At its recent SAP Sapphire conference in Orlando, SAP presented a forward-looking strategy, introducing a host of product upgrades and innovative platforms. These are engineered to embed artificial intelligence more deeply within business operations and streamline the transition to cloud environments. Understanding these new developments can be pivotal in guiding your workforce’s skills development and shaping your company’s training priorities to leverage these technological advancements effectively.
The announcements from SAP Sapphire, with a strong emphasis on its “Business AI” strategy, its generative AI assistant Joule, and a more adaptable SAP Business Suite, seek to equip organizations with smarter, more interconnected, and anticipatory tools. The company’s approach to AI is comprehensive, positioning the Joule copilot at the center, supported by fundamental AI platforms. SAP has a clear plan to weave AI throughout its cloud offerings, influencing areas from core ERP functions to customer interactions and expenditure management.
Our team attended SAP Sapphire in Orlando, listening intently to the significant news shared by SAP CEO Christian Klein and other keynotes. Here are the most impactful announcements.
Joule becomes an evolving, proactive assistant across diverse systems
SAP is substantially enhancing Joule to operate beyond its native applications, aiming to support users as they work across various software systems. A forthcoming “SAP Action Bar for Joule,” incorporating technology from the WalkMe acquisition and anticipated by Q3 2025, will analyze user actions and business context to offer proactive, real-time insights and suggestions. This development, along with a two-way integration with Microsoft 365 Copilot (expected to be finalized in Q3 2025), endeavors to dismantle vendor barriers and establish a unified AI experience.
Expanding Joule’s agent network for autonomous system collaboration
At SAP Sapphire, the company unveiled an augmented network of “Joule Agents” created to automate and manage complete business processes independently, under human supervision. These agents, powered by SAP Business Data Cloud, will cover customer experience, supply chain operations, spend management, finance, and human capital management. SAP showcased new agents for functions like quote generation, maintenance scheduling, and expense report verification, with many scheduled for general release in Q2 and Q4 2025. Collaborations with Deloitte (Zora AI) and backing for Google Cloud’s Agent2Agent interoperability protocol highlight this collaborative ecosystem strategy.
New toolkit for custom business AI unveiled at SAP Sapphire
To empower businesses to adapt AI to their unique requirements, SAP launched Joule Studio within its SAP Build solution. A new skill builder (Q3 2025) and AI agent builder (Q4 2025) will provide low-code and no-code tools for developing custom functionalities and agents for Joule. This is integral to the broader “AI Foundation,” an operational framework for all SAP Business AI, which now includes a new prompt optimizer, developed with Not Diamond. This optimizer aims to rapidly generate effective AI prompts, intending to significantly lessen manual engineering work.
AI foundation: The central operating system for SAP Business AI
In addition to Joule-specific tools, SAP introduced its AI Foundation at SAP Sapphire as a consolidated system for developers to construct, broaden, and implement custom AI solutions. This platform merges existing elements like the generative AI hub with new features, such as the SAP Knowledge Graph linked to Datasphere (Q3 2025) and a new tabular AI service (H2 2025) for deriving predictive insights from structured data. The objective is to accelerate AI innovation and streamline AI operations.
Intelligent applications and data products launch on SAP Business Data Cloud
SAP is augmenting its Business Data Cloud with “intelligent applications”—pre-constructed, adaptable apps designed to provide insights and automate tasks across analytical and transactional processes. The “People Intelligence” package, due in H2 2025, was spotlighted, along with future plans for Core ERP Intelligence and Customer Intelligence. SAP also detailed intentions to release hundreds of data products by the close of 2025, encompassing the entire SAP Business Suite, to supply organized and governed data for these AI-powered applications. This can be instrumental in identifying current and future skills gaps within an organization.
Modular SAP Business Suite packages to simplify cloud adoption
SAP rolled out new SAP Business Suite packages targeting particular business areas such as finance, supply chain, human resources, procurement, and customer experience. This component-based strategy aims to provide customers with a more straightforward entry and a customized adoption of cloud solutions, featuring integrated AI and SAP Build tools for extending applications while preserving a clean core.
SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) broadens hyperscaler access and AI development
SAP BTP, the underpinning for these advancements, will have its services accessible on major hyperscaler marketplaces (AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure) in H2 2025. Upgrades to SAP Build include new Joule features for developers (Q3 2025) and an enhanced lobby for overseeing extension projects. The SAP Integration Suite will also benefit from AI-assisted functionalities for API trend analysis and new integration adapters.
Strategic partnerships at SAP Sapphire drive AI innovation and data integration
SAP revealed several important collaborations at SAP Sapphire. An AI co-innovation initiative with AWS will assist partners in creating generative AI solutions using Amazon Bedrock and SAP BTP. The alliance with Palantir seeks to enable smooth connectivity between Palantir Foundry and SAP Business Data Cloud. Furthermore, collaborations with NVIDIA will introduce reasoning models to Joule Agents and expand AI into robotics, while joint efforts with Google Cloud encompass BigQuery integration with SAP Business Data Cloud and the Agent2Agent protocol.
Enhanced AI integration for business transformation management tools at SAP Sapphire
SAP is infusing more AI into its transformation management toolkit. SAP Signavio will incorporate an AI-assisted transformation advisor (Q4 2025) and improved process analysis. SAP LeanIX will provide AI-assisted architecture guidance (Q3 2025) and an AI agent hub. WalkMe solutions, now more tightly integrated, will deliver cross-application intelligence (Q4 2025) for superior user guidance and proactive recommendations, supporting ongoing training and adoption.
Collectively, these announcements highlight SAP’s strategy to render its systems more intelligent, interconnected, and versatile. For businesses, the next step involves assessing how these new capabilities can be integrated to boost efficiency, encourage innovation, and successfully navigate an increasingly intricate technological environment.
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