Led by SAP Executive Board Member Muhammad Alam, in charge of SAP Product & Engineering, SAP executives announced a string of business AI innovations, including role-aware Joule assistants, during the kickoff keynote at the inaugural SAP Connect event in Las Vegas this week.
Against the backdrop of the event theme—”Connect Everything, Achieve Anything: Agents, Data, and the Business Suite”—they set out SAP’s vision for how SAP Business Suite, which combines AI, data, and applications, can transform enterprises and deliver unprecedented business value to customers despite global macroeconomic uncertainties.
Unique times
“We are living in very unique times,” Alam said at the start of the keynote. “Unique in terms of the unpredictability we face from a geopolitical and macroeconomic perspective, and also unique in terms of the advancement in AI and the potential that carries for all of us.”
He added, “Even the most significant challenges can be responded to, navigated, and—when approached the right way—turned into opportunities. And that’s exactly where SAP comes in. Because the best way to face uncertainty is with confidence that you can see what’s happening across your business and your network.”
The CFO perspective
His comments were echoed by CFO and Executive Board Member Dominik Asam in an onstage discussion with economist and Berkeley professor Ulrike Malmendier, during which they likened the role of the CFO in navigating today’s business uncertainties to that of co-piloting a modern jet.
“AI is the next supercycle and has what it takes to create an effective cockpit for the CFO, including recommendations about real actionable options all the way to autopilot for less critical tasks,” Asam said. He also warned that standing on the sidelines of technological progress is “a sure recipe for falling behind in competition.”
“As in prior tech supercycles, the entire competitive playing field is being completely reshuffled,” he said.
New products
Building on this theme, Alam noted that while uncertainty is real and isn’t going away, it can be successfully navigated and turned into opportunities. To help customers achieve this, he announced several new and enhanced SAP products.
Among them, SAP Supply Chain Orchestration is an AI-native application that uses a network knowledge graph to analyze real-time signals across a company’s multi-tier supply chain to detect risks and issues, such as extreme weather or tariffs. It then helps customers minimize disruptions by assessing the impact of these risks and suggesting alternatives to help minimize disruptions. “Think of it like a GPS in your car which selects an alternative route to avoid traffic or tolls,” Alam explained. In addition, he announced a major update to the SAP Ariba solutions for source-to-pay suite, positioning SAP Ariba as the most modern platform in the industry and the only truly AI-native source-to-pay solution—all built on SAP Business Technology Platform.
The human-AI partnership opportunity
Turning to uncertainties over the future of work itself, SAP Chief People Officer and Executive Board Member Gina Vargiu-Breuer, who is leading SAP’s own workforce transformation, was joined on stage by Ian Beacraft, founder and chief futurist of Signal and Cipher.
“At SAP, we know firsthand that AI is everywhere, shattering norms and transforming the workforce,” Vargiu-Breuer said. “And we as SAP are boldly steering this shift, as requirements for our workforce are simply changing really fast.”
Vargiu-Breuer emphasized that a successful business AI strategy also depends on leveraging AI alongside human expertise and fostering what she described as “a collaborative human + AI approach, rather than just automation.” “By integrating AI’s capabilities with human creativity, empathy, and judgment, we move beyond simple automation into real human-AI power couples,” she said. “Ultimately, the future will favor those who embrace orchestration, delegation, and creative problem-solving.”
Role-based AI assistants
Echoing this human-centric approach, Alam noted, “Everyone is talking about agents—billions of agents—and agents taking over everything. We want to talk about people, the roles they play, and the tried-and-tested organizational constructs in place today that are running complex businesses across industries.”
Reflecting this, he said SAP is making Joule deeply aware of the workstyle of the person it partners with, their role, and the business process context in which they operate. “Today, we are introducing AI assistants, including a receivables assistant for your accounts receivable colleagues, a controlling assistant for your controlling colleagues, a demand Planning assistant for your demand planning colleagues, and an AI assistant for every role.” Each assistant has agents and AI tools at their disposal to help make the person it partners with smarter and more efficient, Alam explained.
Taking the receivables assistant as an example, he said it can handle collections and dispute resolution today and will soon also be able to help with fraud detection, invoice processing, and payment scheduling. “Over time, we will continue to make this assistant even smarter by adding more agents and capabilities—all designed to make the person in this role more effective.”
Deep research and new intelligent applications
“While efficiency and automation carry potential for great value for the organization, AI’s greatest strength is in unlocking insights and recommendations based on its ability to do deep research across vast amounts of internal and external data, which is hard for people to do,” said Alam. To address this challenge, SAP is introducing deep research in Joule, a capability that can research and analyze complex problems and deliver findings quickly and efficiently.
Following additional announcements, including an expanded set of SAP Business Data Cloud Intelligent Applications and an enterprise wide, multi-stakeholder engagement orchestration solution in SAP Engagement Cloud, Alam closed out the keynote by reminding his audience: “To create exponential value and to reach the global maxima for your enterprise, the whole matters. And that’s what we are focused on: providing you with best-in-class applications, seamlessly and natively integrated across the breadth of finance, spend, supply chain, HCM, and customer experience.”
SAP Business Suite delivers unprecedented value
The unmatched value of SAP Business Suite is that it brings together the power of best-in-class applications with a semantically rich harmonized data layer to power high-value AI in a singular seamless experience. It helps you manage uncertainty, evolve your workforce, and break down silos to create amazing customer value.
