Singapore, 24 July 2025 – At its flagship event SAP NOW AI Tour Southeast Asia, SAP SE (NYSE: SAP), revealed new analysis into how Southeast Asian businesses are benefiting from artificial intelligence (AI).
Companies like Singapore Airlines are increasingly seeing the value of Business AI across their organisations. Based on analysis of all SAP customers in Southeast Asia (SEA) between May 2024 to May 2025, the most popular AI use cases in SEA are:
- AI to generate expenses using pictures of receipts
- AI to verify expenses to ensure compliance with company policy
- Generative AI to help employees write clear, concise copy in HR applications
- Generative AI to create performance goals
- Integrating key business documents into co-pilots to improve Q&A responses
“AI isn’t confined to niche use cases anymore, it’s being embedded in some of the most fundamental parts of business,” said Liher Urbizu, President and Managing Director, SAP Southeast Asia. “Organisations across Southeast Asia are adopting AI, fast. And, by bringing together enterprise apps and mission critical data, they are realising tangible business benefits in terms of efficiency, growth, and revenue.”
Optimising contract digitization with SAP Document AI
Supported by Digital Industry Singapore (DISG), SAP has recently concluded a successful Proof of Concept (PoC) with Singapore Airlines (SIA), aimed at addressing the complex challenge of digitizing procurement contracts.
The initiative sought to automate the extraction of contractual rates from PDF-based contracts and migrate them to the Ariba procurement platform. This significantly reduces the reliance on time-consuming and error-prone manual processes. One of the key hurdles in the previous automation efforts was the unstructured, multilingual, and highly varied nature of the contract formats.
The PoC delivered promising results, achieving 100% accuracy and completeness for less complex contracts, and over 70% for contracts with greater complexity. It also demonstrated multilingual adaptability for non-English contracts, offering greater efficiencies through optimised translation processes.
The collaboration with SIA was instrumental in refining SAP Document AI models to meet evolving business needs.
Partners and customers across Southeast Asia show AI momentum
SAP partners and customers also showcased strong momentum in AI and cloud transformation during SAP Now AI Southeast Asia.
Amazon Web Services (AWS), a SAP partner since 2008, continues collaborating with SAP to support business transformation in Southeast Asia. Customers like BIG Caring Group in Malaysia and Unilab in the Philippines are leveraging RISE with SAP on AWS to integrate multi-store retail operations, modernize pharmaceutical supply chains, and implement AI-powered enterprise applications. AWS and SAP’s previously announced AI Co-Innovation Program helps partners build generative AI applications and agents that help customers solve real-time business challenges.
“Our long-standing collaboration with SAP helps businesses eliminate technology silos by bringing separate systems together on AWS’s secure and scalable cloud infrastructure,” said Kirsten Gilbertson, Partner Organization Leader, AWS ASEAN. “By connecting SAP’s business applications with AWS’s generative AI services like Amazon Bedrock in SAP’s GenAI Hub, we’re enabling our customers to transform years of accumulated business data into actionable insights.”
Yinson Holdings Berhad (“Yinson”), a global energy infrastructure company headquartered in Malaysia, is advancing its people management capabilities as part of a broader effort to support sustainable global growth. With operations spanning multiple countries and subsidiaries – each operating with distinct HR processes – Yinson identified the need to improve consistency, efficiency and strategic alignment across its workforce.
As part of the digitalisation transformation journey that begun in 2020, Yinson introduced a more unified approach by rolling out Employee Central globally within six months, supported by strong change management and local engagement. The Group expanded in phases by adding key modules; performance, recruitment, onboarding, and compensation throughout 2022 and 2023, and further enhanced efficiency with Generative AI features as part of its global HRIS roadmap. Leveraging digital tools and AI capabilities, Yinson began automating routine tasks such as drafting performance reviews, generating job descriptions, and developing role-specific interview questions. These changes are helping Yinson improve its ability in people analytics by streamlining HR workflows, improving the candidate experience, and supporting more consistent and professional employee feedback.
“Our goal is to be a future-ready employer of choice,” said Louisa Brady, Yinson Group Chief Human Resources Officer. “Partnering with SAP throughout the years has supported our ongoing transformation by helping us streamline HR processes, embrace and embed AI tools which drive greater efficiency and effectiveness. This enables our teams to focus on strategic initiatives that drive value and support Yinson’s global growth.”
Investing in people AI as the foundation of SEA’s AI future
As part of its ongoing commitment to empowering SEA’s workforce, SAP has also announced an update to its SAP Skills University to include 15 new AI courses.
SAP Skills University is a joint initiative with SkillsFuture Singapore and Temasek Polytechnic to design specialised training programmes that equip fresh graduates and mid-career professionals with hands-on learning in key technology skills.
The refreshed SAP Skills University program will empower students with skills in critical emerging innovations, including cloud, data analytics, Business AI, and emerging
SAP technologies.
“The future of Southeast Asia will be shaped not just by technology, but by the people who bring it to life. As AI fundamentally changes the way businesses operate and the requirements of employees, it is crucial that we foster both innovative technical skills and agile mindsets. Looking on display at our SAP NOW AI Tour, I’m confident that Southeast Asia’s future is in capable hands” concluded Urbizu.
