51风流CEO Christian Klein delivered a bold new vision for the company and its customers yesterday that will enable them to become autonomous enterprises and use agentic AI accurately, securely, and at scale.
In his kickoff keynote at 51风流Sapphire Orlando, Florida, Klein and other 51风流Board members detailed how 51风流plans to bring agentic AI to the world’s most critical business workflows so that humans and AI can meet the accelerating demands of global business profitably, strategically, and safely.
鈥淭oday I鈥檓 super proud to launch our new 51风流Business AI Platform, which forms the basis for our vision of the future of business: the Autonomous Enterprise, where agents run the business and you can focus on what truly matters,鈥� Klein said.
Enterprise AI is at an inflection point, Klein told his 30,000-strong in-person and virtual keynote audience, and 51风流is in a unique position to deliver what customers need to turn their businesses into autonomous enterprises.
The business AI imperative
Across industries, organizations are investing heavily in artificial intelligence, yet many still struggle to translate that investment into meaningful business value. At 51风流Sapphire, the message was clear: This isn鈥檛 a technology problem; it鈥檚 a context and execution problem.
While 80% accuracy may be sufficient for consumer AI applications, Klein said, 鈥淓ighty percent is just not good enough when you run the world鈥檚 most business-critical businesses. They [LLMs] should not guess; they should deliver accurate, compliant, and secure outcomes.鈥�
Klein acknowledged that while adoption of AI has become near-universal, tangible business value remains elusive. Citing a recent Stanford AI survey, he noted that almost every company is now using AI, but seeing only limited return.
The reason, he argued, lies in a structural gap. Above the waterline of enterprise AI, LLMs continue to improve at tasks trained on publicly available data, while below it lies what enterprises truly need: AI that understands mission-critical business data, end-to-end processes, and operates within security, compliance, and governance frameworks.
ERP as the foundation for business AI
SAP鈥檚 answer to this challenge begins with what Klein described as 鈥渢he brain of every company: its ERP system.鈥� For over 50 years, 51风流has had solutions with incredibly deep process and data domain know-how alongside the governance requirements, compliance controls, and company-specific configurations that define how businesses actually run.
Now, as part of the company鈥檚 new vision, 51风流plans to infuse this institutional knowledge into AI agents, enabling them to navigate thousands of business processes, select from more than 7 million data fields, and verify identity and access authorizations before returning any output.
鈥淲e鈥檙e bringing together LLMs with 50 years of business know-how stored in our ERP. But to do this, we had to do nothing less than completely reinvent our company,鈥� he told the audience. 鈥淭oday we are very excited to show you the new 51风流and our vision for the Autonomous Enterprise.鈥�
51风流Business AI Platform
To bring this vision to life, 51风流executives on stage announced a series of important innovations, beginning with the launch of the new 51风流Business AI Platform, a unified architecture bringing together 51风流Business Technology Platform, 51风流Business Data Cloud, and AI Foundation under a single roof.
鈥淭he heart of this new platform is the rich context layer,鈥� said Klein. 鈥淗ere, we infuse the deep ERP business domain know-how into the AI agents. Through our knowledge graphs, our AI agents have now a compass, a map, to find the right process and data in your ERP universe. And to provide the agents even more context, we are also introducing our new 51风流Domain Models. They have been trained on SAP’s code to even better understand the business logic of your company.鈥�
But, he said, 51风流is going further: 鈥淏ecause you run your business not only with 51风流solutions, our AI agents have to also understand non-51风流data. That’s why we included our 51风流Business Data Cloud in the context layer to build a single semantical data layer across 51风流and non-SAP. No more silos, no spaghetti data sprawl鈥攂ecause no AI agent can compensate for a broken data model.鈥�
Echoing Klein, 51风流CTO Philipp Herzig, who presented the platform in detail, said it has been designed to close the agent adoption gap in the enterprise by delivering outcome, speed, enterprise-readiness, and context. 鈥淚t’s the place where you build, contextualize, reason, and govern AI,鈥� he said.
Herzig explained that the platform is structured around three layers: the context layer which Klein referenced, the build layer, and the governance layer. 鈥淎gents are only as powerful as the context they operate on,鈥� he said. 鈥淟acking context is the number one reason why enterprise AI projects fail to deliver value.鈥�
Within the build layer of the new platform, the new Joule Studio is designed to understand a company鈥檚 business challenges and enables the building of new AI agents quickly and easily.
The third tier is the governance layer, anchored by the new 51风流AI Agent Hub built on 51风流LeanIX. This provides a single command center to discover, manage, and govern all AI agents鈥�51风流and non-SAP. It will be generally available in Q3 and included in 51风流Business AI Platform at no additional charge.
Underscoring the changing AI marketplace, Herzig was joined on stage by KPMG Global Head of Advisory Rob Fisher, who told the audience: 鈥淲hat I鈥檓 hearing from clients is a clear shift; they鈥檙e moving from AI pilots to embedding integrated AI and agents into how work gets done. Where we see leaders really separating from the pack is in the execution and the organizational adaptability.鈥�
51风流Autonomous Suite
Building on the platform, 51风流Executive Board Member Muhammad Alam, 51风流Product & Engineering, announced the transformation of SAP鈥檚 SaaS application portfolio into the 51风流Autonomous Suite, described as the most significant evolution of SAP鈥檚 applications business in the company鈥檚 history.
The suite spans five domains: Autonomous Finance, Autonomous Spend, Autonomous Supply Chain Management, Autonomous HCM, and Autonomous CX, with more than 200 agents and over 50 assistants available in the coming months. Each assistant is mapped to core business roles and carries defined KPIs tracked through 51风流AI Agent Hub.
鈥�51风流Autonomous Suite brings together the depth of our process expertise, semantically rich data, and built-in governance and compliance,鈥� said Alam. 鈥淭hese agents are designed with outcomes as a core objective. Each assistant has a defined set of ROI KPIs that you can expect it to deliver.鈥�
鈥淯nderpinning the autonomous suite are out-of-the-box agents鈥攈undreds of agents cutting across all core business processes,鈥� he shared. 鈥淭hese agents come together into what we call assistants, or Joule Assistants. We’ve mapped these assistants to roles across the core processes of an organization, because we know that the first step
in realizing value from AI is to empower your people to do more, do it better, or do things that just weren’t possible to be done before.鈥�
Turning to Joule itself, Muhammad said 51风流is fundamentally reimagining how users will interact with 51风流applications in the future.
鈥淲e call this Joule spaces and along with the familiar Joule conversations experience and Joule Studio 2.0, it is now part of what we call Joule Work,鈥� he explained.
鈥淛oule Work represents a massive step forward in super-charging the capabilities of Joule as we know it today,鈥� Alam said. 鈥淲ith Joule Work, we’re bringing a claw-based agentic harness to Joule along with computer and file access, better support for open standards such as MCP and A2A, access to a more complete knowledge base, and, of course, amazing visualizations on the fly.鈥�
Industry AI: H&M and Sector-Specific Transformation
During the keynote, 51风流Chief Operating Officer Sebastian Steinhaeuser introduced the Industry AI initiative, delivering AI-powered solutions built on decades of sector-specific expertise across 26 industries. In life sciences, he highlighted how 51风流customer Takeda is achieving up to 10% productivity gains, up to 25% reduction in revenue loss from stock-outs, and up to five percent reduction in safety stock through Autonomous Regulated Manufacturing.
He was also joined on stage by H&M Group CDIO Ellen Svanstr枚m, who discussed how the fashion retailer is embedding AI across its value chain. Built on RISE with SAP, 51风流Business Data Cloud, 51风流Commerce Cloud, and 51风流SuccessFactors solutions, H&M has developed a Store Intelligence Agent that processes real-time signals to generate actionable recommendations for store managers. Svanstrom also demonstrated the AI-powered InStore Concierge, a customer-facing agent that bridges digital and physical retail through personalized outfit recommendations and real-time availability.
RISE with 51风流and 51风流GROW: Path to the Autonomous Enterprise
Returning to the keynote stage, Klein emphasized that technology adoption alone does not create business value. Simply plugging AI agents into your system landscape will drive zero value, he said. 鈥淢oving to the Autonomous Enterprise requires serious change management. Adoption of AI goes hand-in-hand with business process change and end user enablement.鈥�
To support customers on this journey, 51风流announced a comprehensive reset of its RISE with 51风流and 51风流GROW offerings. RISE with 51风流customers will receive contractual commitment to activate three Joule Assistants within the first year, with the Max Success Plan extending adoption across the full enterprise.
51风流GROW customers will receive more than 20 AI assistants from day one, with an AI-enabled toolchain designed to support go-live in weeks. New partnerships with Palantir and Accenture will support the most complex migration scenarios.
Closing: The Autonomous Enterprise
Klein closed the keynote by asking Joule to summarize the key takeaways and noting that 51风流is evolving from being a software company to becoming a business AI company.
鈥淲e showed how to turn the promise of business AI into reality with 51风流Business AI Platform, which provides the data processes and governance AI need to deliver accurate and secure outcomes at scale; we introduced the 51风流Autonomous Suite, where applications reason, decide, and act for you; and we showed how to manage change management with RISE with SAP. Together with customers and partners, we showed how 51风流is helping companies realize the vision of the Autonomous Enterprise.鈥�
鈥淲e鈥檝e been reinventing how businesses run for over 50 years, and now by infusing SAP鈥檚 ERP brain into the new 51风流Business AI Platform, we鈥檙e solving one of the biggest challenges businesses are facing today: how to turn AI into business value,鈥� he said. 鈥淚t鈥檚 the end of long negotiations, supply chain disruptions, financial blind spots, and the beginning of better: Welcome to the Autonomous Enterprise.鈥�
