SAP CEO Christian Klein delivered a bold new vision for the company and its customers yesterday that will enable them to become autonomous enterprises and use agentic AI accurately, securely, and at scale.
In his kickoff keynote at SAP Sapphire Orlando, Florida, Klein and other SAP Board members detailed how SAP plans to bring agentic AI to the world’s most critical business workflows so that humans and AI can meet the accelerating demands of global business profitably, strategically, and safely.
“Today I’m super proud to launch our new SAP Business AI Platform, which forms the basis for our vision of the future of business: the Autonomous Enterprise, where agents run the business and you can focus on what truly matters,” Klein said.
Enterprise AI is at an inflection point, Klein told his 30,000-strong in-person and virtual keynote audience, and SAP is in a unique position to deliver what customers need to turn their businesses into autonomous enterprises.
The business AI imperative
Across industries, organizations are investing heavily in artificial intelligence, yet many still struggle to translate that investment into meaningful business value. At SAP Sapphire, the message was clear: This isn’t a technology problem; it’s a context and execution problem.
While 80% accuracy may be sufficient for consumer AI applications, Klein said, “Eighty percent is just not good enough when you run the world’s most business-critical businesses. They [LLMs] should not guess; they should deliver accurate, compliant, and secure outcomes.”
Klein acknowledged that while adoption of AI has become near-universal, tangible business value remains elusive. Citing a recent Stanford AI survey, he noted that almost every company is now using AI, but seeing only limited return.
The reason, he argued, lies in a structural gap. Above the waterline of enterprise AI, LLMs continue to improve at tasks trained on publicly available data, while below it lies what enterprises truly need: AI that understands mission-critical business data, end-to-end processes, and operates within security, compliance, and governance frameworks.
ERP as the foundation for business AI
SAP’s answer to this challenge begins with what Klein described as “the brain of every company: its ERP system.” For over 50 years, SAP has had solutions with incredibly deep process and data domain know-how alongside the governance requirements, compliance controls, and company-specific configurations that define how businesses actually run.
Now, as part of the company’s new vision, SAP plans to infuse this institutional knowledge into AI agents, enabling them to navigate thousands of business processes, select from more than 7 million data fields, and verify identity and access authorizations before returning any output.
“We’re bringing together LLMs with 50 years of business know-how stored in our ERP. But to do this, we had to do nothing less than completely reinvent our company,” he told the audience. “Today we are very excited to show you the new SAP and our vision for the Autonomous Enterprise.”
SAP Business AI Platform
To bring this vision to life, SAP executives on stage announced a series of important innovations, beginning with the launch of the new SAP Business AI Platform, a unified architecture bringing together SAP Business Technology Platform, SAP Business Data Cloud, and AI Foundation under a single roof.
“The heart of this new platform is the rich context layer,” said Klein. “Here, we infuse the deep ERP business domain know-how into the AI agents. Through our knowledge graphs, our AI agents have now a compass, a map, to find the right process and data in your ERP universe. And to provide the agents even more context, we are also introducing our new SAP Domain Models. They have been trained on SAP’s code to even better understand the business logic of your company.”
But, he said, SAP is going further: “Because you run your business not only with SAP solutions, our AI agents have to also understand non-SAP data. That’s why we included our SAP Business Data Cloud in the context layer to build a single semantical data layer across SAP and non-SAP. No more silos, no spaghetti data sprawl—because no AI agent can compensate for a broken data model.”
Echoing Klein, SAP CTO Philipp Herzig, who presented the platform in detail, said it has been designed to close the agent adoption gap in the enterprise by delivering outcome, speed, enterprise-readiness, and context. “It’s the place where you build, contextualize, reason, and govern AI,” he said.
Herzig explained that the platform is structured around three layers: the context layer which Klein referenced, the build layer, and the governance layer. “Agents are only as powerful as the context they operate on,” he said. “Lacking context is the number one reason why enterprise AI projects fail to deliver value.”
Within the build layer of the new platform, the new Joule Studio is designed to understand a company’s business challenges and enables the building of new AI agents quickly and easily.
The third tier is the governance layer, anchored by the new SAP AI Agent Hub built on SAP LeanIX. This provides a single command center to discover, manage, and govern all AI agents—SAP and non-SAP. It will be generally available in Q3 and included in SAP Business AI Platform at no additional charge.
Underscoring the changing AI marketplace, Herzig was joined on stage by KPMG Global Head of Advisory Rob Fisher, who told the audience: “What I’m hearing from clients is a clear shift; they’re moving from AI pilots to embedding integrated AI and agents into how work gets done. Where we see leaders really separating from the pack is in the execution and the organizational adaptability.”
SAP Autonomous Suite
Building on the platform, SAP Executive Board Member Muhammad Alam, SAP Product & Engineering, announced the transformation of SAP’s SaaS application portfolio into the SAP Autonomous Suite, described as the most significant evolution of SAP’s applications business in the company’s history.
The suite spans five domains: Autonomous Finance, Autonomous Spend, Autonomous Supply Chain Management, Autonomous HCM, and Autonomous CX, with more than 200 agents and over 50 assistants available in the coming months. Each assistant is mapped to core business roles and carries defined KPIs tracked through SAP AI Agent Hub.
“SAP Autonomous Suite brings together the depth of our process expertise, semantically rich data, and built-in governance and compliance,” said Alam. “These agents are designed with outcomes as a core objective. Each assistant has a defined set of ROI KPIs that you can expect it to deliver.”
“Underpinning the autonomous suite are out-of-the-box agents—hundreds of agents cutting across all core business processes,” he shared. “These agents come together into what we call assistants, or Joule Assistants. We’ve mapped these assistants to roles across the core processes of an organization, because we know that the first step
in realizing value from AI is to empower your people to do more, do it better, or do things that just weren’t possible to be done before.”
Turning to Joule itself, Muhammad said SAP is fundamentally reimagining how users will interact with SAP applications in the future.
“We call this Joule spaces and along with the familiar Joule conversations experience and Joule Studio 2.0, it is now part of what we call Joule Work,” he explained.
“Joule Work represents a massive step forward in super-charging the capabilities of Joule as we know it today,” Alam said. “With Joule Work, we’re bringing a claw-based agentic harness to Joule along with computer and file access, better support for open standards such as MCP and A2A, access to a more complete knowledge base, and, of course, amazing visualizations on the fly.”
Industry AI: H&M and Sector-Specific Transformation
During the keynote, SAP Chief Operating Officer Sebastian Steinhaeuser introduced the Industry AI initiative, delivering AI-powered solutions built on decades of sector-specific expertise across 26 industries. In life sciences, he highlighted how SAP customer Takeda is achieving up to 10% productivity gains, up to 25% reduction in revenue loss from stock-outs, and up to five percent reduction in safety stock through Autonomous Regulated Manufacturing.
He was also joined on stage by H&M Group CDIO Ellen Svanström, who discussed how the fashion retailer is embedding AI across its value chain. Built on RISE with SAP, SAP Business Data Cloud, SAP Commerce Cloud, and SAP SuccessFactors solutions, H&M has developed a Store Intelligence Agent that processes real-time signals to generate actionable recommendations for store managers. Svanstrom also demonstrated the AI-powered InStore Concierge, a customer-facing agent that bridges digital and physical retail through personalized outfit recommendations and real-time availability.
RISE with SAP and SAP GROW: Path to the Autonomous Enterprise
Returning to the keynote stage, Klein emphasized that technology adoption alone does not create business value. Simply plugging AI agents into your system landscape will drive zero value, he said. “Moving to the Autonomous Enterprise requires serious change management. Adoption of AI goes hand-in-hand with business process change and end user enablement.”
To support customers on this journey, SAP announced a comprehensive reset of its RISE with SAP and SAP GROW offerings. RISE with SAP customers will receive contractual commitment to activate three Joule Assistants within the first year, with the Max Success Plan extending adoption across the full enterprise.
SAP GROW customers will receive more than 20 AI assistants from day one, with an AI-enabled toolchain designed to support go-live in weeks. New partnerships with Palantir and Accenture will support the most complex migration scenarios.
Closing: The Autonomous Enterprise
Klein closed the keynote by asking Joule to summarize the key takeaways and noting that SAP is evolving from being a software company to becoming a business AI company.
“We showed how to turn the promise of business AI into reality with SAP Business AI Platform, which provides the data processes and governance AI need to deliver accurate and secure outcomes at scale; we introduced the SAP Autonomous Suite, where applications reason, decide, and act for you; and we showed how to manage change management with RISE with SAP. Together with customers and partners, we showed how SAP is helping companies realize the vision of the Autonomous Enterprise.”
“We’ve been reinventing how businesses run for over 50 years, and now by infusing SAP’s ERP brain into the new SAP Business AI Platform, we’re solving one of the biggest challenges businesses are facing today: how to turn AI into business value,” he said. “It’s the end of long negotiations, supply chain disruptions, financial blind spots, and the beginning of better: Welcome to the Autonomous Enterprise.”
