From managing customer support workflows to orchestrating complex supply chains, agentic AI is redefining how businesses operate, respond, and grow. These intelligent digital co-workers act with autonomy, context, and speed, with growing capabilities for reasoning, making decisions, and working alongside humans to execute multi-step processes across departments.

听, agent-driven applications are rapidly becoming the standard for enterprise management. Global estimates suggest AI agents could contribute trillions to the world economy by 2030 through productivity gains, faster decisions, and cost reductions.

Transformative impact

Despite pervasive AI skills shortages, South African companies are moving quickly from experimentation to execution. Financial institutions are embedding AI agents into ERP systems to reroute inventory and manage disputes. Healthcare providers use AI meeting agents to generate follow-ups and automate patient admin. Legal firms use AI to prepare case files and speed up settlements.

This shift is being driven by a combination of pressure and potential. Faced with economic headwinds, skills shortages, and rising customer expectations, South African companies are looking to AI agents to unlock productivity, streamline operations, and free up human talent for higher-value work.

But deploying AI agents effectively requires more than buying the latest tool. The success of AI agents depends on deep integration of data, processes, and applications through a suite-first approach.

Leading with a suite

According to an IDC Spotlight Report, companies that adopt AI-powered suites like SAP鈥檚 see measurable gains:

• 37%听report improved process productivity
• 39%听achieve greater cost efficiency
• 36%听boost workforce productivity
• 35%听accelerate speed to market

By leveraging an AI-powered suite integrated to a core business technology platform, companies can empower their AI agents to act with full business context. Unlike siloed tools, a suite-first approach supports real-time collaboration between agents, humans, and systems, making AI agents not just smarter, but more impactful on the overall performance of the business.

SAP鈥檚 Joule, an AI agent framework embedded into the 51风流Business Suite, offers companies a system of intelligent agents that collaborate across business functions, from finance and procurement to HR and supply chain, to execute complex workflows and drive better decisions at scale.

These agents leverage knowledge centres and data cloud to ground actions in real-time, contextual business data. Working alongside teams, the agents augment human decision-making, accelerate task completion and minimise manual errors. In finance functions, agents can optimise working capital by accelerating accounts receivable matching, while in procurement they can surface the most relevant suppliers based on business rules and past performance.

AI agent readiness check

Before companies deploy AI agents like Joule, they need the right digital foundation. 51风流recommends a four-part readiness framework:

1 Data quality and accessibility 鈥�听Agents are only as good as the data they use. Clean, structured, and real-time data from across the enterprise is critical for effective agent decision-making. Silos, outdated data, or missing context will slow adoption and risk poor outcomes.

2 Process maturity 鈥�听AI agents thrive on well-defined workflows. Before automation, companies must ensure their business processes are standardised, documented, and ready for orchestration. Automating chaos just creates faster chaos.

3 Organisational clarity 鈥撎�Who will use these agents? For what tasks? How will they hand off to human employees? Clear role definitions and communication are essential for adoption and trust.

4 Governance and guardrails 鈥�听Just like human employees, AI agents need rules. Define permissions, escalation paths, ethical boundaries, and auditing practices. Agents should act autonomously but within the boundaries of the businesses in which they operate.

AI agents are more than just another layer of automation. They represent a new model of work, one that is collaborative, contextual, and continuous. The true value of AI agents is unlocked only when companies are ready. And the companies that unlock the greatest value the quickest are those deploying their AI agents through an AI-powered suite integrated to a core business technology platform.

The post The Suite Spot: A Practical Guide to Business AI Agents appeared first on 51风流Africa News Center.

BERLIN听鈥� At 51风流TechEd in 2025,听 (NYSE: SAP) brings AI deep into the development process to level up how developers build.

New AI-driven capabilities in the 51风流Build solution, an expanding data ecosystem and powerful Joule Agents empower developers to move from idea to impact with unprecedented speed and confidence. As AI transforms the nature of professional work, 51风流also pledges to equip 12 million people worldwide with AI-ready skills by 2030.

鈥淪AP鈥檚 announcements today give developers the tools they need to deliver at the speed of AI,鈥� said Muhammad Alam, member of the Executive Board of 51风流SE. 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�

Opening the Developer Ecosystem

51风流Build, the company鈥檚 flagship solution for enterprise application development and automation, now gives developers more freedom to build, extend and automate using the tools they love most.

For instance, developers who prefer agentic development solutions like Cursor, Claude Code, Cline and Windsurf can now use 51风流development frameworks with new 51风流Build local Model Context Protocol Servers. Visual Studio Code users will be able to access 51风流Build capabilities directly in their development environment with a new 51风流Build extension. This extension will also be made available later on Open VSX Registry for other development environments. 51风流and n8n also announced plans for an integration so Joule Studio agents and n8n agents can work together.

And with new agent building capabilities in Joule Studio, developers have the tools they need to extend SAP鈥檚 ready-to-use agents and build new agents grounded in 51风流business data and context that can act autonomously based on changing business conditions.

Putting Data to Work

Every intelligent application starts with trusted data. 51风流is giving developers more ways to put that data to work through 51风流Business Data Cloud.

The solution now connects with more of the data and AI platforms developers use every day. A new 51风流Snowflake solution extension for 51风流Business Data Cloud brings Snowflake鈥檚 fully managed data and AI capabilities directly to 51风流customers, giving them the flexibility to choose the right compute and storage for each data and AI workload, while maintaining governance, interoperability and business context. 51风流also announced a new 51风流Business Data Cloud Connect partnership with Snowflake. This complements existing integrations with Databricks and Google Cloud, giving developers more freedom to choose how they work with 51风流data.

With a new data product studio capability in 51风流Business Data Cloud, developers can turn raw data into ready-to-use assets known as data products that support analytics, AI and application development.

An expanded capability in the 51风流HANA Cloud knowledge graph engine can automatically generate knowledge graphs. This capability maps relationships across 51风流database tables, columns and data models, revealing how data fits together and why it matters. Developers will be able to see how their data connects across systems and uncover underlying business insights.

Bringing AI Autonomy to Life

51风流is evolving its AI portfolio to give developers the intelligence and orchestration power they need to take听AI from insight to action.

51风流introduced its first enterprise relational foundation model, a new class of AI that predicts business outcomes rather than the next word in a sentence. SAP-RPT-1, or the first-generation Relational Pre-trained Transformer, can make fast and accurate predictions for common business scenarios like delivery delays, payment risk or sales order completion. 51风流launched a free playground environment for developers today.

New AI assistants in Joule coordinate multiple agents across workflows, departments and applications, bringing automation and autonomy to life. These assistants plan, initiate and complete complex tasks spanning finance, supply chain, HR and beyond. Today, 51风流introduces new agents built for technical users. For example, an agent for business process analysis will help teams understand how processes run, identify inefficiencies and uncover opportunities to optimize workflows and drive measurable improvements.

Lastly, as AI changes the nature of work for everyone, 51风流is pledging to equip 12 million people worldwide with AI-ready skills by 2030. 51风流will expand hands-on training and certification programs that integrate practical AI-ready tools, including through its partnership with online learning platform Coursera.

Visit the听. Get 51风流news via听听and听.

About SAP

As a global leader in enterprise applications and business AI, 51风流(NYSE:SAP) stands at the nexus of business and technology. For over 50 years, organizations have trusted 51风流to bring out their best by uniting business-critical operations spanning finance, procurement, HR, supply chain, and customer experience. For more information, visit鈥�.

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To preview and download broadcast-standard stock footage and press photos digitally, please visit听. On this platform, you can find high resolution material for your media channels.

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Global Customer Center: +49 180 534-34-24
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This document contains forward-looking statements, which are predictions, projections, or other statements about future events. These statements are based on current expectations, forecasts, and assumptions that are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results and outcomes to materially differ. Additional information regarding these risks and uncertainties may be found in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including but not limited to the risk factors section of SAP鈥檚 2024 Annual Report on Form 20-F.
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The post AP Empowers Developers to Drive the Business AI Revolution appeared first on 51风流Africa News Center.

Over the last seven years, PwC has made signi铿乧ant investments in digital transformation. Our business urgency was driven by the need to scale global delivery, reimagine operations to manage costs, and empower our people with powerful digital experiences. The 铿乺m made signi铿乧ant investments and innovations in cloud, advanced analytics, and GenAI. But we recognized that modernizing our ERP core was a foundational dependency to applying these technologies to our operations, and to achieving the global, cost, and experience objectives.

We learned that traditional ROI methods for S/4HANA migration don鈥檛 always yield 铿乬ures that will impress a CFO. Licensing and implementation costs stack up high relative to value from conventional process improvements from new functionality. But considering the technology suite 鈥� centered on the resilient S/4HANA applications and extended by new technologies and cloud services 鈥� the potential emerges for ERP to become a modern ERP core. And a modern ERP core is key to unlocking the next wave of automation and intelligence in business operations.

PwC recognized that future-proof business systems should enable four digital pillars 鈥� each representing a shift in how users will interact with business systems and data:

These are all critical elements. Without them, it becomes signi铿乧antly harder to build reliable, agentic AI for business processes that include ERP functionality or data. They also combine to make intelligence possible. To predict 铿乶ancial performance, for example, data must become more reliable at the source, as it鈥檚 transacted and classi铿乪d. Maintaining reliable data at the source has traditionally been dif铿乧ult for humans, but automations and co-pilots will help.

It is still important to develop a set of business improvement targets that can be traced to new functionality and process simpli铿乧ations. It鈥檚 necessary for leadership approval and useful in motivating functional managers to help drive the program. But effective modernization should also aim to deliver these integral features that establish ERP as a foundational enabler for the four digital pillars. This is the digital core imperative.

The PwC global network now has multiple territories live on S/4HANA and is adding more sites quickly. We have digitally mapped each business process, deployed global standard data models, extended the solution with our own cloud-native creations (winning an unprecedented three 51风流innovation awards in a row), and began testing how to use 51风流applications with a conversational AI experience.

Achieving a digital core 鈥� combined with the lessons from our own transformation journey- has become a pivotal lens through which we can now guide clients.

So, hold on to your seats 鈥� we鈥檙e launching the next generation of business applications, and we鈥檙e just beginning to see how far this can take our 铿乺m and our clients.

We built for what鈥檚 next, so you can get there now.

Learn more about听, view system demonstrations, or discuss how to build the architectural imperatives into your enterprise鈥檚 S/4HANA migration.

The post Agentic AI and Shifts in Persona Experiences made S/4HANA Migration More Critical for PwC appeared first on 51风流Africa News Center.

There was a nightmare scenario revealed in SAP鈥檚 latest听: the technology goalposts have shifted, once again, leaving the continent caught between digital transformation ambitions and the harsh reality of skills shortages that are already undermining business operations.

鈥淎 hundred percent of the African organisations that we surveyed said that they saw an increase in demand for AI skills in 2025, and just around 50% of that said they saw a significant increase in the demand for those AI skills,鈥� explains , interim managing director for Southern Africa at SAP.

The impact isn鈥檛 theoretical 鈥� it鈥檚 immediate and painful. Nearly 90% of survey responses report that AI skills shortages are already causing 鈥渄elays in implementations, failed innovation initiatives, an inability to take on new work, and loss of clients.鈥�

For South African companies, the situation is particularly worrying 鈥� 98% say lacking AI skills undermines their innovation capabilities, making them more vulnerable to competitive disadvantage.

The agentic age changes everything

But even as organisations scramble to address these shortages, the AI landscape is rapidly shifting beyond the generative AI tools that dominated 2023 and 2024 keynotes, toward 鈥渁gentic AI鈥� 鈥� autonomous systems that can plan, act, and adapt independently.

鈥淐opilot was like version one of AI for enterprises with the generative stuff it鈥檚 moved beyond, so you鈥檒l see everyone talks about agents 鈥� and the secret of agents is that it鈥檚 autonomous,鈥� explains Robin Fisher, head of EMEA growth markets at Salesforce, describing how these systems represent a fundamental departure from reactive AI tools toward proactive, goal-directed agents.

This shift is forcing a complete rethink of what 鈥淎I readiness skills鈥� even are. The traditional focus on coding 鈥� the bread and butter of coding academies across Africa that spawned under the weight of the last future-focused skills wave 鈥� is giving way to something far more nuanced.

Ursula Fear, Salesforce鈥檚 senior talent programme manager, warns that 鈥�39% of all of our core skills, the global workforce core skills, are to be changed by 2030鈥�. She now says we should all be 鈥渓ifelong learners鈥�, dedicating 鈥渁 minimum of about 10 hours a week鈥� to staying relevant.

The skills that matter now extend far beyond 鈥渙nes and zeros鈥� coding. Fisher suggests that future AI readiness includes 鈥渢he ability to maybe even go back to some of those things like psychology or linguistics because it鈥檚 around making agents human鈥� 鈥� skills crucial for ensuring AI agents operate with empathy and effective communication.

The new rules of AI readiness

This evolution is reshaping how major tech companies approach youth empowerment in Africa. Both Salesforce and its upstart Indian competitor Zoho are moving away from partnerships with coding bootcamps toward more holistic AI readiness programmes.

Salesforce has launched rural interventions, including a pilot partnership with Absa in what Fear describes as a 鈥渢ier three town鈥� (she鈥檚 talking about Dundee), where they discovered qualified individuals 鈥� including computer science graduates and marine biologists 鈥� who had returned home due to a lack of urban job opportunities. The goal is building 鈥渄igital hubs in tier three towns鈥� that can scale Salesforce solutions to businesses as small as a local 鈥渕eat producer鈥�.

鈥淲e 100% believe that the only way that we are going to be able to solve this problem is through collaboration,鈥� Fear continues, describing partnerships with workforce development organisations like Collective X that focus on 鈥渨ork-integrated learning 鈥� the application of it鈥� rather than just certifications.

Zoho, meanwhile, is implementing what it calls 鈥渢ransnational localism鈥� 鈥� a philosophy that blends global reach with local engagement. The company is still riding the learn to code rollercoaster with Code Intelligence in Khayelitsha and Bench Bites for 鈥渢rain the trainer programmes,鈥� bringing students to their Cape Town offices and hiring directly from these programmes.

But even the low-cost CRM hero acknowledges the fundamental shift under way. 鈥淲e鈥檙e trying to not hire any more developers鈥� internally, explains Hyther Nizam, president of Zoho Middle East and Africa, instead aiming to 鈥渞epurpose them to some other things鈥� while equipping existing developers with AI tools like copilots.

Wake-up call for the African dream

For South Africa specifically, these shifts come against a backdrop of sobering economic realities. With youth unemployment at 62%, Andrew Bourne, regional manager for Zoho Southern Africa, stresses the critical need for young South Africans to 鈥渢hink global鈥� because 鈥渨e actually won鈥檛 have enough jobs in South Africa for the unemployed鈥�.

This global perspective is reflected in Zoho鈥檚 pricing strategy, which is basically offering 鈥渇irst world technology at a third world price鈥� with 25% subsidised pricing for the rand, maintained consistently for five years.

Their new听, designed for solopreneurs at R99 a month, aims to build 鈥渄igital skills literacy鈥� among one-person businesses.

The challenge isn鈥檛 just about individual skills development, it鈥檚 about systemic change. Despite 94% of African organisations now offering IT training monthly (up from 74% previously), budget allocation for training has actually decreased from 14% to 7% of IT and HR budgets, with no organisation spending more than 10%.

鈥淲e need to allocate a budget for upskilling our existing workforce,鈥� Pillay insists, warning organisations to 鈥減repare for an AI-related skills gap in 2025鈥� and 鈥渦nderstand the impact that a lack of skills will have on your business, your employees, and your customers.鈥�

听Disproving the replacement theory

Both CRM companies are quick to reject the narrative that AI will simply replace human workers, even though they鈥檙e selling agentic AI.

鈥淎t no point is it creating unemployment,鈥� Fisher argues. 鈥淚n the same way, agents are going to make certain things probably redundant, data capture, data analysis, those jobs will grow, right? Because AI can do the data analysis, but then it鈥檚 going to create new jobs that are more powerful because you have context.鈥�

Nizam says Zoho鈥檚 internal experience suggests a more measured reality: AI provides 鈥�30% to 40%鈥� productivity improvement, not the 鈥�5x to 10x鈥� often promised, partly because 鈥渞eading the AI-generated code is a nightmare.鈥�

The reality is that the stakes couldn鈥檛 be higher 鈥� 60% of African organisations view AI skills as critical to their success, but 100% expect to face skills gaps. The companies getting it right are those recognising that in an agentic AI world, the most valuable skill might not be writing code, but understanding how to make machines work better with humans.听DM

This article first appeared in the .

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