An Economist Impact study sponsored by SAP found that 89% of procurement professionals feel confident in their ability to leverage AI to drive efficiency and productivity. This finding highlights the urgency of the challenge and the optimism around AI’s potential to strengthen resilience.
In times of uncertainty, spend is one of the levers companies can actively control. Leaders are expected to deliver not only savings, but also resilience, sustainability, and risk-aware processes.
At SAP Connect, we introduced several new AI capabilities to bring more automation, deeper integration, and smarter insights across our spend management solutions. These innovations are focused on improving outcomes: reducing risk, strengthening supply chains, increasing productivity, and freeing people to focus on higher-value work. They ensure spend continues to fulfill its elevated role as a driver of business growth and resilience while helping customers stay ahead of evolving demands.
Next-gen SAP Ariba brings deeper AI integrations and new AI assistants in Joule
SAP is rolling out the next generation of SAP Ariba solutions for source-to-pay to automate the power of procurement, improve cost savings, ensure compliance, and build supply chain resilience. Next-gen SAP Ariba is the world’s most modern source-to-pay solution designed to power the future of procurement.
The first AI-native source-to-pay suite redefines what is possible today and sets the course for the future. With businesses facing ever-present change, our customers can take advantage of a solution that’s built to endure — intelligent, integrated, and scalable. The capabilities delivered as part of next-gen SAP Ariba will empower businesses to tackle today’s challenges and excel in the future.
Next-gen SAP Ariba is built on SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP), and has a completely redesigned user experience, embedded analytics, and seamless integration with SAP Cloud ERP public and private applications.
The advanced capabilities and benefits of next-gen SAP Ariba solutions offer the following:
- Accelerated value realization: Faster adoption with intuitive interfaces and guided workflows
- Deeper insights: Actionable analytics that translate into tangible savings and operational improvements
- Empowered teams: A more productive experience for procurement professionals
Next-gen SAP Ariba capabilities will be rolled out starting in Q1 2026.
SAP also introduced new agentic and generative AI capabilities across the SAP Ariba suite to help organizations optimize productivity and decision-making. Planned for release in Q1 2026, a new Joule Agent for bid analysis automatically compares supplier bid data, including total cost, to give procurement teams insight and recommendations for award decisions.
SAP also added three AI features to the SAP Ariba procurement portfolio:
- AI supplier-response summary will use Joule to help review, analyze, and summarize supplier responses to questionnaires, helping procurement specialists make more informed decisions. This is planned to be generally available in Q1 2026.
- Joule for simplified invoice creation will help employees outside accounts payable to easily submit invoices from SAP Cloud ERP for processing with minimal input. The feature will be generally available in Q4 2025.
- Intelligent contracting will use Joule to automatically extract key information, generate summaries, and search historical contracts for discrepancies and compliance issues. This feature will be generally available in Q4 2025.
As part of the broader SAP Ariba portfolio, SAP Ariba Intake Management is now globally available. The solution provides a single-entry point for all procurement requests to simplify intake, improve compliance, and give employees full visibility into status updates. With Joule, users can easily submit requests or follow guided steps, while the system orchestrates processes across SAP and non-SAP systems.
Learn more at our upcoming webinar, Simplify Procurement Intake with AI-Guided Orchestration, on November 20, 2025. Register here to see how organizations can streamline intake processes and drive meaningful results.
New AI enhancements in SAP Fieldglass connect the right external talent to the right roles
New AI enhancements to the SAP Fieldglass portfolio make it easier to match potential external workers with available positions by automatically analyzing role descriptions to determine the skills required for each position.
The new skills-based hiring feature automatically analyzes role descriptions to determine the skills required for each position, reducing the time to source potential candidates by up to 50 percent. By accelerating candidate matching, organizations can count on a faster, more cohesive, and efficient hiring process.
This feature is generally available and works in conjunction with existing AI features, including resume analysis and job description creation.
SAP Concur and American Express Global Business Travel make business travel easier, smarter and more impactful for organizations everywhere
SAP Concur announced a strategic alliance with American Express Global Business Travel (Amex GBT). Complete by SAP Concur and Amex GBT is a co-developed solution that will combine booking, servicing, payments, and expensing into one experience with AI at its core. The solution will benefit from SAP Concur and Amex GBT technology and business travel expertise. Complete customers will also have access to Amex GBT’s unmatched marketplace, software, and services via Complete, offering greater incentives and cost savings.
Smarter AI for travel and expense management in SAP Concur
We also introduced new AI capabilities for SAP Concur that will streamline reporting, strengthen fraud prevention, and simplify travel planning, helping organizations better control costs while improving the employee experience.
These innovations include:
- The Receipt Analysis Agent, a newly embedded Joule Agent in ExpenseIt, will go beyond basic receipt scanning, automatically completing missing information, determining expense types, and verifying vendor details, even for unknown vendors, to deliver accurate results without iterative learning. General availability for these features is expected for Q4 2025.
- Verify, the automated expense-audit service from SAP Concur now features an AI-generated receipt checker that flags receipts likely created by AI or online generators, helping auditors stop fraudulent claims. The service is currently generally available.
- A new pre-spend planner tool uses generative AI to estimate trip budgets based on policies and itineraries, while also providing relevant travel advisories to keep travelers informed. General availability is planned for early 2026 and Concur Expense customers can take advantage of the pre-spend planner at no extra cost. It will be available to Concur Travel customers later in the first half of 2026
Partnerships and integrations
SAP Concur has enhanced its integration with Uber for Business to further automate how ride and meal expenses are processed, providing better visibility to executives and business users. Ride and meal receipts are automatically routed into Concur Expense, with detailed tax, tip, and itemization data, resulting in cleaner data, fewer manual corrections, and faster reimbursement.
Looking ahead
SAP’s latest innovations across procurement, external workforce, and travel and expense help customers achieve positive outcomes such as cost savings, reducing risk, strengthening supply chains, creating value, improving productivity, and freeing people up to do higher-value work.
Etosha Thurman is chief marketing officer for SAP Finance and Spend Management.
