The next era of business will be defined by how well organizations turn intelligence into action at scale.
We’re witnessing the rise of a new wave of intelligent applications reshaping how organizations operate, embedding real-time data and critical operational context with AI models to enable swift and thoughtful decisions. Unlike traditional software that is governed by rigid business rules, these modern applications can learn and adapt to rapidly evolving customer and market demands — detecting changes to optimize processes, anticipate needs, and collaborate with both human and artificial “thinkers” to create competitive advantage for an organization.
Yet, we stand at the cusp of a bolder wave of innovation, one that unfortunately only the discerning few organizations may fully harness. Despite the vast potential of AI and cloud technologies, their true impact hinges on using these innovations with the secure and semantically rich data that is vastly available within an organization.
Transform outcomes with intelligent applications
This year at SAP Sapphire, we unveiled a significant expansion of SAP Business Data Cloud to deliver on the promise of intelligent applications: prebuilt, composable applications that seamlessly integrate trusted data products, AI capabilities, and business simulations to serve the needs of every business leader.
These intelligent applications are not just analytics tools; they transcend traditional analytics by automating and orchestrating work across both analytical and transactional workflows, enabling customers to make decisions and execute actions within SAP Business Data Cloud.
Today, we are introducing new intelligent application capabilities in SAP Business Data Cloud, starting with People Intelligence, an offering grounded in workforce composition, skills, and compensation data products. Built on data from SAP SuccessFactors software, People Intelligence provides HR and business leaders with AI-driven recommendations to optimize talent decisions, drive engagement, and ensure compliance. It features capabilities such as workforce composition insights, compensation insights, and skill insights, all available in the second half of 2025.
Additional intelligent application capabilities in SAP Business Data Cloud that are entering technology preview include:
- Cloud ERP Intelligence: Empowers leaders with transformative insights, business simulations, and AI capabilities to manage uncertainty, drive profitability, and meet sustainability goals. These capabilities include new data products from key business processes such as manufacturing (production execution, resource optimization, etc.), supply chain (inventory, deliveries. etc.), and contract accounting (payments, billing, etc.).
- Customer Intelligence: Guide sales, service, marketing, and commerce teams with a 360-degree customer view to anticipate needs, improve targeting, and build a comprehensive customer profile.
- Finance Intelligence: Provides CFOs and finance teams with real-time forecasting and planning, connected data across systems, and AI-powered anomaly detection.
- Spend Intelligence: Delivers procurement and operations leaders real-time spend visibility to minimize supplier risk, flag spend outliers, and reduce costs.
Each intelligent application in SAP Business Data Cloud is underpinned by curated, governed data products, sets of structured business data and metadata designed to accelerate use cases and reduce data integration overhead. And with SAP Databricks natively available in SAP Business Data Cloud, users can leverage SAP data products with existing lakehouses with a zero-copy approach.
As part of these technology previews, we are also announcing the delivery of hundreds of new data products throughout 2025 across all SAP Business Suite domains — from inventory optimization and delivery analysis to sustainability and compliance data products. The first wave includes new environmental, health, and safety (EHS) and product compliance datasets, with sustainability footprint data to follow later in the year.
Amplify the value of AI with your most powerful data
In addition, SAP Business Data Cloud is expanding its knowledge graph capabilities. Originally launched within SAP Datasphere, the knowledge graph can now ingest and map metadata across SAP and external sources, and seamlessly consume models published in SAP Knowledge Graph on SAP BTP. This creates a living model of how business data is structured and connected, providing a semantic backbone for AI to operate with higher precision.
Paired with Joule in SAP Business Data Cloud, now generally available, users can engage with complex business data as naturally as they think, without the constraints of traditional technology. Joule unlocks the full richness of enterprise information, empowering people across the organization to navigate, reason, and act with intelligence grounded in real business context.
Open data ecosystem: Expanding intelligence beyond SAP
We are also making SAP Business Data Cloud more accessible to power the next generation of intelligent, multi-cloud applications.
Starting in the second quarter, SAP Business Data Cloud is available on AWS, with Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure expected to follow in the second half of 2025. This makes SAP’s data foundation more accessible and deployable within multi-cloud strategies, giving customers the flexibility to run intelligent workloads wherever they operate.
At the same time, SAP is actively collaborating with leading partners to build the next wave of intelligent applications.
- Accenture will release six intelligent applications addressing key challenges in supply chain, talent, finance, and procurement (GA timeline pending).
- Adobe and SAP are co-developing an application that fuses Adobe’s marketing data with SAP’s financial and supply chain data, enabling real-time alignment between demand signals and operational planning, expected in late 2025.
- Palantir and SAP are partnering to facilitate joint customers’ cloud migration journey and modernization programs. Seamless connectivity between Palantir and SAP Business Data Cloud will enable customers to build a harmonized data foundation across their enterprise landscape. SAP Business Data Cloud and Palantir Foundry and AIP will transform data silos into a trusted data foundation that enables human + AI teaming in the real world. Together the companies will responsibly deliver essential outcomes and support customers, including the U.S. government, to quickly adapt to changes and disruptions.
- Thomson Reuters will develop an intelligent application to help customers navigate the fast-moving challenges in the current global trade and tariffs environment, planned for end of 2025.
- Joint Collibra and SAP Business Data Cloud customers can now run up to 10x more active data quality jobs in Collibra Data Quality & Observability when run on SAP BDC data, at no additional cost. This limited time offer helps accelerate decision-making, strengthen compliance, and improve AI readiness, and is available until May 30, 2026.
The scope of partner collaboration also extends to data enrichment use cases. A new partnership with Moody’s will let our joint customers blend SAP’s accounts receivable data with Moody’s risk datasets to enhance cash flow forecasting, prioritize collections, and reduce exposure to bad debt. This solution is scheduled for general availability in the fourth quarter of 2025.
We’re excited to partner with our customers and ecosystem to unlock a new generation of intelligent applications in SAP Business Data Cloud, where trusted data, AI, and business context come together to drive meaningful change. The future of modern business will belong to those who turn intelligence into action.
Get started
- Sign up for the technology preview
- Register for our upcoming webinar featuring the latest on data products and intelligent applications in SAP Business Data Cloud
- Learn more about SAP Business Data Cloud
Irfan Khan is president and chief product officer of Data and Analytics at SAP.
