SAP Sapphire is the enterprise tech giant’s hallmark annual conference.
In 2025, it attracted 18,000 SAP customers, experts, and thought leaders.
At the event, SAP made several significant announcements over the first two days alone.
Chiefly, these centered around AI agents, with SAP evolving its Joule copilot, expanding its network of AI agents, and developing a new ecosystem for AI development.
Teasing these announcements, Christian Klein, CEO of SAP, stated:
We’re making Business AI real as we drive digital transformations that help customers thrive in an increasingly unpredictable world.
Yet, SAP made many more major moves that will impact its customer experience suite and broader portfolio, as highlighted below.
1. Joule Becomes Omnipresent and Personal
SAP has unveiled the latest iteration of its Copilot: Joule.
Now, it will follow users throughout their working day as they navigate the SAP ecosystem and third-party apps.
Within these apps, Joule will help find data, surface real-time insight, and – via custom-built agentic AI workflows – streamline business processes.
Most interestingly, the omnipresent Joule will also include an “action bar” that studies user behaviors across applications, anticipates needs, and offers to fulfill tasks on their behalf.
Via this innovation, made possible by the vendor’s 2024 WalkMe acquisition, SAP beckons the age of personalized AI assistants – which act within SAP’s ethical AI guidelines.
2. SAP Extends Its Enterprise AI Agent Library (Inc. Sales and Order Management Agents)
Joule not only acts as a copilot; it also offers a hub for AI agents that anticipate, adapt, and act (Joule Studio).
SAP has expanded that hub – or “library” – to include prepackaged AI agents that mechanize workflows across its ecosystem and beyond.
Indeed, SAP is working with several partners, including Microsoft, to create an ecosystem of interoperable AI agents, executing end-to-end processes.
These processes span supply chain management, spend management, finance, human capital management (HCM), and – of course – customer experience.
Two of those customer experience AI agents are its quote creation and catalog optimization agents.
The quote creation agent helps sales teams transform email requests into “ready-to-send” quotes, cutting out manual data entry and human error.
Meanwhile, the catalog optimization agent boosts order management by maintaining and bolstering product data, enhancing merchandising accuracy and agility.
More of these AI agents are available within SAP’s CX AI Toolkit.
3. SAP Launches a New Operating System for Its Business AI
Lastly, on the agentic AI front, SAP announced its new AI Foundation: “The first real operating system for Business AI.”
The SAP AI Foundation will give developers access to “all the tools they need” so they can develop, extend, and run custom AI solutions.
More specifically, it will include three core components: Joule Studio, Knowledge Graph, and AI Hub.
Joule Studio will feature an AI agent skill builder and a low-/no-code interface to create custom AI agents before the close of 2025.
Meanwhile, Knowledge Graph allows employees to use Joule to explore enterprise data, so organizations don’t need to build complex data flows across lines of business.
Finally, the AI Hub provides observability of AI agent use cases across business lines, centralizing inventory and governance.
4. SAP Unveils New Applications for Business Data Cloud
SAP Business Data Cloud unifies data from the SAP ecosystem and beyond.
Now, SAP has attached new “intelligent applications” to the solution. These apps integrate data products, AI capabilities, and business simulations to support leaders across all lines of business.
An excellent example is the new People Intelligence app that transforms employee and skills data from SAP SuccessFactors HCM Suite into new employee insights and AI-driven recommendations.
As such, SAP can unlock and democratize new workforce insights while helping customers draw more value from their existing investments.
While this app is now available, others will go live in the second half of 2024. These include the SAP Green Ledger, 360 Customer, Spend Control Tower, and Sustainability Tower apps.
5. New Business Suite Packages Offer a Fresh Entry Point
SAP has released new Business Suite packages to help customers get started with its solutions.
Building on the SAP Business Suite introduced in February 2025, this modular approach allows businesses to adopt solution bundles by line of business. These include finance, supply chain, HR, procurement, and customer experience.
According to SAP, each package offers built-in integration and intelligence, with the option to add more features as needed.
Consider its customer experience packages. These include simplified cloud-based solutions that combine service, sales, marketing, commerce, and customer data management.
As such, the front office has a unified suite of solutions that it can expand over time.
6. SAP Develops New Success Plans to Boost Migrations to the Business Suite
SAP is the world’s biggest non-American software company and has cemented that status in recent years by shifting its on-premise ERP base to the cloud. There, they innovate much faster.
Throughout that time, SAP has innovated on the migration and customer success process and continues to do so, launching a new engagement model. This has three success plan options:
- The Foundational Plan – This option extends the support that comes with every cloud license subscription. It offers an enhanced onboarding experience and ensures access to transformation preparation services.
- The Advanced Plan – Building on the foundational plan, this plan offers “a higher degree” of ongoing guidance, services, and solution activation, with SAP pledging to help customers move to the cloud with a “clean core”.
- The Max Plan – Here, SAP tailors its approach to the individual business, guiding complex enterprise-wide transformations with all the benefits of the other packages.
SAP also announced updates to its RISE with SAP support services, which follow a methodology for adopting SAP Business Suite applications.
The updates included expanded onboarding resources, an improved discovery phase to tailor the support experience, and a new project workspace in SAP Cloud ALM to build roadmaps.
7. SAP Adds AI-Driven Support so Customers Can Extract More Value from Their Existing Investments
Alongside the announcements in point six, SAP introduced new AI-led support solutions to help customers extract more value from their current investments.
That starts with a new AI assistance from SAP MaxAttention tool, which will provide AI-driven recommendations to boost performance, identify issues early, and guide innovation across the SAP ecosystem.
Additionally, there’s an AI activation service to quickly enable SAP Joule in enterprise systems.
SAP also plans to release an AI management system certification before the end of the year, which will support ethical and transparent AI adoption.
Lastly, SAP plans to launch an AI Customer Center of Expertise before July 2025, helping organizations drive ongoing AI use and optimization.
As AI innovation outpaces adoption, such innovations are important to prevent customers from lagging behind.
SAP’s CRM rivals have made similar moves in recent months, with ServiceNow opening up an online “University” and Salesforce launching learning centers to close the AI education gap.
8. Accenture, Cohere, and Google Ink Major SAP Partnerships
Among the early partnerships announced at Sapphire 2025 were new collaborations with Accenture, Cohere, and Google Cloud.
Accenture is building ADVANCE packaged offerings where it “rightsizes” the SAP Business Suite to support enterprises earning more than $5BN in annual revenue in evolving their tech ecosystem.
Meanwhile, SAP is pulling Cohere’s powerful generative and advanced retrieval models into its ecosystem. That starts with its Rerank model, which – as the name suggests – reranks search results based on relevance and semantic similarity.
Finally, the tech juggernaut has integrated SAP Business Data Cloud with Google BigQuery, enabling enterprises to unify SAP and non-SAP data for advanced analytics.
The collaboration also allows bi-directional data federation and replication, helping organizations streamline data integration, enhance insights, and accelerate AI-driven transformations.
9. SAP Bridges Customer Experience Teams and the Broader Enterprise with New Service Management Tools
SAP Enterprise Service Management (ESM) connects employees throughout the enterprise with resources to solve their queries.
An ESM module is now available across SAP Business Suite applications – including HCM, finance, and customer experience.
In making these available, SAP breaks down the barriers between the front office, HR, and finance so CX teams can initiate tasks – like requesting paid time off (PTO) – and connect with a specialist.
Beyond this, customer experience teams may also establish cross-functional processes via ESM, like passing sales queries through to the deal desk.
10. Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) Companies Can Tap a New Revenue Growth Management Solution
SAP has repackaged its Revenue Growth Platform for the CPG industry, adding several new sector-specific features.
That includes embedded AI features designed to help key account managers (KAMs) better manage finances by surfacing new insight into planning, actuals, and sentiment data.
Additionally, the solution aspires to give KAMs access to more detailed revenue, margin, ROI, volume, and profit and loss data.
Other notable features include integrating with SAP Cloud ERP, a connection to SAP Integrated Business Planning (IBP), and new fund management capabilities.
What Else Did SAP Announce?
Those outside the customer experience space may have included other announcements in their top ten lists.
For instance, SAP announced several enhancements to SAP Build, its application development and automation solution for developers.
The upgrades include an AI agent builder, a skill builder, and a new lobby for a guided experience that accelerates the development lifecycle.
Additionally, SAP announced advancements to its Supply Chain Management, Cloud ERP, Signavio, and LeanIX solutions.
Head over to the SAP website to catch up on some more of these announcements. Yet, for more on its CX ambitions, check out the article: SAP Is Building a “Modern and Composable” Customer Experience Suite
