Highlighting the Value Added with SAP Business AI

SAP’s AI is designed to seamlessly integrate into enterprise applications, for example Financial Management and Supply Chain Management, delivering real business value beyond existing solutions. By embedding AI directly within business processes, SAP enhances efficiency and productivity while reinventing the user experience with Joule, our generative AI copilot. Through strategic partnerships and investments, we provide AI-driven use cases tailored to customer needs.

A strong data foundation is key to SAP’s AI strategy. Built on SAP Business Technology Platform, AI solutions leverage the Generative AI Hub, part of AI Foundation allowing customers and partners to customize and extend capabilities. With 450+ partner AI applications, businesses can implement ready-made solutions or develop their own, ensuring AI innovation is both scalable and adaptable

Sustainability is a growing priority for businesses, but professionals face significant challenges in making real progress. One of the biggest hurdles is data fragmentation—sustainability data is often scattered across departments, external sources, and various formats. This lack of integration makes it difficult to process, verify, and use the data effectively, limiting informed decision-making.

Additionally, manual and specialized processes hinder efficiency. Since ESG KPIs are not always embedded into core business processes, sustainability tasks often rely on manual work, increasing the risk of errors and taking time away from strategic action. Instead of driving initiatives, teams spend valuable time fixing data inconsistencies and consolidating reports.

Finally, gaining actionable insights is complex due to the distributed nature of sustainability efforts. Multiple stakeholders, evolving regulations, and cross-functional impacts make it difficult to extract relevant and timely insights. This complexity can overwhelm teams, delaying critical decisions and slowing down sustainability progress.

SAP Business AI brings powerful capabilities to SAP Sustainability solutions, addressing key challenges in sustainability management. One major advantage is data readiness—AI helps unify fragmented, siloed data from multiple sources and formats. By leveraging AI-powered data processing, organizations can enrich and prepare sustainability, financial, and operational data, ensuring accuracy and relevance for analytical and operational needs.

Another critical opportunity lies in process automation. Sustainability processes are often complex, requiring specialized knowledge and manual effort. AI enables automation, reducing errors, accelerating compliance with new regulations, and freeing up time for strategic initiatives. By embedding AI-driven automation, businesses can enhance efficiency while maintaining high ESG standards.

Finally, AI amplifies expertise by generating actionable insights across business operations. Sustainability decisions often require balancing financial goals with environmental impact. AI provides predictive recommendations and deep operational insights, empowering teams to make informed decisions that drive meaningful, sustainable change

AI is only as powerful as the data it relies on, and SAP’s suite-centric approach ensures businesses have a strong foundation for sustainability insights. By integrating SAP Business AI with sustainability solutions, organizations can harness critical data from the SAP Business Suite, including financial, supply chain, and HR data. This enables proactive decision-making, such as identifying suppliers with high environmental or human rights risks and ensuring fair salary distributions across the workforce.

Beyond core business data, SAP Sustainability solutions process and provide key sustainability-related datasets, including ESG reporting, carbon footprint, and operational data in areas like health and safety. However, AI must also incorporate external sustainability data to deliver comprehensive insights. This includes global regulatory information, environmental datasets such as geospatial and climate data, and real-time sentiment analysis from news and social media.

With SAP, businesses can uniquely combine internal and external datasets to establish an audit-ready, high-quality data foundation. This holistic approach supports strategic financial planning, operational execution, and regulatory reporting while optimizing sustainability performance. By leveraging AI-powered analytics, organizations can drive meaningful, data-backed sustainability actions that align with both business and environmental goals.

Let’s look at an example of an embedded AI capability within SAP Sustainability Control Tower.

Businesses need to create ESG reports that align with internal strategies and meet external regulations like CSRD but gathering, analyzing, and compiling data from multiple sources is time-consuming and complex.

SAP’s AI-assisted ESG report generation capability automates data collection, visualization, and report generation:

• AI selects relevant ESG metrics from SAP Sustainability Control Tower.
• Automatically generates tables and graphs to visualize key data.
• Produces a comprehensive report draft using best-practice templates.