Explaining SAP’s Strategy

In this video Sebastian Steinhaeuser, Chief Operating Officer for SAP, lays out the strategic approach SAP is taking to deliver on its promise to help the world run better and improve people's lives in 2026.

• 0:00 - Core Tenets: SAP's Purpose and Vision drive our strategy.
• 0:36 - A Decisive Moment for SAP: AI is reshaping the market and SAP has a decisive opportunity to drive lasting advantage through leading AI.
• 1:13 - Going All-In on AI: The driving principles, defining how SAP helps organizations to deliver tangible and scalable business value from AI.
• 4:02 - Strategic Imperatives: Executing along five key strategic imperatives.
• 6:48 - SAP Business Suite Brings the Flywheel to Life: SAP Business Suite is a comprehensive set of integrated solutions, where applications, data, and AI work as one.

Our strategy continues to bring together apps, data, and AI into a virtuous flywheel.

Deeply integrated Business AI enhances our SAP Cloud ERP applications, which in turn generate richer, more accurate data. With SAP Business Data Cloud the most valuable business data from every part of the business feeds into a semantically rich data treasure. This becomes the basis to further enhance AI.

Like the principles of physics, the SAP Flywheel captures momentum from continuous rotations across these three layers—applications, data, and AI—to drive innovation, boost productivity, and ensure sustainable growth for our customers.

This is something that only SAP is positioned to do. Why?

1. Seamless applications, data, and AI deliver the highest value for our customers and enable scaling of AI beyond pilots. If organizations add AI just as a separate layer "bolted on", it increases complexity in managing data access, authentication, security, and governance. Even when handling these tasks, delivering AI effectively to end users remains challenging. This is why integrating AI directly into applications and business processes delivers a seamless experience and greater value that is difficult to replicate with fragmented systems.
2. AI with the broadest context provides the deepest value. Even when organizations bring apps, data, and AI together seamlessly within a single domain, processes still operate in silos. Bridging functions requires an additional data and AI abstraction layer that sits above individual functions. This is where the breadth of SAP Business Suite comes in: it delivers one holistic apps, data, AI flywheel, harmonized in SAP Business Data Cloud and seamlessly embedded in applications.

While the opportunity is clear, the largest technology shift in our industry also poses risks to our core business. New agentic AI capabilities are completely reshaping enterprise technology. Business process execution is shifting from individual applications to an agentic AI layer that runs all critical processes and becomes the new user experience. Role‑, context‑aware, and industry‑specific assistants become the operating and interaction layer to run end‑to‑end processes. Persona‑based AI assistants will support every role across each enterprise function, from finance and procurement to HR.

Let’s explore a practical example together to understand how embedded AI assistants and Joule agents transform finance from day-to-day execution to shaping strategic decisions: When apps, data, and AI converge, finance processes evolve from siloed, manual handoffs to connected, assistant‑led execution. AI assistants augment core domains - reporting, planning, quote‑to‑cash, treasury and working capital, and tax and compliance - operating with shared enterprise context and guardrails. Routine tasks like reconciliations, status checks, data reentry, and cross‑team follow‑ups are automated. This frees finance teams to focus on exceptions, decisions, and strategic analysis. Joule interprets intent and coordinates assistants across processes to enable autonomous execution. Signals in one area automatically drive the next best action in another - linking planning to working capital moves, aligning compliance checks with reporting timelines, or connecting quote‑to‑cash activities with treasury actions - without users stitching steps together.

The outcome is fewer redundant manual steps, faster cycle times, higher data quality, and finance capacity redirected to planning, risk management, and value creation. Organizations can go beyond standard capabilities with Joule Studio in SAP Build: create custom Joule skills and agents that reflect unique processes and business capabilities, then have them orchestrated by Joule within the same guardrails and context.

AI is a disruptive technology, but only if we take a user‑centric and business‑process-driven view and are willing to radically disrupt ourselves and transform our legacy systems making Joule our new user experience triggering high-value agentic use cases and workflows, can we unlock its full potential. Software companies that do not drive this transition with full force are at risk to become a commodity feeding into a 3^rd-party agentic AI layer.

• Seamless apps, data, and AI deliver the highest value: Embedding AI directly into application and data layers creates a unified experience and delivers benefits that fragmented systems cannot match.
• Giving AI the broadest context provides the deepest value: Even with integrated apps and data, processes often remain siloed. The breadth of SAP Business Suite bridges this gap through one holistic Apps, Data, AI flywheel.
• Redefining how End Users Work and Business Processes Run with SAP Business AI: New agentic AI capabilities are completely reshaping enterprise technology. Business process execution is shifting from individual applications to an agentic AI layer that runs all critical processes and becomes the new user experience.