SAP executives speaking at the SAP TechEd event in Berlin this week told their audience of developers, system architects, and technologists that they have a central and vital role in the “agentic AI revolution.”
We’re entering a new era, according to SAP Executive Board Member Muhammad Alam, in charge of SAP Product & Engineering: “the era of agentic AI, where AI moves from being just a tool to becoming your trusted teammate.”
Joined on stage by SAP CTO Philipp Herzig and Michael Ameling, president of SAP Business Technology Platform, Alam set the stage during the kick-off keynote, saying: “As developers, you are not on the sidelines of this AI revolution. You are the revolution. And we are here to supercharge you for what’s next.”
Supercharging developers
Together they dismissed suggestions that AI will replace developers. “The truth is that developers aren’t going away,” Alam said. “They are getting supercharged. They’re becoming the architects of smart connected businesses. So, the real question isn’t if we need developers; it’s how fast can we empower them to thrive and lead in this AI-native era?”
Ameling, Alam, and Herzig outlined SAP’s vision and highlighted the integration of AI, data, and intelligent agents to transform business processes and drive innovation. They also emphasized the importance of a unified data fabric and the deployment of advanced AI models and agentic technologies within the SAP ecosystem.
In this new business environment, they noted that every enterprise is becoming a data company and every user experience—from the front line to the boardroom—is becoming AI-driven.
“As developers, you don’t just code anymore,” Alam said. “You also design intelligent workflows and supervise AI agents to shape real business outcomes.” To help developers do this, SAP’s strategy centers on empowering them with applications, connecting them with data, and supercharging them with AI.
SAP BTP is the foundation for AI agents
All this runs on SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP), which serves as the foundation for building and managing AI agents—both SAP built and custom developed. While SAP BTP is the engine, the Business Transformation Management portfolio is the navigator, ensuring technology translates into real business impact. It aligns strategy, process, and people, turning AI-driven potential into sustainable transformation at scale.
Alam identified three broad themes during the keynote:
First, he said SAP is continuing to make SAP more open. As part of that, he announced SAP Snowflake, which brings the full data and AI capabilities of Snowflake as a solution extension to SAP Business Data Cloud (SAP BDC). This partnership is exactly what joint customers have been asking for, Alam shared.
Second, he said SAP will provide developers with the most context-rich agentic platform, including the most deeply grounded set of ready-to-use agents that developers can customize to their needs. “Today, you’ll hear about creating custom Joule Agents using low-code and pro-code tools with agent builder in Joule Studio as part of SAP Build” Alam said.
“We’re also standardizing AI agent interoperability with the agent-to-agent protocol, allowing your agents to collaborate securely across ecosystems,” he added.
Third, he announced SAP’s first foundation model built specifically for structured business data: SAP RPT-1, pronounced “SAP Rapid One.” “Our relational pretrained transformer delivers enterprise-grade accuracy and scale, outperforming both LLMs and AutoML for tabular AI, which is critical for building reliable high-value agents,” Alam said.
“In short, we’re embracing an open ecosystem, supercharging agents with deep process and data context, and giving you the tools to amplify AI and agents,” he said. As the keynote continued, Ameling and Herzig detailed these and other innovations, explaining how they will help developers work smarter and achieve more.
SAP BDC and Snowflake
Ameling expanded on the new partnership with Snowflake, which will bring Snowflake’s fully managed data and AI capabilities to SAP customers. Together with the introduction of SAP BDC Connect for Snowflake, he said this will result in cost savings and simplified data landscapes. “This enables you to integrate SAP and non-SAP data products seamlessly between SAP BDC and Snowflake, so that you can deploy intelligent applications faster and share across your preferred data marketplace.”
Ameling also positioned SAP HANA Cloud as “the database AI was looking for.” With SAP HANA Cloud and SAP BDC, SAP provides the best business data fabric to help address these challenges, he said. “Without SAP HANA Cloud, you would have one database for each and every data representation, which leads to disaggregated data siloes that limit your AI potential. With SAP HANA Cloud, we have all these powerful engines in one integrated, multi-model database.”
Building on this, Herzig emphasized that every business requires a strong data foundation because “AI is nothing without well-organized data…On top of the data foundation sits our AI Foundation that allows you to not only use the latest frontier AI technologies out there in the market, but also to extend SAP’s out-of-the-box AI capabilities and build your own experiences deeply contextualized in your business processes and data.”
SAP pioneers a tabular foundation model
Herzig then explained that SAP RPT-1 was designed to address a crucial problem for developers and enable them to deliver much better predictive capabilities, enterprise-grade accuracy, and scale to business customers.
Until now, Herzig said, “We still had to go back to good old machine learning …to train what we call ‘narrow’ AI models that are specifically made for each [business] task. Therefore, you really had to train a hell of a lot of models.” For example, to solve 10 predictive tasks across 10 different entities like company codes or plants would require training 100 different models.
“What we really want to do is get rid of all these models and just introduce one giant model that only requires a small amount of data to learn from,” he said. That’s what SAP RPT-1 is. “We believe SAP RPT-1 is the most capable predictive foundation model that’s out there today,” he said, delivering much higher prediction quality while being very fast and super-efficient in terms of resource requirements.
Joule, Joule Agents, and AI assistants
The SAP CTO also emphasized that the company is committed to providing developers with the most context-rich agentic platform. He noted that SAP has already shipped 20 Joule Agents across lines of business and will have approximately 40 by the end of the year, and that these agents can leverage more than 2,100 pre-delivered Joule skills. In addition, more than 300 embedded AI scenarios across product lines are available for customers to date, including Joule Agents, growing to 400 use cases in total by the end of the year.
Ameling added: “Our promise is simple: build with intent. You describe the outcome and SAP Build uses AI agents to generate code, logic, and UIs for you, all with seamless access to your applications and data while you stay in the flow… [SAP] Joule for Developers enables vibe coding experiences to make intent-based development simple and intuitive.”
SAP is taking it one step further by providing extensions to work with VS code, Windsurf, Cursor, OpenAI Codex, Claude Code, Cline, and more directly in SAP Build. “You choose a tool, and we meet you where you are,” Ameling said. He also announced that fine-tuned ABAP LLMs with ABAP 1 on AI Foundation will be published in Q4 this year.
SAP is redefining how developers interact with AI through innovations in Joule and agentic AI, but also in terms of physical AI. Herzig welcomed Torsten G. Mueller, Group CIO and COO BPS at Sartorius, to discuss how the partnership between Sartorius, NEURA Robotics, and SAP is bringing to life robots that understand the what, when, and how based on live business context. “This is how we’re really imagining the future, right? Humans and robots working in harmony through Joule, through AI,” Herzig said.
Quantum computing
Looking to the future, Herzig ended the keynote by talking about another “compute paradigm that is still hard to seize”: quantum computing. While he made it clear that SAP is not building a quantum computer, SAP is teaming up with quantum hardware leaders, like IBM—whose Director of Research and IBM Fellow Jay Gambetta joined via video—to help evaluate quantum computing for business processes and applications.
“We believe quantum will join classical and AI compute in your stack, and we’re embedding it into the processes and apps you’re already using, so it just shows up in the workflows of your enterprise,” Herzig said. “And of course, with the cloud, we scale it all. Now, SAP has got you covered, and you’ve got your business covered.”
