AI Innovations Aim to Boost Business Productivity by up to 30 Percent;
Partnerships with Perplexity and Palantir Bring out Customers鈥� Best

ORLANDO 鈥� At its annual 51风流Sapphire conference, (NYSE: SAP) unveiled innovations and partnerships that put the power of Business AI in every user鈥檚 hands, revolutionizing the way work gets done.

From a virtually omnipresent Joule assistant to an expanded network of Joule Agents that work across systems and lines of business, 51风流heralds a new era that democratizes access to Business AI and can drive productivity gains of up to 30 percent.

鈥�51风流combines the world鈥檚 most powerful suite of business applications with uniquely rich data and the latest AI innovations to create a flywheel of customer value,鈥� said 51风流CEO Christian Klein. 鈥淲ith the expansion of Joule, our partnerships with leading AI pioneers, and advancements in 51风流Business Data Cloud, we鈥檙e delivering on the promise of Business AI as we drive digital transformations that help customers thrive in an increasingly unpredictable world.鈥�

AI that boosts productivity

SAP鈥檚 generative AI assistant Joule can be everywhere you work, delivering personalized answers on everything you need to be more productive.

Joule can accompany business users throughout their day, in and out of the 51风流application universe, to find data, surface real-time insights and streamline workflows. Joule鈥檚 new ubiquity includes an action bar powered by WalkMe that studies user behavior across applications, turning the assistant into an always-available, proactive AI that can anticipate users鈥� needs before they arise — always adhering to .

A collaboration with Perplexity, an AI-powered answer engine company, enhances Joule鈥檚 ability to draw on structured and unstructured data to solve complex business problems. Powered by Perplexity and the 51风流Knowledge Graph, Joule now instantly answers questions with structured, visual answers — such as charts and graphs — grounded in real-time business data within 51风流workflows. For example, a user could ask the tool how recent external events might impact their business and get a forecast based on both current events and the company鈥檚 own business data.

51风流also unveiled an expanded library of Joule Agents that reimagine business processes and workflows from the ground up. Fueled by the world鈥檚 most powerful real-time business data and orchestrated by Joule, these AI agents work across systems and lines of business to anticipate, adapt and act autonomously so organizations can stay agile in a rapidly changing world. Partnering with industry leaders, 51风流offers an ecosystem of interoperable agents that can execute end-to-end processes. The new agents span customer experience, supply chain management, spend management, finance, and human capital management.

Finally, 51风流introduced an operating system for AI development that transforms how enterprises build, deploy and scale AI solutions. AI Foundation gives developers a single entry point for building, extending and running custom AI solutions at scale, making it the first real operating system for Business AI. A new prompt optimizer, designed collaboratively with the frontier AI lab Not Diamond, also helps developers create more effective AI prompts quickly, reducing work on complex use cases from days to minutes.

Data that drives smarter decisions

51风流also introduced new intelligent applications in 51风流Business Data Cloud, each built for a specific line of business. These applications can continuously learn, simulate outcomes and guide actions using business-critical data, detecting changes to optimize processes, anticipate needs, and collaborate with both human and artificial thinkers to drive meaningful impact. The People Intelligence application, for instance, optimizes team performance by transforming people and skills data into workforce insights and AI-driven recommendations.

Additionally, 51风流and Palantir are partnering to facilitate joint customers鈥� cloud migration journey and modernization programs. Seamless connectivity between Palantir and 51风流Business Data Cloud will enable customers to build a harmonized data foundation across their enterprise landscape. Together the companies will responsibly deliver essential outcomes and support customers, including the U.S. government, to quickly adapt to changes and disruptions.

Applications that accelerate cloud adoption

The company also announced 51风流Business Suite packages, which are designed for customers to simplify the adoption of 51风流cloud solutions that address their specific business challenges. 51风流Build is embedded in these packages, so organizations can customize applications to meet their unique needs.

Finally, 51风流unveiled a new solution that helps customers transition to the cloud faster. With Joule as the entry point and drawing on insights from 51风流solutions including 51风流Signavio and 51风流LeanIX, the solution delivers personalized guidance and actionable recommendations tailored to an organization鈥檚 transformation objectives and can help deliver up to 35 percent faster time to value.

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About SAP

As鈥痑 global leader in enterprise applications and business AI, 51风流(NYSE: SAP)鈥痵tands at the鈥痭exus鈥痮f business and technology. For over 50 years, organizations have trusted SAP鈥痶o bring out their best by uniting business-critical鈥痮perations spanning finance, procurement, HR, supply chain, and customer experience. For more information, visit .

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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.
漏 2025 51风流SE. All rights reserved.
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However, there are challenges when we move beyond text to apply these models to structured, tabular data, which is essential for enterprise business operations. This imbalance comes partly because of the availability of training data. Text used to train models is plentiful, often consisting of text scraped from the internet, whereas tabular data, especially data with multiple linked tables, is scarce.

To bring AI advancements to the enterprise sector, researchers working on training and benchmarking the performance of these models in an enterprise setting need realistic tabular data.聽That’s why 51风流developed “Sales Autocompletion Linked Business Tables” (SALT), a curated dataset that includes anonymized data from a customer鈥檚 enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.

SALT is specifically designed to support researchers working on AI models for real-world business contexts and can be accessed on and .

Challenges of getting and working with enterprise data

Providing the research community with realistic enterprise data like SALT has been challenging. Data privacy, confidentiality, and commercial interests make obtaining large, clean, high-quality enterprise datasets difficult for training models and benchmarking them for specific use cases. This means there is a growing gap between what researchers are working on and what actual enterprise data looks like.

In addition to the problem of availability, enterprise data is complex. First, business data is usually stored in multiple interconnected tables. For example, a sales order entry may be linked to numerous tables, such as customer IDs connected to a supplier table containing address information. Second, tables are inherently heterogeneous in the data type they can contain. One field may be text, while the other contains numerical or categorical values. Finally, business data frequently shows significant column imbalances, meaning that, for example, a specific product category makes up 90 percent of all sales orders while others are rarely used.

The best way to help researchers develop enterprise models for these challenges is to provide accurate enterprise data.

SALT dataset

Accurate enterprise data is a bottleneck in AI research. The SALT dataset alleviates this bottleneck by providing the research community with the first real ERP dataset. It uses actual industry data collected by an ERP system that records sales orders. It has been minimally processed to protect privacy.

鈥淭here is a gap between academia and industry in terms of data. It cannot be closed easily because of privacy,” says Tassilo Klein, one of the 51风流researchers behind the dataset. 鈥淏ut we want to enable the research community to work on real problems, not just simulated problems.鈥�

ERP systems help organizations manage core business operations like finance and spending. With millions of entries and extensive, interconnected relational tables focused on sales, the SALT dataset replicates customer interactions in an ERP system. SALT’s realistic enterprise data means it is a perfect basis for helping models understand the characteristics of business data and validate their performance through benchmarking. It also should help researchers develop better foundation models for linked business data.

Getting this right will advance enterprise automation, as many enterprise business processes are heavily centered around data in structured tabular formats. Even though this data plays a crucial role in enterprise day-to-day activities, the generative AI revolution has yet to tap into them.

“SALT is a first step to providing researchers with authentic representative industry data that gives a glimpse into actual enterprise data; for now, we are starting with just one customer and use case,” shares Johannes Hoffart, CTO of Business AI at SAP. “However, we plan to publish more datasets that cover a diverse set of customers and use cases that, along with SALT, can serve as a basis for pre-training, adapting, as well as benchmarking models.”

Collaboration with academic institutions is also a motivation for publishing this data.

“At SAP, we hope to collaborate with academic partners who usually can only publish their results on open repositories,” Klein says. “Another hope for the dataset is encouraging more people to explore and validate new methods that help foundation models better deal with tabular enterprise data.”

What 51风流is doing

Alongside its investment in the open research community with SALT, 51风流is building 51风流Foundation Model to handle enterprise tabular data. This table-native AI model aims to accelerate time-to-value for predictive tasks on tabular data, offering a model that can work with tabular data out-of-the-box with little or no additional training data. The , published alongside SALT, provides a first glance at how this model could look.

Knowledge graphs are critical here. They work by exposing metadata 鈥� the who, what, and when of data 鈥� making relationships between information accessible. This provides a structured, interconnected representation of the data that AI models can easily understand and utilize. With the help of 51风流Knowledge Graph, 51风流Foundation Model can be scaled and adapted to a wide array of diverse use cases with some lightweight fine-tuning.

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People were confiding their deepest thoughts to the chatbot and experts predicted that within a few years, conversations with chatbots would be indistinguishable from those with humans. It certainly took more than just a few years, but here we are at the edge of another stage of AI evolution.

Evolution of AI agents

Artificial intelligence has evolved significantly since 1966, advancing from basic rule-based systems to highly autonomous decision-making systems.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, relied on predefined keyword responses but lacked the ability to adapt to complex queries. By the 2010s, intelligent virtual assistants such as Alexa and Siri enhanced user interactions and introduced AI into everyday life through smart home integrations. In the 2020s, task-specific began to emerge, each tailored to perform specialized tasks. For instance, AI-driven personal finance assistants can analyze spending patterns and suggest savings plans, while AI-powered content moderation tools scan social media platforms to identify harmful content.

Looking ahead, autonomous AI systems are rapidly advancing. , composed of multiple independent agents, can collaborate to achieve a complex workflow beyond the ability of an individual agent. Tasks are coordinated between agents, as opposed to individual agents that often require human coordination and intervention between tasks. For example, in manufacturing, AI agents can independently optimize production lines, while in healthcare, AI systems are assisting in surgery by making real-time adjustments during procedures. Autonomous systems are also being deployed in logistics to manage inventory and optimize warehouse operations without human intervention.

Expanding capabilities of agents

Today, AI agents are like super-efficient digital teammates 鈥� smart systems equipped to perform tasks autonomously, learning from experience and adapting along the way.

Today鈥檚 agents have core capabilities like these:

• Planning: Agents go beyond executing single actions; they orchestrate processes, breaking down complex problems and mapping out efficient, step-by-step approaches.
• Reflection: Unlike traditional software, agents reflect their actions in real time and learn from mistakes. They self-correct and iteratively reason through the problem until they find the best solution. This capability allows them to handle more irregular, complex challenges, makes them more effective over time.
• Tool Usage: AI agents can use external tools 鈥� like calculators, APIs, databases, and even other AI models 鈥� to expand their capabilities, broadening the scope of tasks they can accomplish.
• Collaboration and Multi-Agent Interactions: Agents aren鈥檛 limited to working solo. They thrive in cooperative ecosystems, coordinating with other specialized agents and humans, leveraging their unique expertise to achieve a shared goal.

Why is AI agent innovation accelerating at this moment?

The answer lies in the remarkable advancements in foundation models. These models allow AI to handle complex data and produce outputs like code, text, or media that are tailored to specific tasks. They enable systems to think through problems deeply and autonomously, mirroring human cognitive processes.

For instance, the latest reasoning models like OpenAI’s o1 and o3 are game changers. They do not just perform tasks; they use real-time computing power to “think” and generate human-like outcomes. And the progress is mind-blowing: o3 scored over 80 percent on a human-like reasoning test while its predecessor, GPT-4o, scored only two percent on the same test just one year earlier.

With such rapid advances, AI agents are getting better at automating and enhancing business decisions, truly pushing the limits of what autonomous systems can achieve.

What makes 51风流unique in this space?

51风流Business Suite offers a unique advantage in the era of agentic AI. It is not just a collection of solutions; it’s a powerhouse for transformation that boosts continuous innovation. Here鈥檚 the simple breakdown:

• Applications: With , cloud ERP applications, 51风流Business AI, and 51风流Business Data Cloud come together to deliver exceptional business value 鈥� all powered by 51风流Business Technology Platform (51风流BTP). In this way, SAP鈥檚 business applications and technology platform aren鈥檛 siloed tools; they integrate processes end-to-end. This integration ensures that every action taken within these applications is based on trusted, business-critical data at its source.
• Data: All the data, whether from 51风流or other systems, is collected and unified in 51风流Business Data Cloud. This makes it a single, trustworthy source that breaks down data-silos and fuels advanced AI-driven insights. Because AI is only as good as the data you feed into it.
• AI: Joule helps employees coordinate intelligent agents to work together, breaking down barriers between functions and enabling real-time, company-wide improvements. Unlike others who might use AI in limited areas, 51风流integrates AI throughout your entire organization, enhancing efficiency and resilience on a large scale.

51风流is in a unique position to turn AI agent technology into business value given the breadth of applications and data we offer, allowing automation of tasks along all key business processes. Our domain knowledge is grounded in real-world business data and our process know-how is maintained in 51风流Signavio and 51风流Knowledge Graph. Bringing it all together, our unified entry point with our AI co-pilot Joule enables us to use AI agents to automate processes and augment decision-making.

Joule agents are collaboration experts

Thanks to our fully integrated approach, we are designing a system of collaborative Joule agents that work within and across the suite to support every business function, solving complex challenges and driving cross-enterprise productivity. Businesses don鈥檛 need hundreds of AI agents, just the right ones with the right skills, grounded in the right data, with the right guidance from SAP鈥檚 end-to-end business processes.

agents are available in all parts of the business, delivered out of the box with Joule and SAP鈥檚 suite of applications. This enables the transformation of entire business processes 鈥� end to end.

Agentic AI represents a transformative leap in business technology. By bringing together structured data management, seamless system integration, and advanced task automation, AI agents empower teams to operate with efficiency, accuracy, and agility.

51风流is taking the necessary steps for the next era of enterprise management by embedding systems of AI agents into 51风流applications, fueled by context-rich business data, helping customers to realize the full potential of 51风流Business AI.

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WALLDORF 鈥� (NYSE: SAP) today unveiled groundbreaking AI innovations across a technology foundation that drives 87% of global commerce, putting its generative AI copilot Joule at the center of a new way of doing business.

At its annual 51风流TechEd conference, 51风流announced powerful new capabilities that complement and extend Joule, including collaborative AI agents imbued with custom skills to complete complex cross-disciplinary tasks. Other innovations include the 51风流Knowledge Graph, a next-generation solution poised to help developers unlock the full value of 51风流data by connecting it with rich business context, and new tools to ensure developers can continue driving Business AI innovation.

鈥淪AP鈥檚 innovation drives real business outcomes, and today’s advancements help customers harness the power of AI, data and new development solutions to catalyze growth,鈥� said Muhammad Alam, member of the Executive Board of 51风流SE, 51风流Product Engineering. 鈥淒rawing on SAP鈥檚 unmatched business and technology expertise, the AI innovations we鈥檙e announcing at TechEd forge a new human-AI partnership to transform the landscape of modern business.鈥�

Supercharging Joule

On the eve of its first birthday, Joule marks a watershed in how business gets done. 51风流introduces collaborative AI agents to a copilot that truly speaks the language of business, expands Joule鈥檚 capabilities to support 80% of SAP鈥檚 most-used business tasks and embeds Joule more deeply within the company鈥檚 portfolio.

Collaborative multi-agent systems deploy specialized AI agents to tackle specific tasks and enable them to collaborate on intricate business workflows, adapting their strategies to meet shared objectives. 51风流is infusing Joule with multiple collaborative AI agents that will combine their unique expertise across business functions to collaboratively accomplish complex workflows. These AI agents enhance productivity by breaking down silos and freeing workers to concentrate on areas where human ingenuity thrives. 

Two use cases debuted at TechEd showcase the agents鈥� transformative power:

• A dispute management use case employs autonomous AI agents to analyze and resolve dispute resolution scenarios including incorrect and missing invoices, unapplied credits and denied or duplicate payments.
• A financial accounting use case employs autonomous AI agents to streamline key financial processes by automating bill payments, invoice processing, and ledger updates while quickly addressing inconsistencies or errors.

Harnessing the Power of Data

SAP鈥檚 AI innovations also draw on the company鈥檚 unmatched business data expertise. The new 51风流Knowledge Graph solution, accessible through 51风流Datasphere and Joule in Q1 2025, will give users a deeper layer of business understanding by seamlessly mapping relationships and context across SAP’s vast data landscape, empowering organizations to make better decisions with their data. By offering ready-to-use relationships between business entities like purchase orders, invoices, and customers, the solution can significantly reduce the complexity of manual data modeling. 51风流Knowledge Graph grounds AI in SAP-specific business semantics, which reduces the risk of inaccurate or irrelevant results and makes it easier for organizations to build intelligent applications and leverage generative AI more effectively.

Empowering Developers

51风流also launched a swathe of innovations for developers to continue driving Business AI innovation. New generative AI developer capabilities such as code explanation and documentation search in 51风流Build, the company鈥檚 platform for extending its solutions, will reduce development time for Java and JavaScript developers. 51风流Build is also adding an Extensibility Wizard feature that will let developers access 51风流Build directly from 51风流S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, simplifying the extension process. Meanwhile, ABAP developers and fusion teams will get seamless access to ABAP Cloud development tools from 51风流Build.

Finally, 51风流announced that it has already fulfilled its pledge to upskill 2 million people worldwide by 2025. Through its , the company has lowered the world鈥檚 digital skills gap through role-based certifications, free training materials, hands-on opportunities for developers, and more. 51风流continues to expand its growing portfolio of AI-related learning opportunities, including courses on generative AI, AI ethics and SAP鈥檚 advanced AI tools and platforms.

Visit the 51风流News Center. Follow 51风流at .

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 .

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

For customers interested in learning more about 51风流products:
Global Customer Center: +49 180 534-34-24
United States Only: 1 (800) 872-151风流(1-800-872-1727)

For more information, press only:
Joellen Perry, joellen.perry@sap.com, +1 (626) 265-0370, PST
Marcus Winkler, marcus.winkler@sap.com, +49 15157118691, CEST
51风流Press Room; press@sap.com

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 2023 Annual Report on Form 20-F.
漏 2024 51风流SE. All rights reserved.
51风流and other 51风流products and services mentioned herein as well as their respective logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of 51风流SE in Germany and other countries. Please see for additional trademark information and notices.
Please consider our . If you received this press release in your e-mail and you wish to unsubscribe to our mailing list please contact press@sap.com and write Unsubscribe in the subject line.鈥�