Following their opening keynote address at SAP Sapphire & ASUG Annual Conference, SAP leadership convened for a media-and-analyst Q&A session to unpack the strategy behind this year’s announcements, from the company’s plan to make Joule omniscient to its shift to a suite-as-a-service strategy.
With business AI at the center of the conversation—whether related to suite architecture, partner enablement, or economic resilience—the Q&A provided a behind-the-scenes view of how SAP plans to operationalize the bold vision laid out on stage.
Moving to Best of Breed as a Suite, or “Suite-as-a-Service”
Suite Strategy: As companies seek to leverage AI, SAP is repositioning its solution suite with a clear thesis: AI’s potential to create exponential value for enterprises can only be unlocked through tightly integrated, end-to-end business-application landscapes.
Integration Enables AI: While “best of breed” tools once justified custom integrations in pursuit of functional depth, generative AI has upended the playbook. Delivering tangible business outcomes now depends on shared data models, unified process context, and seamless system execution.
“Organizations that really think about AI [realize] they don’t have a choice,” said Muhammad Alam, who leads the product and engineering area of the Executive Board of SAP SE. “If you really, truly want to unlock AI, you only have one choice, which is that you have to go out professional-grade, as a suite.”
Suite-as-a-Service: SAP’s new commercial packaging simplifies adoption by offering modular yet managed access to domain capabilities. The result? Reduced complexity and accelerated time-to-value for customers interacting across areas such as finance, supply chain, procurement, and CX, unifying data that continually improves AI performance.
Flywheel Effect: Bringing together an end-to-end, seamlessly integrated application suite with a data layer that instills a harmonized data model with high-quality data, strong governance, and rich semantical context, as well as AI built on data and available in those applications, will lead to a “flywheel” effect, continuously enhancing business insights and accelerating enterprise productivity.
Optimizing SAP’s AI Transformation
By the Numbers: SAP has already delivered over 230 embedded AI use cases, with ambitions to cross 400 by year’s end, including deployments in HR, spend, and supply chain.
Joule Everywhere: Joule, SAP’s AI copilot, will be embedded across all SAP products and extended into non-SAP systems via partners such as Perplexity and Databricks. A series of feature rollouts, including full integration with WalkMe and analytics-driven insight-to-action flows, are scheduled before end of year.
A Human Touch: Joule agents surface insights, but people stay in the picture. SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC) harmonizes structured and unstructured data, providing support for explainability, auditability, and complete user oversight.
Enterprise-Grade Trust: “In our private world, you can maybe live with a 90% accurate answer, but what you can't have, in the business world, is 90% accurate code,” said SAP CEO Christian Klein. “That’s why BDC is so important for our AI foundation and, of course, for the quality of AI.”
Rethinking the Partner Model for a Suite and Agent Era
New Economics: SAP is reorienting its 23,000-partner and 9 million-consultant ecosystems around the precept of transformation. As SAP transforms internally, partners and consultants will follow suit; certification and training will be especially critical for those partners and consultants assisting with implementation of SAP solutions across various industries.
Leveraging Tools: Drawn-out ERP projects are being replaced with agile deployment via SAP-native tools such as LeanIX, Signavio, and WalkMe. These tools are designed to standardize core processes and shift spending toward innovation.
“We’re not making money any more with long, expensive ERP upgrades,” Klein said. “We’re standardizing, and we are automating, and we are bringing them to clean core with our business suite, so customers can spend their money on innovation.”
Agent Extensions: While 90 percent of AI use cases are embedded, partners are being encouraged to build differentiated, domain-specific agents. For example, PriceFX focuses on pricing logic, while Bosch is deploying agents to triage customer emails and initiate service actions.
Building Resilience in Unprecedented Times
Under Pressure: Amid tariff realignments and supply chain volatility, SAP is positioning its suite as an engine that powers adaptability. “We are getting a lot of good feedback about how AI can further drive not only the optimization of supply chains but also the agility of supply chains,” noted Klein.
Agile Moves: Customers have leveraged SAP tools to optimize sourcing routes, rebalance manufacturing, and simulate cash flows under various geopolitical scenarios.
Uncovering Opportunities: Real-time demand and supply matching and predictive insights, powered by embedded AI and orchestrated through BDC, help businesses turn volatility into a competitive edge.
SAP stressed that its strategy is driven by looking beyond the AI hype cycle to anchor transformation in how businesses run. As AI transitions from an accessory to a core function, SAP is betting that end-to-end systems, grounded in trusted data and driven by partner innovation, can define the next era of enterprise software.