This week at SAP Sapphire Orlando, we announced SAP Business AI Platform, infusing AI with the process knowledge, data, and governance organizations depend on.
SAP Business Data Cloud (SAP BDC) is the data foundation of that platform, the business data fabric that anchors universal business context, serving as the trusted knowledge core for every enterprise application and agent.
The future of agentic organizations will be driven by AI with the deepest organizational knowledge. That future doesn’t start with AI models; it starts with whether your data foundation can give agents the business context they need to act autonomously.
Today, we are introducing innovations that move organizations closer to becoming an autonomous enterprise.
Turn all your data into business outcomes
A business data fabric architecture ensures every agent, application, and decision draws from the same trusted business context. And today, we are introducing new business data fabric capabilities that bring multi-model, unified master data, and embedded governance to your agentic foundation.
- SAP HANA Cloud natively available in SAP Business Data Cloud: SAP HANA Cloud is now a core component of SAP Business Data Cloud. As the AI database for SAP BDC, SAP HANA Cloud provides a unified in-memory engine for agents to reason across transactional, analytical, and multi-model workloads such as spatial, graph, and vector. In practice, this means agents can navigate relationships across customers and suppliers, analyze geographic dependencies, or perform semantic search in real time. And because every workload runs on a single in-memory engine with native workload management, inference time drops dramatically, lowering TCO and improving the predictability of AI costs. With SAP HANA Cloud, SAP Databricks, and SAP Snowflake, SAP Business Data Cloud delivers intelligent compute for every data and AI workload.
- Reltio in SAP Business Data Cloud: With the completed acquisition of Reltio, SAP is bringing multi-domain master data management capabilities directly into SAP Business Data Cloud, helping customers unify, cleanse, and harmonize data across SAP and third-party sources. Reltio’s AI-based entity resolution identifies and merges related records into a single, consistent view of business entities. Low-latency delivery and Model Context Protocol support enable real-time, multi-agent workflows across your data landscape: a procurement agent, for example, can assess supplier risk and trigger action almost instantly using trusted, real-time data. Together, this becomes a golden record system of context that Joule Agents use to deliver faster time-to-value for business AI.
- SAP Master Data Governance natively available in SAP Business Data Cloud: Unified master data is only as valuable as the governance applied to it. To ensure data is AI-ready, governance must shift from regulator to value accelerator. SAP Master Data Governance is now a core component of SAP Business Data Cloud, governing master data and policies across your business data fabric. This results in embedded AI governance that accelerates agent deployment, ensuring every agent operates on data products that are verified and aligned to your business policies.
- SAP AI Core integration with SAP Business Data Cloud: SAP is introducing deeper integration between SAP Business Data Cloud and SAP AI Core, enabling AI models to be grounded directly in trusted business data, semantics, and governance. Batch inference can now be embedded into business-ready data products, continuously enriching the data that powers Joule with predictions, classification, and AI outputs.
“This is where SAP Business Data Cloud fits into the vision: not as a centralized system, but as an enabler of cultural change through its unique capabilities. These capabilities allow teams to preserve mission-critical business context across financial and non-financial data.”
Jannie Affeld, VP Finance Systems and ERP, Google
Transform outcomes with Joule Agents
SAP is bringing agentic AI directly into the business data fabric through Joule Agents, introducing new capabilities that streamline data management, analytics, and planning through a conversational experience:
- Data product search and creation: Joule Agents simplify how users discover and create data products. With natural language prompts, users can identify relevant SAP and third-party data sources, perform joins and transformations automatically, and apply business context and governance policies.
- Automated planning and analytical modeling: Joule Agents enable data modelers and planning teams to generate analytical and planning models using AI. By defining dimensions, granularity, and data sources, users can automatically create models aligned with best practices. Teams can also initiate planning cycles, manage versions, and apply calculations without deep technical expertise.
- Easily surface business insights: Business users can ask complex analytical questions in natural language and receive context-aware insights across lines of business. Powered by governed data products in SAP Business Data Cloud and SAP Knowledge Graph, Joule understands relationships, processes, and business logic to deliver more accurate and complete answers without requiring manual exploration.
- SAP Analytics Cloud story generation: Joule accelerates SAP Analytics Cloud story creation by transforming data models, queries, and business context into dashboards and visualizations automatically. Users can continue the conversation, drilling into KPIs, identifying drivers, and exploring trends in a single workflow.
Extend context across your open data ecosystem
Last year, we introduced SAP BDC Connect, a capability to share data and metadata with zero copies, preserving meaning across every cloud and platform. We are excited to announce SAP BDC Connect for Amazon Athena, continuing our promise of openness and choice.
This enables SAP data products to be discovered and consumed directly within AWS without replication or loss of context. As a result, teams can build analytics, applications, and AI agents faster while ensuring they operate on trusted, governed business data.
Together with existing partners across Snowflake, Databricks, Google BigQuery, and Microsoft Fabric, SAP Business Data Cloud delivers a connected, open data ecosystem so organizations can extend business context across their entire landscape with zero copies.
General availability is planned for H2 2026.
“Compute can happen anywhere, data can stay at the source when needed, but business context is managed once, centrally, in SAP Business Data Cloud.”
Malin Persson, CIO at Ericsson
Get started today
Build your trusted foundation for agentic AI with SAP Business Data Cloud.
- Build your business case and save up to 67% on your TCO with a business data fabric
- Learn how your industry peers are bridging the gap between data strategies and agentic AI
- Explore the SAP Business Data Cloud Demo Hub
Irfan Khan is president and chief product officer of SAP Data & Analytics.
