Analyst(s): Keith Kirkpatrick
Publication Date: May 28, 2025
What is Covered in this Article:
- Strategic Acquisition and Integration: SAP’s acquisition of WalkMe in early 2025 positions the digital adoption platform as a core enabler of SAP’s strategic initiatives, driving digital transformations and cloud migrations and powering the “Joule everywhere” generative AI assistant across SAP and non-SAP applications.
- Enhanced User Adoption and Automation: WalkMe’s platform focuses on user experience by identifying application friction points, guiding feature activation, and automating workflows. It’s already embedded in SuccessFactors, Ariba, Concur, and Sales & Service Cloud, with full ERP cloud integration slated for late 2025, and complements SAP’s Signavio, Lean IX, and Build toolchain.
- Future-Ready, AI-Driven Guidance: SAP leverages WalkMe internally for change management and training, and plans to augment it with AI (in partnership with Perplexity) to deliver proactive, contextual assistance. Analysts see this tight integration as boosting efficiency and maintaining WalkMe’s vendor-agnostic value proposition.
The Event – Major Themes & Vendor Moves: SAP’s acquisition of WalkMe closed earlier in 2025. At the WalkMe analyst day in January, WalkMe executives stressed that in addition to servicing SAP customers, the digital adoption platform would continue to take an agnostic approach to seeking out new business.
However, starting with SAP’s chief executive Christiain Klein, SAP made it clear at its annual Sapphire user event that WalkMe will play an integral part in supporting SAP’s broader strategic initiatives, including driving digital transformations, preparing organizations to move to the cloud, and enabling SAP’s generative AI assistant-powered “Joule everywhere” strategy.
Business Transformation Management
Embarking on a digital transformation has become a key strategy of enterprises seeking to increase productivity, efficiency, and scalability. One of the core elements of a digital transformation is the use of new technology applications and processes. WalkMe’s Digital Adoption Platform is integral to ensuring that organizations understand what applications and processes are being used and which processes are causing friction for workers. WalkMe is designed to focus on the user experience and adoption aspects to not only identify bottlenecks, but create automated workarounds wherever possible to ensure organizations and workers derive the most value from their technology investments.
WalkMe helps guide customers on activating features and capabilities within SAP applications, making it easier to discover and use new functionality. When users click a button in SAP applications, WalkMe can direct them to the appropriate tool for extending processes or automating workflows, creating a more seamless experience across applications.
SAP has already integrated WalkMe into several core applications, including SAP SuccessFactors, SAP Ariba, Concur, and SAP Sales and Service Cloud. In the second half of 2025, WalkMe will be integrated into SAP’s private and public cloud ERP offerings, extending the capability across the full SAP Business Suite.
Integration with SAP’s Tool Chain
WalkMe is also being integrated into SAP’s broader tool chain for implementation and transformation. According to SAP, WalkMe complements other tools like Signavio and Lean IX to create a comprehensive implementation and transformation toolkit to help organizations transform their businesses. Furthermore, WalkMe capabilities are being embedded directly into SAP Build, allowing for seamless extensibility experiences. Users can click a button and jump directly to the tool where they can extend processes or automate workflows.
Joule Everywhere Initiative
The most significant implementation of WalkMe technology is through the “Joule everywhere” initiative announced at Sapphire 2025. By combining Joule with WalkMe, SAP is transforming Joule into an “omnipresent, always-on, proactive and personalized AI assistant” that works across both SAP and non-SAP applications. WalkMe technology also enables Joule to be available directly in both browser tabs and desktop applications, providing contextual assistance regardless of the application in which the user is working. Furthermore, when users are on external sites like LinkedIn, news websites, or social media, they can immediately open Joule to contextualize information they see and understand what it means for their business.
Internal Usage at SAP
SAP is using WalkMe internally as part of their own transformation, using the technology to drive efficiency and improve change management. Specifically, WalkMe is being used to help train SAP employees on new processes and systems, accelerating internal adoption of new capabilities.
In the future, SAP plans to further enhance WalkMe with AI capabilities, making it more intelligent and proactive in guiding users across both SAP and non-SAP applications, creating a universal assistant experience. In addition, the combination of WalkMe’s UI capabilities with the Perplexity partnership will allow Joule to provide contextual assistance based on both internal and external data sources.
WalkMe Highlighted as Core Element of SAP’s Digital Transformation Strategy
Analyst Take: WalkMe made a name for itself as a leading digital adoption platform, helping organizations with extracting the most value from technology investments. By providing more transparency and visibility into application usage, workflows, and even AI usage, enterprises are able to make more informed decisions around which applications are working, which processes need to be refined, and where employees would likely benefit from more training.
The platform has expanded to provide AI-enabled guidance and process automation, further extending its value, particularly as workflows continue to evolve, spanning applications, systems, and even organizations.
SAP has realized the value of leveraging WalkMe internally, and appears to be continuing to invest in the platform’s capabilities to extend these benefits to customers. This is a solid approach, particularly given SAP’s focus on helping current and future customers prepare their organizations for a cloud migration, as well as greater usage of SAP’s expanding enterprise application portfolio.
Similarly, leveraging WalkMe to help provide even more context and capability for the company’s Joule generative AI assistant also makes sense, as these types of tools are increasingly becoming table stakes for SaaS application vendors, and they need to function seamlessly wherever work is being done.
As a result of the tighter integration between SAP and WalkMe, WalkMe’s sales teams will need to reinforce the core messaging unveiled back in January, where the team expressed a commitment to working across all types of applications, regardless of vendor. While it is logical to think that WalkMe clients that don’t use SAP may get a brief pitch on the value of SAP’s platform, it would be wise to focus on the core value proposition of being vendor-agnostic, and highlight the bottom-line benefits of focusing on efficiency through active monitoring and management of applications, workflows, and workers.
You can read a press release highlighting the results of a survey that found significant waste on underutilized technology.
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.
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Author Information
Keith Kirkpatrick is VP & Research Director, Enterprise Software & Digital Workflows for The Futurum Group. 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.
