In one of the most significant advances in its storied 53-year history, SAP is helping businesses harness the full potential of AI by fusing it seamlessly with its data and apps to drive superior business outcomes and finally achieve the long-promised status of a truly Intelligent Enterprise.
I realize that’s a rather grandiose description of SAP’s new strategy, so let me share what’s behind it based on what I saw and learned at the inaugural SAP Connect event in Las Vegas this week.
1. SAP has become a data company to power the AI Revolution. Yes, SAP’s one of the world’s largest enterprise-apps companies and will no doubt maintain that status for the foreseeable future, but its launch in May of its Business Data Cloud has added a huge strategic capability to SAP’s portfolio. It’s all about unlocking the power and potential of AI, and within the BDC SAP has harmonized its unparalleled stores of business data to:
- power new purpose-built agents across its end-to-end apps portfolio;
- enable Joule assistants to work with people to optimize the deployment of those agents;
- let customers view processes and outcomes in a connected fashion rather than in fragmented silos;
- tap into external data stores via partnerships with Databricks and, as of this week, Google Cloud; and
- ensure those new AI agents and assistants and the tasks they execute are fully covered by SAP’s governance, security, and privacy policies.
2. Helping customers obliterate functional silos and work end-to-end. For too long, disconnected applications both reflected and reinforced the fragmented nature of most organizations, preventing them from being able to execute end-to-end tasks. Emphasizing the power of a full suite of applications purpose-built to work together, SAP product chief Muhammad Alam said, “Our announcements today demonstrate the power of SAP Business Suite, where AI, data and applications come together in an experience to propel smarter decisions, faster execution and scalable transformation.”
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3. Elegantly fusing apps, agents, and assistants. By providing a seamless combination of AI-infused applications plus complementary agents plus personalized Joule assistants — all tapping into and ultimately enriching the fully harmonized Business Data Cloud — SAP is promising to boost productivity for its customers and help them unlock new growth opportunities.
4. Everything focused on making life simpler, faster, better for customers. SAP decided to launch the “Connect” event to emphasize the need for businesses to be able to function more intelligently in today’s often-chaotic world, with the title of new event being a very intentional promise of what SAP hopes to do for its customers. As Alam said in the announcement,
“To thrive when volatility is the new normal, businesses need more than a patchwork of disparate best-of-breed applications.” And over and over again throughout the event, SAP hammered home the benefits of a complete and fully integrated suite.
5. Helping customers address #1 priority for CEOs: the ROI of AI.
I suspect this “ROI Estimator” tool will evolve rapidly as new insights are gained by both SAP and its customers, but the inclusion of it in the launches at Connect underscores SAP’s awareness of and focus on the #1 priority for CEOs here in the early days of the AI Revolution: all the talk and big plans are nice, but where is the demonstrable ROI for these proposed AI investments?
Final Thought
Across the enterprise-apps sector, we’ve seen in the past two years enormous activity around AI-infused apps, agentic AI, and assistants from not only SAP but also Oracle, Salesforce, and Workday. In my opinion, SAP has distinguished itself impressively with its announcements at Connect in its heavy emphasis on the central role that its Business Data Cloud will play and the role that Joule assistants will take in overseeing agents and helping people optimize their use.
Of course, in a few days both Oracle and Salesforce will kick off their own events — Dreamforce and Oracle AI World — at which they’ll no doubt share some advanced plans on how to help customers drive optimal business outcomes from apps and agents and data here in the AI Revolution.
And all that innovation and all those investments will surely prove yet again that the biggest winners in the Cloud Wars are always — always — the customers.
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