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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