Analyst(s): Keith Kirkpatrick, Brad Shimmin
Publication Date: May 23, 2025
What is Covered in this Article:
- SAP highlighted its messaging around an AI-driven user experience—Joule—backed by an AI Foundation in the Business Technology Platform. This includes embedding Joule and specialized AI agents (e.g., finance accruals, expense validation, shop-floor supervision) across SAP and third-party apps, plus tooling like Prompt Optimizer and Joule Studio for easy customization and governance.
- The company highlighted unifying its Business Suite under a harmonized data model (Business Suite as a Service) and delivering real-time master data via the Business Data Cloud—soon purchasable through AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud marketplaces. SAP also demonstrated physical-world integration, pairing Joule agents with humanoid robots on the factory floor, and showcased AI-embedded migration accelerators in the RISE toolchain to cut migration time by ~35%.
- SAP is beefing up its partner-driven transformation packages through initiatives like “Advance” with Accenture, Deloitte’s Sora AI models, and a JPMorgan collaboration. It has repackaged its cloud ERP into five AI-powered line-of-business bundles (Finance, SCM, HCM, Procurement, CX) and announced end-of-2025 supply-chain enhancements, targeting up to 30% productivity uplift via pervasive AI.
- Building on SAP Business Data Cloud, which serves as a harmonized data layer powered by several key SAP tools (Business Warehouse, Analytics Cloud, Datasphere, etc.), the company announced several new internal and partner-led capabilities led by Databricks intended to further extend the reach of Business Cloud beyond the confines of SAP applications and data.
The Event – Major Themes & Vendor Moves: SAP held its annual Sapphire user conference May 19-21 in Orlando, FL, sharing the company’s strategy, vision, customer stories, and new product announcements with about 15,000 customers and partners. The event was marked by an emphasis on customer stories and examples highlighting how SAP’s innovations announced over the past years are now being implemented by customers, with the help of partners and SAP’s services teams.
Sapphire featured a vast number of announcements and activity, recapped here:
AI Strategy Overview
SAP outlined an AI strategy built on Joule (the new AI-driven UI), Joule Agents, and the AI Foundation within Business Technology Platform (BTP). This vision, termed “AI everywhere,” is designed to embed intelligence across every layer of SAP’s suite, enabling consistent, contextual assistance and automation across business processes.
Joule Everywhere & Partnerships
SAP will embed Joule across all SAP and third-party applications and will leverage the WalkMe integration to provide in-app guidance and contextual assistance that follows the user journey. A partnership with Perplexity is designed to enhance and enrich Joule’s knowledge base by combining internal business data with real-time external insights from the web. Additionally, Joule Studio—part of SAP Build—will let customers and partners create customized Joule skills, tailoring AI capabilities to their unique workflows, which further enhances the company’s approach of creating industry-specific solutions that require a relatively modest amount of customization work.
AI Agents & Automation
SAP is shipping specialized AI agents for core business functions, including finance accruals, shop-floor supervision, expense report validation, and HR performance management. An AI Agent Hub in SAP Lean IX will centralize agent governance and lifecycle management. To streamline prompt engineering, SAP introduced Prompt Optimizer, which automatically refines generative prompts for optimal performance across multiple AI models.
Physical-World Integration
In collaboration with Neuro Robotics and NVIDIA, SAP will deploy humanoid robots that interact with Joule agents to execute physical tasks, illustrated by a visual inspection use case. This marks a move beyond software alone, bringing AI agents into real-world operations on the manufacturing floor and other environments.
Business Suite & Data Integration
SAP’s Business Suite as a Service is designed to unify applications under a harmonized data model and AI layer for end-to-end process context. The SAP Business Data Cloud delivers real-time, master-data integration with intelligent services spanning Cloud ERP, people intelligence, and spend intelligence. By H2 2025, BTP will be listed across AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure marketplaces, simplifying procurement for enterprises.
SAP Databricks Partnership Expansion
Extending its partnership with Databricks, SAP introduced new and forthcoming joint capabilities designed to expand the scope of SAP Business Data Cloud across SAP and non-SAP data sources through bi-directional, zero-copy data sharing capabilities. The company aims to build a multi-cloud data fabric using open table formats (both Databricks’ Delta and Apache Iceberg) to make it easy for greenfield and brownfield SAP customers to create fully managed data products by connecting rather than constantly moving data.
Implementation & Migration Improvements
SAP also highlighted its embedded AI agents within the RISE tool chain, which promise to accelerate migrations to the Business Suite by roughly 35%, handling tasks from process benchmarking to code generation. SAP also unveiled line-of-business solution packages—each with simplified commercial terms—and committed to covering typical migration costs for ECC and on-premise S/4 customers to balance the services-to-software ratio and help organizations rationalize the cost to migrate to the cloud.
Partner Ecosystem Enhancements
The “Advance” initiative with Accenture offers preconfigured transformation packages for $5 billion-plus enterprises. SAP has certified 14 RISE with SAP partners under its methodology, and a Deloitte partnership brings the Sora family of industry-tuned AI models into SAP’s AI Foundation, enriching finance and supply-chain capabilities. A collaboration with JPMorgan will streamline financial processes on SAP’s cloud, leveraging AI to optimize global working capital and accelerate cloud migrations for banking clients.
New Line-of-Business Application Packages
SAP repackaged its cloud ERP offerings into five AI-driven bundles—Finance, Supply Chain Management, Human Capital Management, Strategic Procurement, and Customer Experience—each including Cloud ERP, Business Data Cloud, SAP Business AI on BTP, SAP Build, and cross-suite service management. Certain WalkMe digital learning modules will be bundled with the products, with additional functionality delivered at a premium price.
Supply Chain Enhancements & Omnipresent AI
By year-end 2025, SAP will roll out AI-driven supply-chain capabilities—from material price handovers to smart-guided manufacturing execution, logistics sustainability, and advanced asset health monitoring. With these announcements, SAP is focusing on delivering on its AI ambitions, with productivity targets of up to 30% by unifying ERP, AI, and data across the enterprise.
SAP Polishes and Reinforces Its AI Strategy at Sapphire
Analyst Take: SAP has been an integral player in the ERP market for decades. A look at their announcements and strategic positioning reveals a company that has realized that today’s enterprises are seeking a flexible, AI-powered platform that not only lets them leverage data held within their own data sources, but also lets them seamlessly pull in other relevant information to drive more granular, contextual, and timely insights, while also enabling agentic workflows.
Based on Futurum’s insights derived from a survey of 119 leading CIOs from Fortune 500 and Global 2000 organizations conducted in late 2024, cybersecurity (90%) leads IT investment priorities, followed by driving digital transformation (89%) and adopting emerging technologies (80%). Futurum found that these initiatives are crucial for addressing evolving threats and maintaining a competitive advantage.
SAP’s announcements and strategic direction indicate that leadership is paying attention to these trends, as evidenced by its focus on enterprise architecture as a cornerstone of transformation. They’ve introduced certification programs and are using tools like Signavio and Lean IX to guide customers toward standardized processes, and are also leveraging WalkMe’s digital adoption tools to ensure that an enterprise’s platform, processes, and people are aligned, which supports greater efficiency, security, and productivity.
SAP’s focus on digital transformations is illustrated by its introduction of Business Suite as a Service, which integrates applications, data, and AI cohesively, reducing the complexity of connecting disparate systems. These products, as well as their AI strategy – which centers on Joule, its new AI-powered UI, Joule agents (which carry out business processes, and its AI Foundation on its Business Technology Platform (BTP), are designed to make AI a centerpiece of the company’s platform, rather than technology that is simply grafted or bolted on top of existing an codebase.
Notably, SAP repeatedly emphasized the ‘flywheel of apps, data, and AI,’ which works in tandem to drive exponential value. This integration provides an end-to-end business process context critical for AI effectiveness. While this flywheel analogy is not unique in the market (I’ve heard the term used repeatedly at many vendor conferences), it is a good sign that SAP is in step with its competitors, instead of chasing them.
Simplification as a Strategy
Another interesting message that came through was SAP’s focus on simplification. The company announced new commercial offerings to drastically simplify doing business with them, especially for mid-market customers who can’t navigate complex SKUs and lengthy contracts. The refocusing of their cloud-migration plans (RISE with SAP and GROW with SAP) on existing customers and new customers, respectively, is far clearer than the previous messaging around company size. However, SAP will need to continue to reinforce and augment this new messaging with case studies and other validation points to demonstrate the value of moving to the cloud.
Building a New User Experience from the Ground Up
By expanding its partnership with Databricks and introducing new data engineering and AI workload capabilities to bring external data into SAP Business Data Cloud, SAP is sending a clear signal that it no longer wants customers to think of it as a walled data garden. More than that, with SAP BTP moving across all major hyperscaler marketplaces (AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure), SAP intends to offer customers a fully integrated software, which, together with the its agentic Joule AI capabilities, can change the way companies build software and the way business users interact with that software.
For SAP, this means a lot more than equipping developers with trusted data products that can be surfaced within traditional business software (e.g., SuccessFactors). SAP hopes it and its customers can begin building a higher level of abstraction with Joule as its new user experience (UX), backed by fully agentic processes working autonomously to take action on behalf of the user. In short, SAP intends that Joule will be “everywhere, for everything”, turning every end user into a super user.
Conclusion
Ultimately, SAP Sapphire 2025 demonstrated the company’s commitment to simplifying customer experiences while leveraging AI to transform business processes. The focus on making AI practical and valuable, rather than theoretical, was evident throughout the event, as was the emphasis on helping customers navigate uncertainty through integrated business solutions.
Due to the breadth and depth of SAP’s offerings, it will be incumbent upon the company to ensure message discipline and consistency across its direct customer base, as well as those customers that come in through partnership deals, or complete implementation or customization projects with ISVs or other consultants. SAP is no longer simply an ERP company; it is transforming into a true AI-enabled platform provider to support the modern enterprise. It will be interesting to check with the company in a year to see how well these new approaches are landing with customers and prospects.
You can read the full press release covering SAP’s new announcements from Sapphire at SAP’s website.
Disclosure: Futurum is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of Futurum as a whole.
Other insights from Futurum:
SAP Q1 FY 2025 Results Exceed Profit Forecasts as Cloud ERP Drives Growth
HR Software Market Dominated by Microsoft, SAP, Workday, and Oracle
Will Orchestration Tools Help Vendors Deliver on Their Agentic Promises?
Image Credit: SAP
Author Information
Keith has over 25 years of experience in research, marketing, and consulting-based fields.
He has authored in-depth reports and market forecast studies covering artificial intelligence, biometrics, data analytics, robotics, high performance computing, and quantum computing, with a specific focus on the use of these technologies within large enterprise organizations and SMBs. He has also established strong working relationships with the international technology vendor community and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and events.
In his career as a financial and technology journalist he has written for national and trade publications, including BusinessWeek, CNBC.com, Investment Dealers’ Digest, The Red Herring, The Communications of the ACM, and Mobile Computing & Communications, among others.
He is a member of the Association of Independent Information Professionals (AIIP).
Keith holds dual Bachelor of Arts degrees in Magazine Journalism and Sociology from Syracuse University.
Brad Shimmin is Vice President and Practice Lead, Data and Analytics at Futurum. He provides strategic direction and market analysis to help organizations maximize their investments in data and analytics. Currently, Brad is focused on helping companies establish an AI-first data strategy.
With over 30 years of experience in enterprise IT and emerging technologies, Brad is a distinguished thought leader specializing in data, analytics, artificial intelligence, and enterprise software development. Consulting with Fortune 100 vendors, Brad specializes in industry thought leadership, worldwide market analysis, client development, and strategic advisory services.
Brad earned his Bachelor of Arts from Utah State University, where he graduated Magna Cum Laude. Brad lives in Longmeadow, MA, with his beautiful wife and far too many LEGO sets.
