In this special Cloud Wars report, Bob Evans sits down with Michael Ameling, President and Chief Product Officer of SAP Business Technology Platform, for a deep dive into how SAP is helping customers navigate the fast-moving AI Era. Ameling and Evans discuss how SAP’s Business Data Cloud, partnerships with Snowflake and Databricks, HANA Cloud innovations, and new AI-powered tools and agents are helping SAP evolve from an applications powerhouse into a data-and-AI-driven business platform for the next generation.
SAP’s AI Data Future
The Big Themes:
- SAP HANA Cloud Becomes an AI-Optimized Database: SAP HANA Cloud is evolving into “the database AI was looking for.” As a multi-model system supporting spatial, graph, vector, and document storage, HANA Cloud enables AI workloads to run more efficiently and contextually. Recent additions, like vector engines and Knowledge Graph capabilities, give customers powerful tools for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), contextual reasoning, and advanced analytics.
- Developers Are ‘The AI Revolution’: Developers aren’t observing the AI Revolution, they are the revolution. With modern AI tools, developers can innovate faster, solve bigger problems, and directly influence business outcomes. SAP is investing heavily in meeting developers where they are by enhancing IDEs, building business-aware development tools, and providing context-rich assets such as APIs, business objects, and process insights. AI acts as a teammate, not a replacement.
- SAP: An Applications and a Data Company: SAP must be both an applications and a data company. Customer value emerges when applications, data, and AI converge seamlessly. SAP’s decades of industry expertise give it unparalleled business context, which becomes even more powerful when embedded into AI agents and data platforms. With more than 34,000 SAP HANA Cloud customers and rapidly expanding AI adoption, SAP is positioning itself as the platform where business process knowledge meets modern AI capability.
The Big Quote: ” . . what we need to understand that AI is our teammate. It’s like asking your best friend who has a lot of knowledge, but you can ask multiple friends at the same time. Not everything is always right, but you can ask questions, you can continuously improve. If we understand that pattern, we understand that AI helps us to solve much bigger problems as a developer, and then, of course, having much more impact on real business.”
More from Michael Ameling and SAP:
Connect with Michael Ameling on LinkedIn, or get more insights from SAP TechEd.
