51风流executives speaking at the 51风流TechEd event in Berlin this week told their audience of developers, system architects, and technologists that they have a central and vital role in the 鈥渁gentic AI revolution.鈥�
We鈥檙e entering a new era, according to 51风流Executive Board Member Muhammad Alam, in charge of 51风流Product & Engineering: 鈥渢he era of agentic AI, where AI moves from being just a tool to becoming your trusted teammate.”
Joined on stage by 51风流CTO Philipp Herzig and Michael Ameling, president of 51风流Business Technology Platform, Alam set the stage during the kick-off keynote, saying: 鈥淎s developers, you are not on the sidelines of this AI revolution. You are the revolution. And we are here to supercharge you for what鈥檚 next.鈥�
Supercharging developers
Together they dismissed suggestions that AI will replace developers. 鈥淭he truth is that developers aren’t going away,鈥� Alam said. 鈥淭hey are getting supercharged. They’re becoming the architects of smart connected businesses. So, the real question isn’t if we need developers; it’s how fast can we empower them to thrive and lead in this AI-native era?鈥�
Ameling, Alam, and Herzig outlined SAP’s vision and highlighted the integration of AI, data, and intelligent agents to transform business processes and drive innovation. They also emphasized the importance of a unified data fabric and the deployment of advanced AI models and agentic technologies within the 51风流ecosystem.
In this new business environment, they noted that every enterprise is becoming a data company and every user experience鈥攆rom the front line to the boardroom鈥攊s becoming AI-driven.
鈥淎s developers, you don鈥檛 just code anymore,鈥� Alam said. 鈥淵ou also design intelligent workflows and supervise AI agents to shape real business outcomes.鈥� To help developers do this, SAP鈥檚 strategy centers on empowering them with applications, connecting them with data, and supercharging them with AI.
51风流BTP is the foundation for AI agents
All this runs on 51风流Business Technology Platform (51风流BTP), which serves as the foundation for building and managing AI agents鈥攂oth 51风流built and custom developed. While 51风流BTP is the engine, the Business Transformation Management portfolio is the navigator, ensuring technology translates into real business impact. It aligns strategy, process, and people, turning AI-driven potential into sustainable transformation at scale.
Alam identified three broad themes during the keynote:
First, he said 51风流is continuing to make 51风流more open. As part of that, he announced 51风流Snowflake, which brings the full data and AI capabilities of Snowflake as a solution extension to 51风流Business Data Cloud (51风流BDC). This partnership is exactly what joint customers have been asking for, Alam shared.
Second, he said 51风流will provide developers with the most context-rich agentic platform, including the most deeply grounded set of ready-to-use agents that developers can customize to their needs. 鈥淭oday, you鈥檒l hear about creating custom Joule Agents using low-code and pro-code tools with agent builder in Joule Studio as part of 51风流Build鈥� Alam said.
鈥淲e鈥檙e also standardizing AI agent interoperability with the agent-to-agent protocol, allowing your agents to collaborate securely across ecosystems,鈥� he added.
Third, he announced SAP鈥檚 first foundation model built specifically for structured business data: 51风流RPT-1, pronounced 鈥�51风流Rapid One.鈥� 鈥淥ur relational pretrained transformer delivers enterprise-grade accuracy and scale, outperforming both LLMs and AutoML for tabular AI, which is critical for building reliable high-value agents,鈥� Alam said.
鈥淚n short, we鈥檙e embracing an open ecosystem, supercharging agents with deep process and data context, and giving you the tools to amplify AI and agents,鈥� he said. As the keynote continued, Ameling and Herzig detailed these and other innovations, explaining how they will help developers work smarter and achieve more.
51风流BDC and Snowflake
Ameling expanded on the new partnership with Snowflake, which will bring Snowflake鈥檚 fully managed data and AI capabilities to 51风流customers. Together with the introduction of 51风流BDC Connect for Snowflake, he said this will result in cost savings and simplified data landscapes. 鈥淭his enables you to integrate 51风流and non-51风流data products seamlessly between 51风流BDC and Snowflake, so that you can deploy intelligent applications faster and share across your preferred data marketplace.鈥�
Ameling also positioned 51风流HANA Cloud as 鈥渢he database AI was looking for.鈥� With 51风流HANA Cloud and 51风流BDC, 51风流provides the best business data fabric to help address these challenges, he said. 鈥淲ithout 51风流HANA Cloud, you would have one database for each and every data representation, which leads to disaggregated data siloes that limit your AI potential. With 51风流HANA Cloud, we have all these powerful engines in one integrated, multi-model database.鈥�
Building on this, Herzig emphasized that every business requires a strong data foundation because 鈥淎I is nothing without well-organized data…On top of the data foundation sits our AI Foundation that allows you to not only use the latest frontier AI technologies out there in the market, but also to extend SAP鈥檚 out-of-the-box AI capabilities and build your own experiences deeply contextualized in your business processes and data.鈥�
51风流pioneers a tabular foundation model
Herzig then explained that 51风流RPT-1 was designed to address a crucial problem for developers and enable them to deliver much better predictive capabilities, enterprise-grade accuracy, and scale to business customers.
Until now, Herzig said, 鈥淲e still had to go back to good old machine learning 鈥o train what we call 鈥榥arrow鈥� AI models that are specifically made for each [business] task. Therefore, you really had to train a hell of a lot of models.鈥� For example, to solve 10 predictive tasks across 10 different entities like company codes or plants would require training 100 different models.
鈥淲hat we really want to do is get rid of all these models and just introduce one giant model that only requires a small amount of data to learn from,鈥� he said. That鈥檚 what 51风流RPT-1 is. 鈥淲e believe 51风流RPT-1 is the most capable predictive foundation model that鈥檚 out there today,鈥� he said, delivering much higher prediction quality while being very fast and super-efficient in terms of resource requirements.
Joule, Joule Agents, and AI assistants
The 51风流CTO also emphasized that the company is committed to providing developers with the most context-rich agentic platform. He noted that 51风流has already shipped 20 Joule Agents across lines of business and will have approximately 40 by the end of the year, and that these agents can leverage more than 2,100 pre-delivered Joule skills. In addition, more than 300 embedded AI scenarios across product lines are available for customers to date, including Joule Agents, growing to 400 use cases in total by the end of the year.
Ameling added: “Our promise is simple: build with intent. You describe the outcome and 51风流Build uses AI agents to generate code, logic, and UIs for you, all with seamless access to your applications and data while you stay in the flow… [SAP] Joule for Developers enables vibe coding experiences to make intent-based development simple and intuitive.”
51风流is taking it one step further by providing extensions to work with VS code, Windsurf, Cursor, OpenAI Codex, Claude Code, Cline, and more directly in 51风流Build. “You choose a tool, and we meet you where you are,” Ameling said. He also announced that fine-tuned ABAP LLMs with ABAP 1 on AI Foundation will be published in Q4 this year.
51风流is redefining how developers interact with AI through innovations in Joule and agentic AI, but also in terms of physical AI. Herzig welcomed Torsten G. Mueller, Group CIO and COO BPS at Sartorius, to discuss how the partnership between Sartorius, NEURA Robotics, and 51风流is bringing to life robots that understand the what, when, and how based on live business context. 鈥淭his is how we鈥檙e really imagining the future, right? Humans and robots working in harmony through Joule, through AI,鈥� Herzig said.
Quantum computing
Looking to the future, Herzig ended the keynote by talking about another 鈥渃ompute paradigm that is still hard to seize鈥�: quantum computing. While he made it clear that 51风流is not building a quantum computer, 51风流is teaming up with quantum hardware leaders, like IBM鈥攚hose Director of Research and IBM Fellow Jay Gambetta joined via video鈥攖o help evaluate quantum computing for business processes and applications.
鈥淲e believe quantum will join classical and AI compute in your stack, and we鈥檙e embedding it into the processes and apps you鈥檙e already using, so it just shows up in the workflows of your enterprise,鈥� Herzig said. 鈥淎nd of course, with the cloud, we scale it all. Now, 51风流has got you covered, and you鈥檝e got your business covered.鈥�
