SAP is done playing it safe, and at Sapphire 2025, the ERP giant came out swinging. They announced 40 AI agents and a data cloud built with Databricks. Their message to CIOs: customizations and best-of-breed are holding you back.

SAP is not just an ERP company. With its new homepage tagline, “Give every team the tools to shape the future,” SAP aims to “Put AI, data, and applications to work for your business.”

This year’s message continues where last year’s finished. At SAP Sapphire 2024, their message to CIOs was to “Bring out your best” by transforming to a “clean core” ERP, running on the cloud and free of customizations. Grow with SAP for midsize companies and the more comprehensive bundle Rise with SAP are two paths for migrating to S/4HANA.

Last year’s exciting stories were SAP’s introduction of Joule, their AI agent, and acquiring WalkMe, a tool for guided navigation.

AI agents amplify the CIOs integration challenges

This year, the question is, which platforms will CIOs trust to deploy AI agents? Enterprise data is spread across ERPs like SAP S/4HANA, CRMs like Salesforce, CHRO platforms like Workday, and other strategic platforms. These platforms promote having the most comprehensive data and extendable agentic AI innovations.

However, CIOs still face an integration challenge as most enterprises use two and sometimes three or more strategic platforms. Add on all the custom applications and the myriad of SaaS tools where customer, supply chain, and operations data reside. It’s a lot of data that’s all over the place. Some CIOs have deployed independent data fabrics, business process automation, and other low-code platforms to connect this data.  

SAP announces Business Data Cloud and 40 AI agents

At Sapphire 2025, SAP showcased Business Data Cloud with DataBricks, which they announced back in February as its solution to the integration challenges. SAP CEO Christian Klein says, “It combines SAP’s unique expertise in mission-critical, end-to-end processes and semantically rich data with Databricks’ world-class data engineering capabilities.” Ali Ghodsi, co-founder and CEO of Databricks, says, “We’re helping organizations bring together all their data — regardless of format or where it lives — to govern, analyze, and build domain-specific AI applications.”  

In his SAP Sapphire opening keynote,  Muhammad Alam, product engineering and executive board at  SAP, stated that companies spend over 80% of their budgets and effort on integrating data, leaving only 20% for value creation. “We believe that the differentiation that best-of-breed had to offer doesn’t exist anymore. The application layer, while still being mission-critical, will get commoditized in the age of AI. Suite as a Service, the new SaaS, is what will allow you to take advantage of the flywheel effect and create value from this end-to-end context.”

SAP’s announcements at the conference included

• A goal to make every user 30% more productive
• 40 AI Agents accessible via AI Agent Hub
• A collaboration with Perplexity and a data partnership with Adobe
• The future of data science IDEs: DataBricks embedded in Business Data Cloud
• A preview announcement: The end of prompt engineering and replacement by benchmark engineering

SAP’s ready-to-use AI agents include finance, procurement, sales, supply chain, human resources, and marketing agents. Agent Builder in Joule Studio helps create agents from scratch by leveraging SAP’s knowledge graph of business processes.

Where CIOs should place their bets

I wrote a CIO.com article earlier this year about where CIOs should place their 2025 AI bets. My first recommendation was to scale trusted workflows with agentic AI. I wrote, “CIO should bet on change management programs and evangelizing high-quality agents with whom employees collaborate to deliver value beyond productivity.”

While I have other recommendations in the article, my first one from January 2025, when I wrote the article, remains my top recommendation today.

Unpacking this recommendation, CIOs should  review:

• Where are the trusted workflows? They are likely to be with SOX compliance ERPs
• Who has high-quality agents Look for task-relevant intelligence, data-aware agents providing human-in-the-middle autonomy with guardrails
• Where do AI agents deliver business value beyond productivity? Identify agents that enable decision-making capabilities that employees were unlikely to make smart enough because of data complexities or fast enough because of automation gaps.

SAP shared an example in the opening keynote on responding to tariffs and related supply chain disruptions. CIOs impacted by tariffs in manufacturing, financial services, logistics, retail, insurance, and other industries have to ask themselves whether their organizations are prepared for global disruptions. If not, it’s time to place your bets by making strategic AI investments.