Before immersing myself into SAP Connect 2025, I had a number of questions that I would like to get answered during the event. These included the ones below and naturally focused on SAP’s CX and AI sides of the house. Some of them I got answered, some of them not, at least not explicitly.

• What is the plan to make SAP CX more prominent in the CRM/CX marketplace and what are main reasons that you see for customers preferring other CX solutions over SAP’s?
• What do customers say that they are missing in the CX suite?
• Where do you see the limits of agentic technology in the near to mid-term? Apart from adoption problems …
• And where do you see most potential for agentic AI going forward?
• What are adopted (agentic) use cases that concentrate on business transformation, gaining capabilities, uplift as opposed to “increasing efficiency”?
• How does SAP deal with the dichotomy between “human augmented by machine” and mass layoffs?
• SAP Consulting as well as SIs do face a need to change their business models away from billable hours. What do you recommend SIs do? How does SAP support them in this venture? How do you foresee the overall ecosystem change with an estimated increase of use and deployment of generative and agentic AI

But more about all this in a minute.

Of course, SAP took this event to announce a flurry of new capabilities across its suite of applications, AI, and technology, as evidenced in the long innovation guide and the theme-describing press release for the event, although I’d say that the event went well beyond “AI that partners with people, data that defies boundaries and applications that turn data into action”. To be sure, SAP Connect extended on the vision that got outlined during last Sapphire.

True to its name, SAP Connect was about connecting – or breaking, to use a stronger word – the silos that are imposed by different types of business software, predominantly, but not only, SAP’s business software and in extension the silos between business departments, The approach was to co-host conferences focusing on the different lines of business while providing the connecting tissue by means of cross references, supported by customer testimonials, in the keynotes.

And I want to say that this largely succeeded. Jon Reed wrote a great piece covering this using Heartland Dental as an example. Other customers like Migros or confirmed their success that got achieved through cross departmental collaboration. “Collaboration is a very, very key for service. We promote support cross-functional collaboration, that begins from idea, of course, but all colleagues from marketing, business and also colleagues from the stores but we work also together with other legal entities in our group, for example, of a work together, very tightly with the bank. And so, we work together with our financial colleagues in the context of practical credit card format is an integrated part of our loyalty program and so it's very important to get them common understanding and the common understanding is also based on a common technology. Baseline we work on a common data Lake. We have Cloud platforms, and this is also the key for a common understanding, for a 360-Degree of our customer view”. Similarly, Wella. Both of them part of the CX keynote.

Or, looking at supply chain processes, SLB, Red Bull and HP. All of them look at cross-functional cooperation as a critical success factor.

And these have only been some examples from the keynotes.

This is powerful support for the SAP E2E story. The only way to tell this even more powerful is to actually embed deep references into other lines of business within these key notes, e.g., closing the loop between demand (CX) and supply including finance. Basically, showing how the different SAP portfolios strengthen each other in a synergistical way.

This would emphasize on the power that the integrated capabilities that SAP commands have. After all, there are at best 2 to 3 companies that can dare telling a story like this: Oracle, to some extent Microsoft on an enterprise level, and Zoho with a bit more of a mid-sized focus for now. This is a tremendous opportunity for SAP, but one that requires not only having the capabilities – which SAP has – but also a messaging that does not disregard a crucial part of any business. An end-to-end story works only if it is supported by an equally strong story for each part of the business.

Ok, Connect works, but how about CX?

Having said this, let’s dig into a topic that is dear to my heart. For a long time, I have been saying that SAP treats its CX suite as a kind of Cinderella – the unwanted stepdaughter. The story being a fairy tale, it has a positive end. Does SAP’s CX suite now get the recognition it deserves?

Since last Sapphire, my view is slowly changing. CX appeared in Christian Klein’s Sapphire keynote, albeit not very prominently and had a more significant experience in Muhammad Alam’s keynote during SAP Connect, which you can revisit in Jon’s watch party with Josh Greenbaum and Bonnie Duncan Tinder that covers it extensively including valuable commentary. As said, giving CX a more prominent place is important, as it is a key ingredient of an E2E story and functionally an indispensable part of any business. There also have been significant announcements with a new loyalty solution, an engagement cloud, a digital service agent, WalkMe being made available for the CX solutions and an interesting revenue intelligence app on the SAP Business Data Cloud. My recommendation is to build on this momentum and to also have Christian Klein put more emphasis on CX going forward. No voice gets heard better and lends more credibility than the top dog’s CEO’s (sorry, Jon, I couldn’t resist using one of your techniques here). Having talked to the CP of  SAP CX, Balaji Balasubramanian, SAP CX Head of Product Strategy Riad Hijal and the new SAP CX CMO Jessica Keehn, I see the outlines of a plan going forward. I am keen to observe it come to fruition (and perhaps help, too?). One thing is for sure, during Sapphire and also during SAP Connect, there was an emphasis on becoming category leader where SAP invests. And there surely are considerable investments into SAP CX.

What about AI?

As part of the press release for this event as well as throughout keynotes, Q and A’s and individual discussions with SAP executives, there is one consistent theme: “AI that partners with people”, or in other words humans are getting help from technology instead of being replaced. This is a very laudable messaging although it is doubtful that a vendor, even one as powerful as SAP, is able to prescribe customers what to do with its technology. It is the buyers’ choice whether they follow this philosophy … or not. Alam and other executives repeatedly emphasized that their objective for using their own AI technology is not replacement of people. Instead, they aim at increasing their organizations’ outcomes by making their team members more productive. SAP COO Sebastian Steinhäuser presented some impressive numbers during his keynote. Apparently, SAP made its flywheel of apps, data and AI work for itself. From a limitation point of view, SAP bets big on the Business Data Cloud that is to deliver clean, consistent, reliable data as the foundation for well-working and collaborating agents that “help execute complex workflows within a specific function”.

For SAP, as well as its competitors, the challenge remains to not fall into the trap of explaining major layoffs as a result of the efficiency gains through their AI. Doing so, would destroy the narrative of AI creating business results through being a helper, not replacement, of people, and thereby the credibility of the tellers of this story.

And what about partners?

SAP has always been strong about ecosystem and partnerships. Given, that AI is all about platform, it makes an ecosystem play even more important. However, the ecosystem changes. IP becomes ever more important, especially over integration services. These get increasingly supported by AI, which requires SI’s to rethink their business models. They need to change from IP that “lives” in the heads of consultants and enables billable hours to IP that is encoded into software and AI. This requires them to adapt to survive and to continue to thrive. SAP encourages them to do this change and to create their AI infused solutions. To be frank, I expect the importance of SI’s in the SAP ecosystem to reduce in favor of ISVs. In future, implementations will require less effort and will have a higher degree of automation. Consulting will be again what it was, becoming more strategic again and less about the nitty-critties about implementing the desired solution. Not having had the chance to go in depth into a detailed discussion, this is probably a topic for another article or a few LinkedIn posts.

Famous last words

I think that SAP came in strong during this conference. The flywheel tells a sound story, and SAP is uniquely positioned to make this vision a reality. Are there pitfalls along the way? For sure. Will SAP trip into some of them? Probably. Will it matter? Likely not. For SAP, as well as for other businesses the game to play is adapt and overcome. And this is something that SAP can do. The company has shown it numerous times.

The remaining proving ground remains CX. There is considerable investment, competitive, in some areas even leading functionality. What is missing is, credibility. As one colleague this week told me “As far as I am concerned, SAP doesn’t have CX solutions”. Ouch. That needs to change.

The news

SAP just held its annual Sapphire event in Orlando, FL. It is totally under the theme of uncertainty and how technology, in particular SAP’s technology, can help businesses steer through poorly charted waters, to use a nautical metaphor. Uncertainty is caused by evolving regulatory situations, tariffs and shipping delays with their impact on the supply chain, waning consumer confidence in the light of all of this, and of course, the big gorilla in the room: AI. SAP’s response to this is the “SAP Flywheel”, which consists of three components

• Applications, of which SAP commands the broadest portfolio amongst all business applications vendors
• Data, which all these applications create, which in turn gives SAP extensive access to semantically rich business data
• AI, which analyses all this data, makes it actionable and, in turn feeds it back to the applications, closing the loop to establish the flywheel.

SAP demonstrated how this works in a scenario that showed how a C-suite consisting of a CFO, CRO, COO and CHRO use the integrated SAP suite with embedded AI to rapidly respond to new tariffs, managing compliance, assessing financial impact, developing strategies, adjusting supply chain plans, and aligning people strategy, all based on unified data.

Key announcements are based on the concept that AI is changing how businesses, and therefore its business applications, operate. Supporting this, is the purpose of SAP’s business AI, which has its foundation in SAP’s Business Technology Platform, BTP. A centerpiece of this change in how businesses – and users – operate is Joule, which is embedded (or will be soon) in all SAP applications and being expanded into non-SAP applications with the help of SAP’s recent WalkMe acquisition to support tasks. On a process level, SAP announced the availability of and the fast delivery of a big number of new Joule Agents. To support businesses and users, all this is underpinned by the AI Agent Hub which is powered by LeanIX to control and govern the deployment of agents.

On the partnership side, SAP announced cooperations with

• Palantir to develop new real-time analytics use cases,
• Adobe, which builds an intelligent application to combine SAP ERP Data with Adobe Experience Cloud data to enable more accurate financial planning and marketing activities
• Not Diamond, to eliminate prompt engineering by automating it (NB: gen AI is eating its own children already)
• And most notably, Neurobotics and Nvidia to connect Joule Agents to the physical world by combining it with (humanoid) robots.
• Functionally, SAP committed to aggressive innovation in all application domains,  including Finance, Spend, Supply Chain, HCM, and Customer Experience, aiming to be best in class, “second to none”, as Muhammad Alam put it.

The bigger picture

AI, in particular agentic AI is in every vendor’s messaging, these days. This is an inevitable consequence of the hype that we are still in. AI-based technology may or may not help businesses navigate the treacherous waters that the current economic uncertainties are, but then all business action creates data, and AI is able to speed up the process of making sense out of this data and to come to informed decisions. This is the most visible reason why many vendors now change the narrative to also include a “data cloud” and/or a “data fabric” as a fundamental part of their software stack.

The other big topic, connected to the first one, is the “death of SaaS” and the degradation of ERP systems to mere data repositories with the business logic being overseen, orchestrated and executed by interacting AI agents. This is essentially the narrative of businesses that are strong on agentic and/or workflow but weak on ERP and it will be interesting how this narrative pans out in the next months.

My point of view and analysis

Let’s start with the keynote itself. I always have a challenge with artificial handovers between speakers or repeating the term “amazing” in a kind of unimpressed tone of voice, and frankly, we have seen more than our share of both in the approximately 2 hours that the keynote lasted – which in itself is pretty much on the long side. Don’t believe me? Watch the slightly edited version on YouTube for yourself (btw, why is there a need to edit it at all? This only reduces authenticity). From a delivery side, I think that Dr. Philipp Herzig performed best, showing mostly credible excitement. And delivery is a thing. Look at other keynotes of enterprise software vendors, like Salesforce or ServiceNow. I agree with Paul Greenberg and Brent Leary, when they say that the keynote is the one opportunity that a company has to excite the attendees. The other thing that struck me is the nearly total absence of topics like sustainability (mentioned in brief as part of the product name Sustainability Tower) or other non-monetary values that have been expressed by SAP in earlier years. While this is understandable to an extent, it raises the question whether these values have been merely lip service. To be sure, SAP is in good company with this – which doesn’t make it better.

Functionally, nearly everything revolved around AI and AI agents in one shape or another. Like most vendors, SAP positions the AI as a helper to employees, developers and consultants, that drives their productivity. SAP’s objective is thirty percent, which I consider low for some SAP user groups – like developers and consultants. Still, I caution about positioning of a tool as a helper and how it is going to be used by buyer organizations. This is something that is beyond any vendor’s control.

Still, I think that SAP has what it takes to help businesses become far more efficient. The innovation behind all that SAP showed during Sapphire is nothing short of mindblowing. And, it is credible, too, as it all relies on business data, which are abundantly available via the whole, often SAP driven, enterprise value chain. The data platform, given by the SAP Business Data Cloud and SAP Graph, can bring the unified data that is necessary for effective agent deployments to life.

More interestingly, SAP launched a full-fledged counterattack on the “SaaS is dead” and “the ERP is only a data repository” narratives of some vendors by demonstrating the ubiquitousness of its own agent, Joule and emphasizing on application logic being just that – logic – combined with already built-in privacy, security, integrations, compliance etc., that are on top of the data and give the necessary business context. Emphasizing on this while showing the ability to orchestrate Joule agents across platforms is quite a powerful message. Yes, orchestration is necessary in a process automation world that is increasingly dominated by agents (whether this is useful or not). With SAP demonstrating this capabilities, other vendors need to have very good arguments if they want to sell an agentic automation platform that has the same already built in.

SAP’s ambition to be best in class in all application domains is probably already achieved in many areas. One of them where it is not, is CX, although SAP put a huge investment into its new Sales- and Service Clouds, which technologically probably are the most modern apps around. And then, there is commerce, where SAP seemingly has lost its edge and marketing that was notably absent during the keynote – apart from the partnership with Adobe. Summing it up from a CX perspective – SAP has a long way to go before being recognized as a key CX player, let alone being “second to none”. And this recognition starts with C-level executives speaking more about it, which is another chance that SAP missed out on during this keynote. The CRO persona in one demo was about analytics and how management can be supported, which is not what CRM/CX is – or at least should be – about. And everything else was about finance, HR and supply chain.

Having said this, SAP’s CX solutions probably are amongst the best – but what is that worth if SAP doesn’t proudly position them? In addition, not doing this weakens the – else incredibly strong – end-to-end story that SAP justifiably tells. So, the easiest way to bolster this story is to leave the impression that CX is SAP’s Cinderella behind by incorporating more of it in the messaging.

All in all, SAP delivered quite a strong positioning a suite vendor. The moat around its ERP solution got far stronger, also considering commitments around becoming easier to deal with. The remaining piece seems to be to prove how SAP is or becomes “second to none” in the CX market or a subset of it.