AXeLANT Chat, an agentic AI running entirely on its own NVIDIA infrastructure in Germany—purpose-built for companies with strict data privacy and sovereignty requirements. AXeLANT Chat both analyzes business data and, with a human in the loop, carries out tasks such as creating a sales quote in SAP Business One.
Built to last
Embedded AI will be the next big chapter of SAP Business One. “The upcoming version 11 of SAP Business One will be aligned with the Autonomous Enterprise strategy, enabling agentic AI capabilities for the Web client and further extensibility possibilities for partner AI innovation,” said Peter Dominik, global head of SAP Business One Product Management.
Joost Tigelaar, SAP global sales for SME Solutions, summarized the feedback from various conversations he had with partners during the SAP Partner Summit for EMEA and MEE in October: “SAP Business One customers value the flexibility of the solution, the strength of our partner ecosystem, and increasingly expect AI and automation to help them get more value from their business data and make every day work simpler.”
Thirty years after the first customers made the strategic decision to adopt SAP Business One, the solution continues to evolve alongside its customers and the 1.2 million users working with it every day.
