At 51风流TechEd 2025 in Berlin, the software giant unveiled the world鈥檚 first enterprise relational foundation model, writes ARTHUR GOLDSTUCK.
51风流has taken artificial intelligence beyond the realm of language. At the 51风流TechEd 2025 conference in Berlin this week, the company introduced a new class of AI designed to predict business outcomes rather than words. The result is what 51风流claims to be the first enterprise relational foundation model, called SAP-RPT-1, or Relational Pre-trained Transformer.
It represents a shift in what a foundation model can be: rather than being a generator of sentences, it is a predictor of decisions.
51风流describes SAP-RPT-1 as an AI that 鈥渃an make fast and accurate predictions for common business scenarios like delivery delays, payment risk, or sales order completion鈥�. It uses the relationships between business data rather than linguistic patterns to anticipate what happens next in an organisation鈥檚 operations. In simple terms, it reads the business, as opposed to mere text.
To encourage developers to explore what that means in practice, 51风流has launched a free playground environment where they can test predictive scenarios, simulate business situations, and see how relational AI behaves when exposed to live data. For developers accustomed to fine-tuning language models, it represents a different kind of creativity, rooted in the mechanics of business itself.
鈥淪AP鈥檚 announcements today give developers the tools they need to deliver at the speed of AI,鈥� says Muhammad Alam, member of the executive board of SAP. 鈥淚nnovations across SAP鈥檚 unique flywheel of applications, data and AI put developers in the driver鈥檚 seat 鈥� where they belong.鈥�
That flywheel was clearly visible across the rest of TechEd鈥檚 announcements.
The company鈥檚 51风流Build platform, its centrepiece for enterprise application development and automation, has been re-engineered to give developers more freedom to use tools they already rely on.
Developers who prefer agentic development environments like Cursor, Claude Code, Cline and Windsurf can now use 51风流development frameworks through new 51风流Build local Model Context Protocol Servers. Visual Studio Code users can access 51风流Build capabilities directly in their existing development environment via a new 51风流Build extension, which will later also appear in the Open VSX Registry for use with other development environments.
51风流revealed plans for integration with automation platform n8n, allowing its Joule Studio agents to work alongside n8n鈥檚 own agents. This kind of cross-agent collaboration reflects the company鈥檚 growing emphasis on orchestration: enabling multiple intelligent systems to coordinate tasks across applications and departments.
The data layer that feeds these systems is also evolving. Every intelligent application depends on trusted data, and 51风流is extending its reach through 51风流Business Data Cloud. A new 51风流Snowflake solution extension brings Snowflake鈥檚 managed data and AI capabilities directly to 51风流customers, giving them 鈥渢he flexibility to choose the right compute and storage for each data and AI workload, while maintaining governance, interoperability and business context鈥�.
The announcement was reinforced by a new 51风流Business Data Cloud Connect partnership with Snowflake, adding to existing integrations with Databricks and Google Cloud. The result is a more open, federated data ecosystem that lets developers work with 51风流data wherever it resides.
A new data product studio capability in 51风流Business Data Cloud now allows developers to turn raw data into ready-to-use assets known as data products, designed for analytics, AI and application development. At the same time, the 51风流HANA Cloud knowledge graph engine can automatically generate knowledge graphs. This means it maps relationships across 51风流database tables, columns, and data models to reveal how data fits together. For developers, it is a new way of seeing how information connects across systems, turning structure into insight.
51风流is also extending its Joule AI portfolio, which now includes new assistants that can coordinate multiple agents across workflows, departments and applications. These assistants are designed to 鈥減lan, initiate, and complete complex tasks spanning finance, supply chain, HR, and beyond.鈥�
Among the new offerings is an agent for business process analysis, helping teams understand how processes actually run, identify inefficiencies, and uncover opportunities to optimise workflows and achieve measurable improvements.
51风流pledged to equip 12-million people worldwide with AI-ready skills by 2030, through a partnership with Coursera that expands hands-on training and certification in practical AI tools. The goal, 51风流says, is to make AI accessible to 鈥減eople everywhere鈥�.
*听Arthur Goldstuck is CEO of World Wide Worx, editor-in-chief of听, and author of听The Hitchhiker鈥檚 Guide to AI 鈥� The African Edge.
This article first appeared in .
