During his keynote at last week’s SAP Connect event, Muhammad Alam, member of the Executive Board of SAP SE, SAP Product & Engineering, announced an expanded set of SAP Business Data Cloud Intelligent Applications.
An intelligent application includes three distinct layers: data products, domain content, and applications. When all these components come together, intelligent applications become a suite of adaptive, AI-powered applications that can learn from data, understand business context, and act on behalf of a user. They are built to complement SAP’s transactional applications and sit on top of SAP Business Data Cloud.
But what makes these applications different from existing analytics solutions? “Traditional reporting and analytics is focused on producing insights and reviewing past performance,” said Brian Raver, vice president, SAP Business Data Cloud Product Marketing. “With intelligent applications, we go a step further. We provide out-of-the-box data products, model them together for actionable insights, and close the loop by allowing the intelligent applications to continuously learn and adapt based on that data.”
Three layers of an intelligent application
Data products
These are ready-to-use, curated data sets that are delivered for analytics, AI, machine learning, and operational use cases and provide insights related to a specific business topic or challenge. “A data product consists of a refined data set, metadata describing the data set, and an access port or application programming interface (API), allowing to exchange data with third-party applications,” Raver explained. Metadata provides detailed descriptions of the data set, including business definitions and explanations of each field, ensuring that users understand the context and meaning of the data they are working with. Available data products are published in a catalog for developers and data professionals for easy discovery and direct access to various use cases from analytics to application development.
Domain content
Data products are then combined into SAP Datasphere semantic models that power SAP Analytics Cloud stories and planning models. These out-of-the-box, interactive dashboards enable customers to analyze performance, monitor key metrics, and plan for high-value business scenarios.
What is an SAP Analytics Cloud story?
An SAP Analytics Cloud story is an interactive dashboard or report that allows a user to visualize, analyze, and share data insights in a highly flexible, presentation-style format. A story can combine charts, tables, text, images, and other visual elements. This helps to explore and understand data from different perspectives.
Applications
Pro-code applications transform the domain content and data products into recommended actions that are directly connected to SAP transactional systems. Over time, they continuously learn and adapt based on business outcomes. The future vision is for these applications to go beyond recommendations and empower AI agents to act on their own. “Intelligent applications encapsulate end-to-end business processes, while AI agents act as users within these processes,” Raver explained. “AI agents can interact with intelligent applications to perform tasks typically done by human users.”
Benefits for customers
An important benefit for customers is that intelligent applications extend the value of existing investments in SAP Business Suite. According to Raver, a key advantage lies in the intelligent applications’ deep connection with SAP’s transactional systems. “These applications provide out-of-the-box data assets that not only fuel intelligent applications but are also accessible for developers and data professionals to use in their own analysis,” Raver explained. This built-in access to curated, high-quality data allows customers to unlock insights and drive value faster, without requiring extensive data engineering resources.
Looking ahead, as AI capabilities continue to mature, these intelligent applications are expected to evolve from providing recommendations to taking actions autonomously. “In the future, these applications could act on their own, learning from user behavior to automate repetitive tasks, free up time for more strategic work, and reduce the need for manual intervention,” Raver said.
By combining trusted SAP data, intelligent automation, and emerging AI agents, the intelligent applications are helping to close the loop between insight and action.
What sets SAP apart
Unlike other vendors that need to reverse-engineer data, SAP provides ready-to-use data products, helping to save customers significant time and effort. “This seamless integration and the ability to deliver immediate value set SAP apart in the competitive data market,” Raver said.
In addition to the SAP-delivered data products, SAP also enables bi-directional zero-copy sharing of semantically rich data products between SAP Business Data Cloud and other partner data platforms, starting with the already available Databricks Data Intelligence Platform. This capability, called SAP Business Data Cloud Connect, enables seamless access to data where it resides, helping to eliminate costly data preparation and loss of semantics and business context. As a next step, SAP Business Data Cloud Connect for Google BigQuery is planned to be generally available in the first half of 2026. Additional partnerships with key players in the data platform market are expected to follow.
With the latest announcements, SAP now offers three intelligent applications—Finance Intelligence, People Intelligence, and Cloud ERP Intelligence Private—and another three in restricted public preview—Spend Intelligence, Supply Chain Intelligence, and Revenue Intelligence. “Intelligent applications powered by curated data products will transform how businesses operate by making data-driven decisions faster and more efficiently. As the market continues to evolve, these apps will play a crucial role in helping companies stay ahead of the curve,” Raver said.
