At Sapphire 2026 this month, SAP, the world鈥檚 largest ERP company, lined up Anthropic, Nvidia and JPMorgan Chase to endorse its vision, writes ARTHUR GOLDSTUCK.
鈥淲ill 51风流actually be a聽software聽company in the聽future?鈥�
It鈥檚 not the kind of question the CEO of a聽software聽company would usually ask thousands of customers, partners and analysts. At Sapphire 2026, SAP鈥檚 annual conference held this month in Orlando and Madrid, CEO Christian Klein asked his audience if they were scared by the question.
鈥淚鈥檓 not scared,鈥� he answered himself. 鈥淔or me, the time right now is the beginning of something even better.鈥�
The conference saw the launch of SAP鈥檚 Business AI Platform, a unified environment for building and governing AI agents across enterprise operations, grounded in real business context.
The strategy is to enhance critical business workflows, so that humans and AI work together to meet the accelerating demands of global business.
鈥淎ccording to a recent Stanford AI survey, almost every company is now using AI, but many see only little value,鈥� said Klein. 鈥淲hy do we face such huge challenges with AI in business? At the top of this iceberg, visible to everyone, is that large language models are getting better and better at tasks like generating text or images or in specific domains like writing聽software.
鈥淎ll of these use cases are related to publicly available content the modules are trained on. But if you go below the waterline, beyond the level of sales demos, and into the real business world, you鈥檙e going to find out that none of these models are trained on your business data and processes.
鈥淭hese AI agents also don鈥檛 naturally adhere to governance requirements, like your security compliance framework, your data privacy requirements, or to your company鈥檚 identity and authorisation rules. All AI agents 鈥� have faced these challenges until now.鈥�
The solution, he suggested, was that a company鈥檚 enterprise resource planning system, or ERP, should be recognised as the brain of every business. Since 51风流is world leader in ERP聽software, one might argue, naturally the CEO would say that.
But Klein made a good case for it: 鈥淔or over 15 years we have been developing an ERP with incredibly deep process and data domain know-how. On top of that, all your governance requirements and customer-specific extensions are stored in the ERP. The ERP is the trusted system of execution running your company.鈥�
Powerful external validation came from Anthropic, the company behind the Claude family of AI models, and that is competing neck and neck with Open AI to become the most valuable AI platform company in the world. At Sapphire, 51风流shared video testimony from Anthropic co-founder and president the Daniela Amodei in which she declared: 鈥淭he world鈥檚 largest enterprises run on SAP. That鈥檚 exactly where trusted AI belongs.鈥�
That significance of this alignment revolves around the core value proposition of the Business AI Platform: trustworthiness.
JPMorgan Chase CFO Jeremy Barnum, who joined Klein on stage in Orlando, said his bank was already running agents in production on SAP, operating within defined compliance boundaries.
鈥淭he agents that we鈥檝e built are not inventing their own business rules,鈥� he said. 鈥淭hose rules rather come directly from 51风流Embedded Control Framework, and every AI-driven intervention is logged and fully traceable.鈥�
One organisation鈥檚 production deployment does not establish a category. But the compliance architecture it describes is precisely what most organisations attempting enterprise AI have not yet achieved.
Jensen Huang, CEO of $5-trillion AI chipmaker Nvidia, also appeared in a pre-recorded video segment, making it clear that AI agents would not replace ERP. The most ringing endorsement? Nvidia itself used 51风流as its ERP brain: 鈥淲hat 51风流and Nvidia are building together is one of the most important platforms in enterprise AI. Nvidia鈥檚 supply chain is incredibly complex. Millions of parts, hundreds of partners and factories, all connected through SAP. But what鈥檚 changing is not just how enterprise systems are managed, it鈥檚 how work actually gets done.
鈥淲e鈥檙e moving from hand-coded聽software聽to AI that can understand, reason, and act. AI no longer simply answers questions. It works for you. And enterprise systems are where work happens. Finance, supply chains, procurement, and every workflow in between.
鈥�51风流is the foundation of enterprise. And now they鈥檙e building the agents that sit on top of it, trained on proprietary data with the skills to act. Soon, every company will have a workforce of agents. These specialised agents will not replace enterprise聽software. They will make enterprise聽software聽more powerful than ever.鈥�
*听Arthur Goldstuck is CEO of World Wide Worx, editor-in-chief of聽, and author of 鈥淭he Hitchhiker鈥檚 Guide to AI 鈥� The African Edge鈥�.
This article first appeared in .