Regulatory frameworks are shifting across multiple jurisdictions simultaneously. Energy costs, labor markets, and customer expectations are each moving in their own direction, often in direct conflict.

The question I am most often asked, across industries and geographies, is a version of the same thing: how do we build an organization that can absorb continuous turbulence without losing operational coherence?

My answer is increasingly the same: you cannot manage permanent disruption reactively. You build systems that can anticipate, adapt, and act鈥攁utonomously, at scale, and in real time. That is what business AI, properly embedded into an organization’s digital core, now makes possible. And the clearest evidence I can offer comes from our customers, many of whom shared their incredible AI innovation journeys at our recent flagship 麻豆原创 Sapphire events.

Data is the foundation, not an afterthought

Ericsson’s journey is instructive precisely because the company confronted a truth that many organizations are still resisting. As Esra Kocat眉rk Norell, vice president of Customer Experience and Enterprise IT at Ericsson, put it directly: “Once you scale AI, it stops being an AI problem and becomes a data problem.”

That insight drove a deliberate investment in a unified business data fabric built with 麻豆原创 Business Data Cloud, a governed architecture that allows data to remain in place while centrally managing business semantics, governance, and lifecycle policies.

More than 85,000 users are now live on the unified AI platform Joule, with Ericsson moving confidently from experimentation to enterprise-wide execution. The company is advancing on two parallel fronts: modernizing its ERP backbone through RISE with 麻豆原创 while simultaneously unlocking AI-driven value in decision-making, efficiency, and new business models.

What Ericsson demonstrates is that the path to trusted, repeatable AI runs through data governance, and that building that foundation early is a strategic advantage, not a cost.

From the digital core to the physical world

If Ericsson illustrates what AI transformation looks like at the level of data architecture, Martur Fompak International, a global leader in automotive seating and interior systems, shows what it looks like on the shop floor. The company has deployed an autonomous intralogistics model enabled by Joule and embodied AI capabilities from 麻豆原创, working with robotics partner Humanoid to integrate AI-powered robots directly into live manufacturing operations.

The system connects production signals and business context to autonomous physical execution. Guided by material data, storage locations, sequencing, and production priorities, humanoid robots now execute material flows across the manufacturing environment鈥攊dentifying, transporting, and delivering materials to the line while continuously confirming back into 麻豆原创 systems.

The logic is about “combining cognitive autonomy with physical automation,” 脰zlem Alt谋n谋艧谋k, Group Intelligent Technologies director at Martur Fompak International, described it, to “transform execution, accelerate decisions, and scale intelligent enterprise capabilities across the organization.”

Early results show increased throughput and fewer errors, with a future target of up to five times greater work efficiency set for mass production. Martur Fompak International was the sole winner in the AI Excellence category at the 2026 麻豆原创 Innovation Awards, recognition not just of the technology, but of the willingness to reimagine factory environments.

Speed, scale, and the intelligent platform

Prysmian, the global cable solutions leader with 鈧�20 billion in revenue and operations spanning more than 50 countries, took a different but equally decisive path. The company completed its evolution to an AI-ready cloud platform through RISE with 麻豆原创 in just four months, then used that foundation to pursue more than 100 AI use cases across its business. The results are measurable: 70% automation of repetitive activities, an 80% reduction in implementation time for new solutions, and 50% acceleration in time-to-market for new products.

What strikes me about Prysmian’s journey is how it reframes the role of enterprise technology. Giovanni Cauteruccio, group CIO and digital officer at Prysmian, described embedded AI as “a key differentiator, enabling us to accelerate solution deployment and strengthen AI skills and culture across the organization.”

In other words, the platform is not simply a system of record, but a capability-building engine that makes the organization smarter over time.

Architecture of agility

Viewed together, these three stories point toward something larger than the sum of their parts. The Autonomous Enterprise is not a distant aspiration. It is being built now, by organizations that have made a deliberate commitment to embedding AI into their operational core as a fundamental design principle instead of a feature.

What makes this possible is the convergence of a governed data foundation, an intelligent ERP platform, and AI capabilities that extend from the desktop to the production line to the supply chain. When these elements are properly integrated, organizations gain something that no amount of reactive management can provide: the ability to sense, decide, and act faster than disruption can mount.

Uncertainty is not going away. The organizations that will navigate it best are the ones building systems today that turn volatility into signal and signal into advantage.

Manos Raptopoulos is global president of Customer Success Europe, APAC, Middle East & Africa and a member of the Extended Board of 麻豆原创 SE.

The Netherlands-based, family-owned maritime group has been building vessels since 1927 and today operates internationally with more than 12,500 people and over 35 yards across six continents. With an ambition to become the world鈥檚 most sustainable maritime solution provider, Damen is combining its long-standing craftsmanship with innovation, digitalization, and operational excellence.

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After investing heavily in 麻豆原创 S/4HANA as its core ERP foundation, Damen is now focused on applying 麻豆原创 Business AI to extend the impact of that platform.

鈥淲e really would like to harvest the business value of that initial investment,鈥� said Han Coenraad, product manager ERP at Damen. 鈥淲e use AI, especially in our operational processes, to get things running more smoothly and support more data-driven decision-making.鈥�

Damen has enabled 麻豆原创 Joule for Consultants and 麻豆原创 Joule for Developers and is exploring conversational capabilities that allow employees to interact with 麻豆原创 systems and processes using natural language.

Looking ahead, Damen sees opportunities to use embedded and custom AI use cases to improve data quality, enhance operational processes, and help teams work faster and closer to customers.

One example is using AI to support parts sales engineers by reading customer documents from email and automatically transferring the right information into sales orders. The goal, Coenraad explained, is to 鈥渂uild vessels sooner, with lower costs and more customer satisfaction.鈥�

Inspired by 麻豆原创 Sapphire and the vision of the Autonomous Enterprise, Damen is ready for the next step: 鈥淭he strategy shift from 麻豆原创鈥攚e are really looking forward to it and we really embrace it. Let鈥檚 make that happen.鈥�

This year at 麻豆原创 Sapphire, we shared our vision for the Autonomous Enterprise — the next evolution of how businesses run, where AI agents execute critical workflows so people can focus on innovation, customer value, and business growth.

This vision comes to life through a reimagined Joule Work, evolving from an AI assistant into the central workspace for enterprise AI. We also introduced the 麻豆原创 Autonomous Suite, bringing AI agents and assistants across core business functions to execute complex workflows with human oversight. With 麻豆原创 Business AI Platform, customers and partners can build, manage, and govern AI agents. And by expanding Industry AI, we’re delivering AI grounded in deep business context and domain expertise to solve industry-specific challenges.

Customers are already benefiting. IT division, Bosch Digital, integrated 麻豆原创 Joule for Developers directly into their coding workflows. Developers saw a 20% increase in productivity using Joule to automate routine coding tasks and optimize code. Joule also generates test cases, speeding up unit testing by 15% to 20% and freeing senior developers for high-value tasks. , the country鈥檚 leading airport operator, defines safety thresholds, service levels, and playbooks, and its agent, Smart Network for Operative Winter (SNOW), executes them. The SNOW agent is a winter operations system that integrates real-time weather, runway, and operations/maintenance data to automatically orchestrate work at Patagonian airports. The agent has improved runway safety, cut direct costs by 16%, and reduced administrative effort by 90%.

built a tool using  so its clients can better handle international tax rules by developing and managing their own custom AI agents and solutions. This way, PwC鈥檚 clients can focus on strategy while AI handles tax. PwC鈥檚 tool helped one pharmaceutical company handle VAT on international transfers 60% more efficiently.

Another customer, , a global fashion retailer, used an AI agent, built on 麻豆原创 Joule, to cut HR process cycle times by 40% to 60%. The agent helps employees quickly handle HR transactions, such as leave requests and payroll queries, through natural language conversations. Reducing time spent on administrative tasks allows HR teams to focus on strategic talent management. These are just some of the customers getting value. There are many more.

Now let鈥檚 dive into the releases from Q2 2026.

Please note that this article covers only AI offerings released from April 1, 2026, to June 30, 2026.

Joule

Joule Work
麻豆原创 Early Adopter Care program (registrations closed)

redefines how people interact with and execute end-to-end business processes. As the user engagement component of the Joule solution, it moves the user experience beyond fragmented, transactional interfaces toward a unified, intelligent way of working across 麻豆原创 and non-麻豆原创 systems. Its dynamic workspace adapts to users’ intent, helping them focus on outcomes rather than spending time finding information. And because it can delegate execution to AI, users will no longer need to coordinate work across multiple application interfaces manually.

Joule Work will allow users to express in natural language what they want to accomplish, triggering to coordinate teams of Joule Agents that will surface the right insights and automate routine work across business domains and systems to achieve the goal. This happens in intent-driven, adaptive workspaces built in real time that keep teams focused on driving decisions and impact. Joule Work can help reduce manual handoffs, shorten cycle times, and enable teams to turn decisions into actions faster. A key function of Joule Work is to connect users with Joule Assistants, which are like smart teammates organized by function. These assistants use context to intuit people鈥檚 intent and act by coordinating the appropriate Joule Agents across the business. Joule Assistants understand organizations deeply and can automate complex tasks within and across functions, freeing employees to address more strategic work.

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Joule Work mobile app
General availability

Employees who use 麻豆原创 on the go can rely on the Joule Work mobile app to interact with 麻豆原创 applications in natural language on their smartphones or tablets. Joule is integrated directly into the app, so a simple chat can surface the latest figures, help complete approvals or maintenance tasks, and support work across areas such as sales, HR, and supply chain processes without having to navigate multiple mobile apps. On iPhone and iPad, users can even start by saying 鈥淗ey Siri, ask Joule in Joule Work,鈥� then speak their question, which is passed straight to Joule for a response. This gives organizations a single, mobile-enabled entry point to Joule capabilities and lets employees gain insights and act on tasks across their 麻豆原创 solutions using everyday language.

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Voice for Joule
麻豆原创 Early Adopter Care program (registrations closed)

A new partnership with LiveKit delivers intelligent voice for Joule, extending the experience beyond the keyboard and into settings where work happens. This partnership helps advance 麻豆原创’s vision for the Autonomous Enterprise. With LiveKit, 麻豆原创 customers can use real-time voice capabilities in Joule and access reliable, always-on conversational AI. This brings voice AI to a full range of roles, devices, and environments, putting Joule within reach of employees whose work is done away from a keyboard.

Enhancements for Joule
Multi-system support for 麻豆原创 S/4HANA Cloud Editions

Joule now supports connecting multiple 麻豆原创 S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition systems or clients and multiple 麻豆原创 S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition systems within a single Joule formation.

Work seamlessly across different 麻豆原创 S/4HANA environments through one unified Joule interface, increasing flexibility and efficiency for organizations operating multiple systems. Administrators enable this feature by configuring system-specific destinations with naming conventions, including additional systems in the Joule formation via System Landscape, and mapping system identifiers in the Joule Admin Center.

Developers can build custom capabilities that leverage data and functionality from multiple back-end systems. Business users access and execute processes across all connected systems naturally within their workflow.

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Autonomous SCM

麻豆原创 Digital Manufacturing, AI-assisted production engineering
General availability

Production engineers can analyze error logs to identify root causes and generate resolution instructions for production processes using 麻豆原创 Digital Manufacturing. The feature also enables engineers to extend production processes via script tasks generated based on natural language input.

Organizations can reduce error analysis time for production process errors by 20%, reduce error analysis time for connectivity errors by 20%, and cut the time to handle a production process or connectivity error from 4.5 to 3.6 hours — while improving operating time from 92% to 92.92%.

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麻豆原创 Digital Manufacturing, AI-assisted description enhancement
General availability

Quality managers can generate clearer and more structured initial descriptions of complex issues using 麻豆原创 Digital Manufacturing. By reducing bias and subjective language, a more balanced and factual representation of the problem at hand is created. Users can also refine and rephrase initial rough descriptions, facilitating more effective follow-up and thorough investigation, and translate descriptions into different languages.

This offers organizations an up to five percent improvement in the efficiency of quality engineers during issue handling and resolution, and an up to 10% reduction in errors during problem handling.

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Autonomous Finance

Project Billing Price Verification Agent
Beta release

Billing specialists can quickly identify mismatches between agreed prices and billing amounts using the Project Billing Price Verification Agent in the manage project billing application of 麻豆原创 S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition.

The agent identifies the relevant contracts and statements of work for the related customer project, extracts key pricing data, and compares them with the values in the project billing request. It highlights discrepancies, provides context, and suggests corrective actions.

Organizations can reduce time spent resolving price discrepancies by 75%, cut revenue leakage from undetected incorrect billing by 75%, and improve cash flow while reducing days sales outstanding by fewer billing cycle delays.

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麻豆原创 S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, AI-assisted localized business data management
General availability

Accounts receivable managers can access and explore localized financial and logistics data through Joule using natural language, without leaving their daily workflows. The capability enables users to run complex reports using natural language instead of manual selection screens, and instantly filter, navigate, and explore results with AI-supported context awareness. This way, finance teams can reduce the amount of training effort required and increase productivity and confidence across the organization.

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Autonomous Spend

Expense Automation Agent
General availability

Expense Automation Agent helps employees who submit business trip expenses by creating a first draft of their expense reports. It automatically collects and adds transactions, fills in relevant fields using contextual information and past behavior, and lets employees quickly review and adjust before submission. Customers can reduce manual data entry, shorten report completion time by up to 30%, and allow employees to focus more on their core work.

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麻豆原创 Ariba Contracts, AI-assisted contract creation from documents and prompts
General availability

Contract managers who create and manage large volumes of agreements can use AI鈥慳ssisted contract creation from prompts to start new contracts more efficiently. The feature lets users enter a simple natural-language prompt directly in the contract creation flow, then proposes contract header fields in seconds for review and confirmation before finalization. Organizations can reduce the effort required to initiate contracts, provide a guided in鈥慶ontext experience, and build a scalable foundation for future AI capabilities while maintaining clear human oversight of each contract.

麻豆原创 Fieldglass, AI-assisted SOW worker role recommendations
General availability

Procurement specialists who manage statements of work can now define suitable worker roles more quickly. This feature applies generative AI to the SOW context, including scope, outcomes, and timelines, to propose relevant roles that users can review and refine. Organizations benefit from faster, more consistent SOW authoring, improved fit鈥憈o鈥憇cope, and clearer, better-governed worker role definitions.

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麻豆原创 Ariba Invoicing, AI-assisted multi-model data extraction
General availability

Procurement and accounts payable teams working in 麻豆原创 Ariba Invoicing can rely on multi鈥憁odel data extraction to capture invoice information more accurately. The feature leverages the latest large language models in the content extraction service to interpret and extract key invoice data, enabling a smoother capture process. Organizations gain a more reliable and efficient invoice processing experience, with improved data quality that helps reduce manual corrections and downstream errors.

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Concur Travel, AI-assisted policy rule generator
麻豆原创 Early Adopter Care

Travel program administrators who manage Concur Travel policies can set up and adjust travel rules more efficiently with the policy rule generator. By pasting existing policy text into an AI-based rule generator, they can automatically produce multiple rule classes and rules in a single step, then apply them via a guided wizard. Organizations save time on policy implementation, reduce configuration errors, and promote more consistent, compliant travel policies across their programs.

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Autonomous CX

Order Reliability Agent
Beta release

The Order Reliability Agent helps customer service and order management teams stay on top of order issues consistently. The agent continuously monitors orders in 麻豆原创 Order Management Services, detects risks such as failures or delays, and either takes automated corrective action or presents clear recommendations and root-cause insights for staff to review. Companies can cut the time spent analyzing and handling exceptional orders by around half. The agent can also reduce customer churn related to fulfillment problems by about 20%, helping create a more reliable order experience.

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麻豆原创 Revenue Growth Management, AI-assisted trade promotion creation
General availability

Key account managers who plan trade promotions in 麻豆原创 Revenue Growth Management can set up promotions more quickly. When they enter a promotion name in the relevant account context, the system proposes key details such as dates, promotion type, duration, and sell鈥慽n timing based on master data, historical promotions, and past user edits. Organizations can shorten promotion setup time by up to 75% and reduce data鈥慹ntry errors and rework by around 30%, improving both efficiency and consistency in promotion planning.

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麻豆原创 Revenue Growth Management, AI-assisted deal sheet generation
General availability

Key account managers can quickly turn promotion data into retailer-ready deal sheets. Starting from a single promotion, the feature fills in system-of-record fields, applies appropriate PDF or Excel templates, and checks that required information is present before the document is created. This helps organizations produce consistent, audit-ready deal sheets in seconds, reduce formatting and data-entry errors, and give account teams more time to focus on customer negotiations rather than document preparation.

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Joule with 麻豆原创 Order Management Services
Beta release

Operations managers and order management teams using 麻豆原创 Order Management Services can rely on Joule to handle everyday operational questions and tasks through simple natural language. By enabling conversational access to key data and actions across areas such as order processing, orchestration, sourcing, availability, returns, and flows, Joule provides real-time, role-aware guidance directly in the flow of work. Organizations benefit from faster access to relevant transactions and insights, can act earlier to prevent issues from escalating, and support smarter, more timely decisions that save both time and operational cost.

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麻豆原创 Engagement Cloud, email campaign duplication
麻豆原创 Early Adopter Care program

Marketing teams can duplicate existing email campaigns to speed up everyday execution. When a marketer copies a previous campaign, email campaign duplication carries over layout, branding, and technical settings, so they only need to update content such as copy or offers. This helps organizations reduce campaign setup time, keep branding and formatting consistent, and limit repetitive configuration work and related errors across channels.

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麻豆原创 Business AI Platform

Build

Joule Studio
麻豆原创 Early Adopter Care

The new Joule Studio gives product teams, architects, and developers a single place to extend, build, and integrate AI experiences from business intent through to production-ready solutions. It starts from the outcomes you want to achieve, uses your own processes and data for context, and connects out of the box across your application landscape. At the same time, it can generate product requirements and technical specifications from your company-specific context, apply eval-based, data-driven guardrails to AI coding assistants under 麻豆原创-managed enterprise controls, and remain open so you can work with third-party or 麻豆原创 models in the development environment that fits your needs.

There will be a migration path from the original Joule Studio to the new version to help customers transition without disruption.

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麻豆原创 S/4HANA custom code migration agent
General availability

ABAP developers and migration teams moving from 麻豆原创 ECC to 麻豆原创 S/4HANA can use the 麻豆原创 S/4HANA custom code migration agent to automate the complex, time-consuming process of migrating custom ABAP code from 麻豆原创 ECC to 麻豆原创 S/4HANA. Delivered as an agentic AI capability in 麻豆原创 Joule for Developers, ABAP AI, the agent runs 麻豆原创 S/4HANA readiness checks via ABAP test cockpit across entire custom code packages, interprets the findings, categorizes issues, and applies a mix of deterministic quick fixes and AI-based code changes with confidence scores, while recording all updates in transport requests for full traceability. High-confidence fixes are applied automatically, and lower-confidence proposals are added as comments for developer review, so teams retain control over final code quality while spending far less time on object-by-object analysis, freeing capacity for higher-value design decisions and overall migration governance.

and .

Contextualize and Reason

Generative AI hub, enhancements

The generative AI hub in the 麻豆原创 AI Core infrastructure integrates with hyperscaler-agnostic operations to improve accuracy and support enterprise-wide adoption of business AI.

Batch API enabling processing of high鈥憊olume foundational model (FM) workloads
Developers and platform teams working with 麻豆原创 AI Core can use the batch API to process high-volume foundational model workloads more efficiently. By submitting large collections of non-urgent AI requests as a single input file, they can run jobs asynchronously in the background. At the same time, 麻豆原创 AI Core writes results to an object store, ensuring real-time, fast, and responsive user experiences. This improves scalability for high-volume processing, simplifies the developer experience across different models and providers, and ensures fair, predictable throughput so that large jobs do not block smaller ones.

Inference observability service: centralized logging and feedback for generative AI workloads
Teams running generative AI workloads on 麻豆原创 AI Core can use the inference observability service to monitor, analyze, and systematically improve model outputs. The service centrally records prompts, responses, and key context with controlled overhead, lets developers and users rate the quality of each response, and attaches lightweight feedback. It also supports labels and filters so interactions can be easily discovered and exported as datasets for fine鈥憈uning, prompt engineering, and benchmarking. Organizations gain standardized transparency into prompt and response quality, reduce costs and effort by replacing ad hoc logging with a unified, compliant feedback channel, and accelerate iterative improvement using structured inference data stored in S3 or metadata-only mode, and managed via REST APIs for labels, feedback, and record retrieval.

Speech-to-speech
The availability of speech鈥憈o鈥憇peech (S2S) recognition helps agent and app developers build natural, end鈥憈o鈥慹nd voice experiences into 麻豆原创 applications.

New models available
New models are supported, including Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite, Claude Opus 4.7, GPT Realtime and Mistral Small, GPT 5.4, GPT 5.4-nano, and GPT 5.3-Codex.

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麻豆原创 Joule for Consultants, enhancements

Custom knowledge grounding connects 麻豆原创 Joule for Consultants to a separate grounding service that indexes organizational content via 麻豆原创 AI Core. It enables Joule to securely index and reference an organization鈥檚 methodologies, policies, templates, and delivery standards alongside 麻豆原创鈥慶urated knowledge. By grounding responses in company鈥憇pecific documentation, consultants can receive more accurate guidance that aligns with established ways of working across projects and engagements.

Expert workspace introduces personalized 鈥渆xperts鈥� that help tailor guidance for specific projects, domains, or workstreams. Context is retained across conversations, so users can switch between initiatives while preserving project-specific knowledge.

and .

麻豆原创 Document AI enhancements

Model selection
This new feature allows you to choose the large language model (LLM) used for document processing. The Default LLM reflects the best-performing model at any given time, while additional models such as Gemini 2.5 Flash and GPT-5 are also available. The list of supported models is updated frequently to ensure access to the latest advancements.

New standard document types
麻豆原创 Document AI workspace and OData V4 APIs now support three additional standard document types: learning certificate, order confirmation, and traffic violation notice. This expands the range of business documents that can be processed out of the box, reducing the need for custom configurations.

Configuration of document-level confidence ranges
麻豆原创 Document AI now supports configurable document-level confidence thresholds, making it easier to assess extraction quality at a glance. Custom confidence ranges 鈥� low, medium, and high 鈥� can be defined on the configurations tab of a schema version. When documents are processed, the overall confidence score is displayed in the document header with color-coding: red for low, orange for medium, and green for high confidence.

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麻豆原创 Domain Models

are AI models trained on 麻豆原创 domain knowledge, including code, data, metadata, business processes, architectural knowledge, and documentation. When customers initiate a query or want to create code, the models are designed to provide results firmly grounded in the 麻豆原创 context instead of relying on generic internet knowledge. Combined with context graphs and agents, the models bring deep 麻豆原创 knowledge to Joule, Joule Studio, Joule Agents, and 麻豆原创 applications.

麻豆原创 Domain Models will help:

• Create custom extensions in 麻豆原创 S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition and 麻豆原创 Ariba: Developers in Joule Studio can use specialized models for 麻豆原创 S/4HANA and 麻豆原创 Ariba to understand and generate clean core-compliant code from natural language.
• Query information in 麻豆原创 S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition and 麻豆原创 Ariba: Customers can use natural-language prompts in Joule to access customer data that is grounded in the underlying data models and the business context.

These capabilities will help create clean core extensions while preserving 麻豆原创 standards and governance. 麻豆原创 Domain Models are running under the hood of Joule and Joule Studio and are not directly exposed to customers.

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Govern

麻豆原创 AI Agent Hub enhancements

麻豆原创 AI Agent Hub gives organizations a single control pane for all AI agents, LLMs, and MCP servers across the enterprise. Featuring automated AI asset discovery across major platforms, including Microsoft, Google, AWS, and now ServiceNow and 麻豆原创 AI Core, alongside structured governance assessments and a verification badge that integrates directly with runtime solutions to control which agents and MCP servers are approved for use.

Looking ahead, we will expand into runtime observability and governance, identity and access control, agent-in-process mining, and workforce impact mapping to make the AI Agent Hub the central command center for AI governance at scale.

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Process Consulting Agent
General availability

Process owners, analysts, and operational leaders can turn process data into clear, practical insights without needing specialist analytics skills with the Process Consulting Agent. Users can ask questions in natural language, and the agent retrieves and analyzes relevant process information through a multi鈥慳gent system, returning structured findings along with suggested next steps. Organizations can cut the time spent searching complex data per artifact by up to 90% and reduce the effort to analyze, design, model, and monitor processes by around five percent, helping teams move more quickly from insight to action.

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Enterprise Content Research Agent
General availability

Enterprise architects and portfolio managers can quickly find and understand architectural information through the Enterprise Content Research Agent in 麻豆原创 LeanIX. By querying inventory data and related documentation across sources such as 麻豆原创 LeanIX, Confluence, and SharePoint, the agent highlights missing fields, supports gap analysis, and helps keep records complete and consistent, while leveraging MCP Server tools as needed. This reduces the time spent on informational searches and navigation, simplifies data management tasks, and supports stronger governance over architecture data across the landscape.

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WalkMe solutions, AI knowledge indexing
General availability

Digital adoption and enablement teams can use AI knowledge indexing to make internal documentation easily available to WalkMe鈥檚 AI services in a controlled way. The feature processes connected knowledge sources, such as web pages and files, extracts text content, and converts it into secure vector embeddings, enabling WalkMe鈥檚 contextual AI assistance to ground guidance in company policies, wikis, and procedures rather than generic models. Organizations can improve real-time compliance outcomes and see a 21% increase in procurement policy adherence, while giving employees faster, policy-aligned answers directly in their workflows.

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WalkMe solutions, AI knowledge referencing
General availability

Digital adoption teams and application owners receive app guidance that aligns with their company鈥檚 policies and standards with WalkMe鈥檚 AI knowledge referencing. When certain conditions are met, such as editing a specific field or completing a form, the feature retrieves relevant content from connected internal documentation so tools like AI SmartTips or chat can compare user input with best practices and provide tailored feedback. This allows organizations to anchor AI assistance in trusted company information and help employees access the right policy or governance details when needed.

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WalkMe solutions, pinned AI
General availability

Operations, HR, finance, and other business teams now benefit from on-screen assistance exactly where they enter data or complete tasks, using WalkMe鈥檚 pinned AI. By attaching AI smart tips to input fields and AI Launchers to specific elements, the feature provides contextual guidance in place, grounded in company knowledge sources, so users can continue their work without switching applications. Organizations can improve data quality across key forms and workflows, reduce errors and rework, and see measurable gains such as a 41% improvement in data quality.

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WalkMe solutions, on-demand AI
麻豆原创 Early Adopter Care program

Employees working across line-of-business applications can turn to WalkMe鈥檚 on-demand AI for quick answers or step-by-step support without leaving their current screen. Through a conversational in-app menu that travels with users across applications, they can ask questions, retrieve company knowledge, and trigger automations or Smart Walk-Thrus, keeping guidance and execution closely connected. Organizations benefit from faster access to trusted information and a measurable impact on quality, including up to a 41% reduction in time spent correcting ERP-related business tasks.

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麻豆原创 LeanIX solutions, AI-assisted enterprise architecture decision management
General availability

Enterprise architects and architecture review boards get faster, more consistent decisions with enterprise architecture decision management in 麻豆原创 LeanIX solutions. By providing context, such as transformation diagrams or landscape changes, they can ask the AI to generate a draft architecture decision entry that includes the relevant background, decision, and implications for stakeholders to review and approve. This reduces manual data extraction and authoring effort, streamlines collaboration on approvals, and helps ensure architecture decisions are documented and concluded in a timely, traceable way.

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麻豆原创 LeanIX solutions, AI-assisted fact sheet calculations
General availability

Enterprise architects and workspace admins using AI-assisted fact sheet field calculations in 麻豆原创 LeanIX solutions can quickly turn plain-language business rules into working calculations. When they describe the rule they need, the feature generates readable, commented code that is aware of their fact sheet types, fields, relations, and enums. Hence, calculations align with the actual workspace configuration. This helps teams move from a business question to a usable metric in minutes, increase self-service configuration, reduce reliance on JavaScript skills, and speed up the delivery and maintenance of calculated fields that downstream reports and views depend on.

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麻豆原创 LeanIX solutions, AI-assisted automation creation
General availability

Enterprise architects and workspace admins can transform plain-English workflow descriptions into working automations with AI-assisted automation creation in 麻豆原创 LeanIX solutions. When they describe the review, update, or governance flow they need, the feature generates the appropriate triggers, conditions, and actions with field mappings aligned to the current workspace configuration. This lets teams build and scale automations themselves, increasing EA productivity, reducing reliance on technical experts, and making it easier to keep key processes such as onboarding workflows and lifecycle checkpoints consistently automated.

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麻豆原创 Cloud ALM, AI-assisted document summary
General availability

Document summary helps project teams and engineers understand long documents more quickly. Within the documents application, users can trigger an AI-generated summary, review and edit it in a separate window, and then apply it as a persistent summary section in the document. This shortens the time spent manually reading and extracting key points, supports faster comprehension of complex engineering content, and enables quicker decisions without leaving the document workflow.

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麻豆原创 Signavio solutions, AI-assisted context analyzer, text-to-event matching, and sentiment analysis
General availability

The context analyzer helps process owners and analysts match free text with process objects, such as sales orders or purchase requisitions, to the corresponding process events in event logs. The feature links free-text records such as survey responses, feedback, comments, and tickets to the corresponding process events, so qualitative experience data appears alongside operational logs. This enriches process mining with unstructured text, reduces manual mapping work, and improves process analysis accuracy by around 30%, helping teams pinpoint bottlenecks and experience issues more effectively.

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Jonathan von Rueden is chief AI officer for 麻豆原创 SE.

*Disclaimer: This article provides estimated benefits. All calculations are estimates based on 麻豆原创 customer case studies, 麻豆原创 benchmarks, and other research. Actual benefits may vary and may be affected by additional factors not considered by this article. The information is provided 鈥渁s is鈥� without warranty of any kind, expressor implied, and in no event shall 麻豆原创 be liable for any damages whatsoever in relation with the use of this article. See Legal Notice on for use terms, disclaimers, disclosures, or restrictions related to this material.

The acquisition will accelerate 麻豆原创鈥檚 success in TFMs that started with 麻豆原创-RPT-1 and bring one of the world鈥檚 leading TFM research teams into the 麻豆原创 family.聽Prior Labs聽will continue to聽operate聽as an independent entity, with 麻豆原创 committing to聽investing聽more than 鈧�1 billion over the next four years to scale it into a globally leading frontier AI lab for the structured data that聽underpins聽the world鈥檚 businesses.

For聽additional聽information about the acquisition, see the聽press release聽from May 2026.聽

Visit the . Get 麻豆原创 news via  and .

Media Contacts:
Alex Vaught, +1 (206) 678-5712, 聽alex.vaught@sap.com, PST
Ilaina Jonas, +1 (646) 923-2834, 聽ilaina.jonas@sap.com, EST
Daniel Reinhardt, +49 151 168 10157, 聽daniel.reinhardt@sap.com, CET
麻豆原创 麻豆原创 Room;听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.鈥� 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 麻豆原创鈥檚 2025 Annual Report on Form 20-F. 
漏 2026 麻豆原创 SE. All rights reserved.  
麻豆原创 and other 麻豆原创 products and services mentioned herein as well as their respective logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of 麻豆原创 SE in Germany and other countries. Please see  for additional trademark information and notices.  

Those investments are critical. But they weren鈥檛 the finish line. They were the foundation. And today, they鈥檙e paying off in new ways as organizations adopt AI to drive measurable business outcomes.

But there鈥檚 another part of that foundation which is becoming just as important: data. The organizations best positioned to compound their value from AI are those that have invested in data foundations that give AI the trusted business context it needs to reason, recommend, and act.

Now, in conversations with customers across the Americas and around the world, I鈥檓 seeing a new pattern emerge. The discussion is shifting from where AI can be applied to what happens when intelligence becomes embedded into the core of how the business operates.

While every transformation is different, three common shifts keep coming up.

1. From AI use cases to intelligent business processes

The first wave of AI adoption focused on proving value. Organizations identified high-impact use cases, delivered measurable results, and built confidence that AI could make a difference.

That work isn鈥檛 finished. But increasingly, customers are asking how intelligence can become part of the business processes employees use every day. We鈥檙e already beginning to see what this looks like in practice.

For example, HR Path Brazil, a Brazilian company specializing in recruiting and managing talent for international firms, is using Joule embedded in 麻豆原创 SuccessFactors HCM to automate routine HR interactions. It is helping employees find the information they need faster while allowing HR teams to focus on more strategic work. The company has reported a seven percent reduction in standard HR support cases and two hours of聽HR support workload eliminated each week, which quickly adds up.聽It鈥檚 one example of how embedded and connected AI is becoming part of how work gets done.

2. From measuring AI use to measuring the business outcomes it creates

One of the biggest changes I鈥檓 seeing is how organizations define success. ROI is becoming a given and that is reflected in the data, especially in Oxford Economics research out just this week. It showed that organizations investing in AI expect to see an average return of 21% this year but increasing to 38% in two years. And as agentic AI continues scaling, it is projected to deliver $17.6 million in returns, more than quadrupling last year鈥檚 estimates (US$4.3 million).

This is allowing organizations to focus more on business outcomes from their AI. They are asking questions like can we shorten cycle times? Can we improve decision-making? Can we free employees to spend more time creating value? Can we become more resilient and responsive as a business?

This is an important shift because it changes the conversation from implementing technology to improving how the business performs.

3. From systems of record to the new operating system for the enterprise

The third shift is the one I believe will have the greatest long-term impact. For decades, enterprise software primarily captured transactions, standardized processes, and automated routine work. Now it鈥檚 beginning to help organizations anticipate change, recommend actions, coordinate work across functions, and increasingly execute routine decisions with human oversight.

That鈥檚 why I believe the Autonomous Enterprise represents more than the next phase of automation. It represents a new operating model for business.

Instead of people spending time connecting information across finance, supply chain, procurement, HR, and customer operations before deciding what to do next, intelligent systems can increasingly provide context, surface recommendations, orchestrate work, and help teams execute.

People remain firmly in control. But they鈥檙e supported by enterprise software that is becoming an active participant in how the business operates and executes, not simply a system that records what already happened.

Where we go from here

The organizations creating the greatest long-term advantage won鈥檛 just be the ones deploying the largest number of AI use cases. They鈥檒l be the ones that use those early successes to rethink how work gets done across the enterprise.

The journey to the Autonomous Enterprise won鈥檛 happen overnight, and it won鈥檛 replace the need for strong leadership, governance, or talented people. If anything, those become even more important.

We鈥檒l likely look back on today鈥檚 AI projects much the same way we now look back on the early days of cloud transformation; not as the destination, but as the foundation for a fundamentally new way of operating and innovating continuously.

The true winners from this shift will be the ones who continuously become more intelligent, more adaptive, and ultimately more autonomous.

Jan Gilg is a member of the Extended Board of 麻豆原创 SE and global president of Customer Success & Americas.

While the amount the average global business spends on AI increased slightly to US$28 million this year, the level of ROI from that investment has spiked. Globally, companies expect to drive ROI of 21% this year (US$6.3 million), up from 16% last year. That ROI is expected to grow to 38% in two years鈥� time (US$15.9 million).

Agentic AI is central to those ROI expectations. In the next two years, average ROI from agentic AI is expected to reach US$17.6 million, more than quadrupling from last year鈥檚 estimates (US$4.3 million).

These insights have been revealed in new global research, , which surveyed 2,600 business leaders across 13 countries.*

Commenting on the research, 麻豆原创 Chief AI Strategy Officer Sean Kask noted, 鈥淎I has moved from experiment to execution, and that鈥檚 beginning to show real returns. But there鈥檚 still a long way to go. Because AI that lacks context鈥攚hether that鈥檚 processes, data, or governance鈥攁t best creates activity without outcomes and at worst creates risk.鈥�

AI inching closer to enterprise maturity

While global investment in AI increased slightly from US$26.7 milion in 2025, there were significant changes in key markets. Investment increased significantly in Brazil, UK, Australia, and Germany, while leading markets like China and India saw funding decreases.

Today, almost a third of all tasks (30%) in the average business are supported by AI, a figure expected to increase to 48% in two years. Yet, while strategic investment in AI has almost doubled year-on-year to 17%, piecemeal approaches remain by far the most prevalent (41%).

Some of this may be a leadership problem. Under a half of companies have a dedicated AI leader responsible for AI adoption (46%), clear frameworks about AI development (52%), or even training on AI capabilities and risks (41%).

Yet, despite those challenges, 69% of businesses are satisfied with their current AI ROI, even though more than two-thirds are not convinced AI is achieving its full potential.

Some of this optimism is due to agentic AI, since over eight in 10 (83%) businesses say agentic AI has moderate to very high potential to transform their organization. Yet, it is still early days for the technology, with only three percent of businesses saying they are fully prepared for agentic AI, while the majority say they are either partially prepared or not prepared at all.

Global businesses meeting key AI challenges

Organizations are facing a range of challenges achieving ROI from AI, including data, workforce, and governance issues.

Data quality remains the biggest challenge for global organizations. The number of businesses that say they are data ready for AI dropped from last year, with 73% of companies revealing challenges with incomplete data. And that is impacting day-to-day work, with 79% of businesses experiencing rework, delays, or backlogs due to low quality AI outputs.

Similarly, businesses are managing the workforce impacts of AI. Almost eight in 10 businesses (78%) are either unsure or agree their company upskilling is not keeping up with the evolution of AI tools. And just one percent of respondents said AI will have no impact on their workforce planning. Meanwhile shadow AI use is increasing year-on-year, with 69% saying it happens at least occasionally.

鈥淭he next step in achieving value will be to integrate AI deeply with contextual data and processes,” Kask said. “But businesses across the world must understand AI often provides value that is harder to measure than expected, and risk that moves faster than most governance can keep up with. Businesses are quickly discovering that AI governance plays a foundational role in unlocking the value from AI.鈥�

Governance is a critical obstacle in the way of enterprise AI value. Just 12% of businesses say either their skills or their processes and frameworks are fully ready to govern AI effectively.

These issues may be exacerbated in an agentic future. Today, 38% of companies do not have a human-in-the-loop process for agentic workflows, 37% don鈥檛 have permission and access controls for agents, and only 44% have a registry of the agents in their business. This is critical, given more than two-thirds of businesses (69%) either agree or are unconvinced if they are deploying agents quicker than they can govern them.

Future of value from AI is the Autonomous Enterprise

鈥淩ealizing real value from AI is not going to be easy because it demands a new approach,鈥� Kask concluded. 鈥淏usinesses large and small will need to connect AI to the data and processes that run their organizations, and make sure it has the context and governance to drive trusted results. That鈥檚 what we call the Autonomous Enterprise. This isn鈥檛 a technical change; it鈥檚 a human one. Because you can only achieve real value if agents, processes, and people work as one.鈥�

*Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Italy, India, Japan, Singapore, Thailand, United Kingdom, and United States.

That was the takeaway from a between 麻豆原创 CFO Dominik Asam and 麻豆原创 Fioneer CEO Matthias Tomann. Their conversation touched on topics like the future of , the role of AI, and the growing importance of integrated enterprise platforms.

For decades, banks and insurers have built operating models around regulatory fragmentation, country-specific requirements, layered systems, and continuous workaround solutions. As a result, the industry is running on patchwork architecture that is expensive to maintain, slow to change, and fundamentally misaligned with how AI works.

Partnership built for financial services innovation

Since joining forces in 2021, 麻豆原创 and 麻豆原创 Fioneer have significantly expanded their joint capabilities for the financial services sector. As Tomann highlighted in the conversation, the partnership has already delivered substantial momentum for 麻豆原创 Fioneer:

• R&D investment increased by 120%
• Annual software sales more than doubled
• Major customers successfully transitioned to 麻豆原创 Cloud ERP
• The platform evolved into a richer, more scalable, and highly capable ecosystem

Together, the companies are combining 麻豆原创鈥檚 trusted cloud and data infrastructure with 麻豆原创 Fioneer鈥檚 deep financial services expertise to help institutions simplify operations, modernize core systems, and prepare for the AI-driven future.聽

Executives from both companies will be exploring these critical topics further at their annual which is now open for registration.

AI is not the starting point, data integration is

Everyone wants AI, but AI can only create value from integrated data, real-time access, and standardized processes. But most financial institutions still operate on the opposite: fragmented foundations. That reality will define the winners over the next five years.

The organizations that succeed will not be the ones experimenting with the most models. They will be the ones that establish unified, trusted, real-time enterprise data with strong governance. That is the real competitive advantage.

But even that is only part of the story. The next phase is not just about using AI to analyze better; it is about AI executing work.

We are now seeing a fundamental shift: from systems that store and report information to systems that act on that information in real time, orchestrating end-to-end processes across the business. This marks the transition to the Autonomous Enterprise, 麻豆原创鈥檚 vision for the future of business where AI does not just support decisions but increasingly drives execution, within clearly defined guardrails.

Financial services can no longer afford 鈥減atchwork architecture鈥�

This shift makes one thing clear: The traditional approach to building IT landscapes is no longer viable.

For years, many financial institutions solved problems incrementally鈥攁nother point solution, another integration layer, another workaround. But eventually every workaround becomes technical debt and integration is the single largest IT cost category.

Tomann made clear during the conversation that the emphasis must be on simplification rather than adding more complexity.

What 麻豆原创 and 麻豆原创 Fioneer are driving is not another modernization cycle. It is a structural shift toward comprehensive, integrated platforms and AI driven processes that replace fragmentation, not sit on top of it.

The result is a scalable financial services platform where core banking, lending, reporting, insurance, and analytics operate within an integrated architecture instead of disconnected silos.

Real-time finance is becoming a strategic requirement

Real-time capability is becoming foundational to competitiveness鈥攚hether it鈥檚 risk management, regulatory reporting, customer experience, fraud prevention, treasury operations, or AI-driven decision making.

Institutions that can act on integrated data instantly will have a major advantage over those still moving information between disconnected systems overnight. With integrated data and AI embedded in core processes, finance is moving toward continuous financial intelligence:

• Forecasting becomes dynamic and always up to date
• Risk is detected and assessed in real time
• Closing processes become increasingly automated
• Decisions are guided by AI based on live business context

Increasingly, AI assistants and agents take over execution of finance processes, from planning and risk management to invoicing and financial close, under strict governance. The role of finance shifts from reporting on the business to steering the business in real time.

AI will reward those who simplify

One of the most striking statements from Asam during the discussion is that 麻豆原创 is already seeing 10x performance improvements from AI-driven process improvements. But it also highlights something many organizations still underestimate: just how much AI rewards those who standardize.

The more fragmented the processes and data structures are, the harder it becomes to operationalize AI at scale. In contrast, organizations with standardized platforms, harmonized data, and integrated workflows will accelerate much faster.

That is why modernization conversations today are no longer simply 鈥淚T projects.鈥� They are business strategy discussions.

Future of financial services will be built on trust, scale, and intelligence

Financial services organizations are operating in an increasingly complex geopolitical and regulatory environment. Infrastructure decisions are no longer just about performance and cost, they are about compliance, security, operational resilience, and national requirements.

This is why scalable, enterprise-grade cloud platforms are becoming so critical.

The institutions that thrive in the next era of financial services will be the ones that can combine trusted data, integrated operations, AI-enabled processes, scalable infrastructure, and regulatory resilience into a single operating model.

The future of financial services will not be defined by isolated AI experiments. It will be defined by who can build the most intelligent, connected, and adaptable enterprise foundation for what comes next.

.

Kris Kowal, Banking Industry Leader at 麻豆原创.
Falk Rieker, Financial Services Industry Leader at 麻豆原创.

Under the official banner of Climate Cooperation in a Fractured World, delegates spread across the city and the tone was noticeably different from previous years. Fewer pledges, more blueprints. Less “what should we aim for,” more “who is going to finance and build it.”

Sustainability is a driver of growth

If there was a single reframing that ran through the week, it was this: sustainability is not a cost of growth, it is a driver of it.

That shift was visible in how decarbonization was discussed. Conversations that once centered on targets now centered on operations: Scope 3 emissions, value-chain engagement, procurement and logistics decisions, energy demand reduction. Practitioners repeatedly pointed to an “execution gap”鈥攖he distance between climate strategies on paper and projects that are actually permitted, financed, and built鈥攁nd to the unglamorous work of unblocking infrastructure and untangling supply-chain bottlenecks as the real frontier.

Electrification gave the growth argument its clearest expression. The launch of the Electrify Now initiative, which aims to lift electricity’s share of final energy demand from roughly 20% today to 35% by 2035, was framed as an industrial strategy.聽Nearly doubling electricity’s share of energy demand in under a decade is an acceleration, and the week’s energy-transition summits were clear about what it demands: scaling renewables at pace, doubling down on energy efficiency, and, above all, building out the grid infrastructure to carry it. Speeding up permitting and resolving supply-chain constraints were named repeatedly as the bottlenecks that will decide whether the target is met.聽

The heatwave outside made that case tangible. As cooling demand surges and extreme weather stresses networks, a clean, resilient electricity system is fast becoming a precondition for business continuity and not just decarbonization.聽UK-focused sessions highlighted the substantial clean energy investment flowing into the country since 2024 as evidence that the in its own right.聽

The same logic ran through the finance agenda. Sessions on moving from risk to resilience and from risk to opportunity focused on mobilizing capital for adaptation and climate-resilient infrastructure, and on the practical challenge of connecting available capital with investable projects through better data, governance, and pipeline development.

Nature is now on the agenda

Perhaps the most striking development of the week was where nature sat on the agenda, and where it is headed. Speakers were blunt about the underlying problem: our economic system is very good at valuing what we take from nature and very poor at valuing nature itself. Worse, we actively pay to destroy it. Figures cited during the week put global investment flows that harm nature at around US$7.5 trillion a year, against roughly $250 billion flowing into activities that help it. As one speaker put it, the task is not to lament that imbalance, but to get the economics right and to start treating nature as something that can be measured, managed, and steered with the same discipline as carbon or financial risk.

That 鈥済etting the economics right鈥� is fast becoming a data challenge for business. Work such as the on the economics of landscape restoration suggests that investing in nature can generate returns comparable to investing in factories, railways, or other conventional infrastructure. As nature-related risks and opportunities are codified into emerging frameworks and regulation, companies will have to treat nature as a set of measurable data points: impacts and dependencies per site, per supplier, and per product line, rather than a one鈥憃ff narrative in a sustainability report.

Governments have levers too, from requiring companies to stress test for nature-related risk, to shaping incentives so that capital flows toward restoration rather than degradation. For corporate leaders, that translates directly into new categories of information that need to be captured and governed: nature鈥憆elated financial exposure, land use and biodiversity metrics, and nature鈥憄ositive investment pipelines. What was once an externality is quickly becoming a set of operational KPIs.

, professor at the London School of Economics, noted that this was the first year nature was represented at the event, but also how far it still has to travel: “Today here in the outdoor tent, next year in the big room.” The implication for businesses is that the organizations that move nature into their core data models and decision frameworks now are better positioned when this topic inevitably moves from the tent to the board agenda.

The AI warning: get sustainability data in now

Underpinning nearly every theme was data. Location-specific climate analytics were described as “the new lens” for understanding financial risk, and AI featured in almost every discussion of how organizations can gain visibility and control over complex energy, water, and supply chain systems.

But the sharpest point made during the week was a warning. As Stephen Jamieson, chief marketing officer of , put it: “If we don’t get sustainability data into AI right now, AI will optimize around it. AI works within the systems, the data, and the constraints you give it. If your sustainability priorities live only in documents and presentations rather than in your data and processes, AI will optimize confidently in entirely the wrong direction.”

The logic is uncomfortable, but hard to argue with. Sustainability now plays out at the transaction level鈥攕uch as carbon cost per shipment, Scope 3 exposure per supplier, packaging compliance per SKU鈥攁nd the volume, granularity, and pace of those requirements exceed what manual processes and fragmented tools can manage. An organization whose cannot see its financial constraints, or whose supply chain system cannot see supplier regulations, hands its AI a broken map.

麻豆原创鈥檚 answer to this is the Autonomous Enterprise: a maturity journey that starts with intelligence based on trusted, transparent data; moves to optimization where AI is weighing trade-offs across cost, risk, and sustainability impact in real time; and progresses toward autonomy, where sustainability rules are embedded directly into enterprise workflows and executed within defined guardrails. Sustainability stops being a reporting activity and becomes a governing factor in how decisions are made. The architecture choices organizations make now will determine whether that automation can scale safely later.

From the tent to the big room

London Climate Action Week 2026 closed with an uncomfortable message delivered in 35-degree heat: the climate is not waiting for business strategies to mature. But a hopeful signal surfaced, too: the growth case, the nature case, and the technology case for climate action are converging, and each is being made in the language of returns, resilience, and competitive advantage.

The task for business leaders is to bring those cases inside capital allocation, procurement, and the data and systems where decisions are actually made. The organizations that thrive will be the ones that move the sustainability agenda into the big room, before the next heatwave makes the argument for them.

For more information on scaling sustainability for your business, visit .

Monica Molesag is global head of Sustainability Communications at 麻豆原创.

At the center of that effort sits a deceptively complex challenge: understanding, in real time, which revenue and cost factors are driving or eroding gross margin across a highly diversified business. For years, answering that question meant manual reporting, delayed insights, and finance teams spending valuable time on data gathering rather than analysis.

That鈥檚 now changing, thanks to a co-innovation initiative developed together with 麻豆原创 and Numen, a global 麻豆原创 partner specializing in digital transformation and enterprise software implementation.

From manual reporting to proactive decision intelligence

The project鈥檚 goal was to replace a labor-intensive gross margin analysis process with a generative AI application embedded directly into Natura &Co’s financial workflows. Built on 麻豆原创 Business AI Platform, 麻豆原创’s unified foundation integrating business technology, data, and AI capabilities, the application connects directly to data in 麻豆原创 S/4HANA to provide finance teams with automated insights and narrative recommendations in real time, without the need for manual data pulls or offline reporting.

The application enables users to explore revenue, cost, and margin drivers interactively, identifying at a glance which elements are protecting or eroding margin performance across markets and product lines. Crucially, human oversight remains central to the design: the AI application generates insights, while finance professionals retain full control over interpretation and decisions.

鈥淭he implementation of gross margin analysis using AI in 麻豆原创 S/4HANA marked an inflection point in the analytical capability of our finance area,” said Rog茅rio Dias Garcia, tech manager, ERP Latam, Natura &Co. “We overcame delays and raised the standard of insights by integrating margin analysis from 麻豆原创 S/4HANA with a large language model connected via the 麻豆原创 AI Core layer. This architecture allowed us to provide, in an agile, secure, and completely anonymous manner, a stratified and precise view of gross margin offenders and protectors鈥攄iscriminating exactly which revenue or cost elements were driving market performance.鈥�

A collaborative architecture for scalable AI adoption

Natura &Co鈥檚 application derived from a prototype 麻豆原创 partner Numen created in early 2024 at 麻豆原创鈥檚 global on business AI, leveraging the generative AI capabilities of聽麻豆原创 Business AI Platform. The solution was designed and developed through close collaboration between Natura &Co, Numen, and 麻豆原创. From the outset, the approach was to align AI adoption with concrete business priorities, ensuring the application would be scalable and production-ready rather than a standalone prototype.

Numen brought deep 麻豆原创 implementation expertise to the project, combining knowledge of 麻豆原创 S/4HANA architecture with hands-on experience in building solutions on 麻豆原创 Business AI Platform. The technology stack鈥斅槎乖� S/4HANA, 麻豆原创 AI Core, 麻豆原创 Fiori, and 麻豆原创 Business Technology Platform鈥攑rovided the secure, integrated foundation needed to connect financial data with generative AI capabilities in an enterprise context.

鈥溌槎乖� enabled the transformation by providing the technological foundation and expert support,鈥� said Carlos Aravechia, head of Data Design & Intelligence at Numen.

The success of the project has validated a broader conviction at Natura &Co: that generative AI, embedded directly in ERP workflows, can fundamentally reposition finance from a transactional function to a strategic business partner.

A blueprint for other businesses

The Natura &Co project demonstrates a pattern that other organizations can replicate, particularly those running 麻豆原创 S/4HANA. The combination of structured ERP data with the contextual reasoning capabilities of large language models creates a foundation for decision intelligence that goes well beyond traditional business intelligence tools.

The project was built within a six-month co-innovation sprint and went live in August 2025. It is currently in use across Natura &Co鈥檚 Equador operations.

Looking ahead, Natura &Co is already planning the next phase: integrating Joule Agents to further automate the extraction of standard analytical content and deepen the AI-driven optimization of financial processes.

鈥淭he success of this initiative validates the transformative potential of embedded AI within our ERP,鈥� Dias Garcia noted. 鈥淲e are now ready to move forward鈥攄eepening these insights and integrating the capability of Joule Agents to maximize the extraction of standard content and further optimize our business decisions.鈥�

For 麻豆原创 customers evaluating how to move from AI experimentation to AI in production, the Natura &Co project offers a concrete, replicable model: start with a high-value, well-defined business process, embed AI directly into existing workflows, and build in human oversight from the start.

The acquisition accelerates agentic AI and expands customers鈥� ability to聽combine 麻豆原创 and non-麻豆原创 data to run analytical and AI workloads in real time, with no data movement or conversion necessary, and with vastly improved economics for enterprise analytics.

For additional information about the acquisition, see the press release from May 2026.

Visit the . Get 麻豆原创 news via  and .

Media Contacts:
Alex Vaught, 麻豆原创, +1 (206) 678-5712, alex.vaught@sap.com, PST
Ilaina Jonas, 麻豆原创, +1 (646) 923-2834, ilaina.jonas@sap.com, EST
Daniel Reinhardt, 麻豆原创, +49 151 168 10 157, daniel.reinhardt@sap.com, CEST
麻豆原创 麻豆原创 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.鈥� 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 麻豆原创鈥檚 2025 Annual Report on Form 20-F. 
漏 2026 麻豆原创 SE. All rights reserved.  
麻豆原创 and other 麻豆原创 products and services mentioned herein as well as their respective logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of 麻豆原创 SE in Germany and other countries. Please see  for additional trademark information and notices.  

West made a point that stayed with me. Using AI simply to generate more output is only the beginning. The more powerful use case is to treat AI as a collaborator in the thinking process: something that can challenge assumptions, ask questions we might not have asked, and help us see a problem from a different angle. In that role, AI is not replacing judgment, it is creating useful friction around it.

That shift matters because the work of building technology is changing. Developers are no longer just writing deterministic logic and controlling every outcome in advance. Increasingly, they are working with systems that are creative, probabilistic, and less predictable by design. That opens up huge possibilities, but it also raises the bar. Quality, guardrails, metrics, and trust become even more important when software starts to reason in ways that are not always fully scripted.

The advice West offered to developers was simple and probably more durable than any specific tool or framework: fall in love with the problem, not the solution. The technologies will change. The models will change. The implementations will change. But the ability to understand a problem deeply, stay curious, and apply AI with judgment will remain valuable.

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At a time when so much of the conversation around AI feels breathless, that feels like a good way to approach this moment: not with blind enthusiasm, and not with fear, but with curiosity and discipline. What are we trying to understand? What are we trying to improve? Where would better questions, better feedback, or better judgment make the biggest difference?

That is where AI starts to feel less like a wave we have to chase, and more like a capability we can shape with purpose. AI gives us new ways to build, learn, and decide. The question is not just how much more we can produce with it, but how much better our thinking can become when we use it well.

The agreement, concluded at the end of 2025, marks a significant step in migrating Nokia鈥檚 麻豆原创 landscape to the RISE with 麻豆原创 journey. By adopting RISE with 麻豆原创 Methodology, Nokia will follow a structured, end-to-end approach to migrating its ERP landscape covering processes, data, applications and operating models while gaining continuous access to innovation and embedded AI capabilities delivered through 麻豆原创鈥檚 cloud ERP portfolio.

Nokia has selected Microsoft Azure as the cloud platform underpinning the transformation, providing the global scale, security and performance required to support the company鈥檚 most business-critical enterprise workloads. 鈥淣okia鈥檚 decision reflects a clear commitment to business-led transformation,鈥� said , Global President Customer Success Europe, APAC, Middle East and Africa and Member of the Extended Board, 麻豆原创 SE. 鈥淩ISE with 麻豆原创 Methodology provides Nokia with a structured road map, integrated toolchain and continuous access to innovation. It enables the company to modernize its ERP landscape while keeping a clean core and building a strong foundation for enterprise AI.鈥�

A Structured Approach to ERP Transformation

RISE with 麻豆原创 is designed as a comprehensive business transformation framework rather than a point solution. It combines a standardized transformation methodology, integrated tools and expert guidance to help organizations move from legacy ERP environments to RISE with 麻豆原创.

麻豆原创 will operate and manage the 麻豆原创 S/4HANA software environment in the cloud, allowing Nokia to shift focus from infrastructure management to business outcomes. The approach supports process standardization, operational simplification and ongoing innovation, rather than a one-time system migration.

Nokia has been on a business and technical transformation journey with its next-generation 麻豆原创 S/4HANA software environment, covering finance and key logistics capabilities, supported by 麻豆原创 solutions and applications. These include 麻豆原创 S/4HANA for central finance, 麻豆原创 Master Data Governance, 麻豆原创 Extended Warehouse Management, 麻豆原创 Global Trade Services and 麻豆原创 S/4HANA Cloud for advanced ATP. AI-enabled functionality embedded in 麻豆原创鈥檚 cloud applications will be progressively adopted as part of the journey.

鈥淭his agreement builds on our existing work with 麻豆原创 and Microsoft and supports Nokia鈥檚 ambition to secure how we run our core business operations,鈥� said Marek O膷kay, VP, Global Head of IT Procurement & Vendor Management, Nokia. 鈥淏y applying RISE with 麻豆原创 Methodology on Microsoft Azure, we are strengthening a structured and future ready path for business growth 鈥� one that simplifies our ERP landscape, enables continuous innovation and strengthens our commitment for AI driven processes.鈥�

Microsoft Azure as the Cloud Foundation

Microsoft Azure will serve as the cloud foundation for Nokia鈥檚 RISE with 麻豆原创 journey, aligning with Nokia鈥檚 broader cloud and data strategy. Nokia already operates parts of its 麻豆原创 landscape on Azure, and consolidating workloads on a single hyperscale platform is expected to deliver benefits in performance, security latency and operational resilience.

As part of the agreement, Microsoft will collaborate closely with 麻豆原创 and Nokia throughout the transformation, supporting migration activities and ongoing optimization.

鈥淭his collaboration demonstrates how cloud platforms, enterprise applications and AI can come together to support complex, global business transformations,鈥� said Joacim Damgard, CVP, Europe North Microsoft. 鈥淏y running 麻豆原创 S/4HANA on Azure within the RISE with 麻豆原创 journey, Nokia is creating a scalable and secure foundation for continuous innovation.鈥�

Building on a Longstanding 麻豆原创 Relationship

Nokia has been an 麻豆原创 customer for decades. In recent years, the company has been consolidating multiple ERP systems into a unified 麻豆原创 S/4HANA software landscape as part of its next-generation ERP program.

The move to RISE with 麻豆原创 helps secure that journey, providing a structured methodology to help accelerate transformation, reduce complexity and unlock cloud native capabilities.

Visit the聽. Get 麻豆原创 news via聽 and .

About 麻豆原创

As鈥痑 global leader in enterprise applications and business AI, 麻豆原创 (NYSE:麻豆原创)鈥痵tands at the鈥痭exus鈥痮f business and technology. For over 50 years, organizations have trusted 麻豆原创鈥痶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鈥�.

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When suppliers send order confirmations as PDF files, even minor discrepancies in price, quantity, or delivery dates can trigger significant manual effort within procurement. For Lemvigh鈥慚眉ller, one of Denmark鈥檚 largest wholesalers within steel, plumbing, heating and electrical products, this has long been a familiar challenge, consuming substantial time and resources.

The company has now tackled the very point where earlier automation initiatives often stalled. With a new solution based on several specialized AI agents, developed on 麻豆原创 technology and implemented in close collaboration with NTT DATA Business Solutions, supplier PDF order confirmations can now be read, interpreted, compared, and processed automatically鈥攄irectly against 麻豆原创 systems.

鈥淲e have previously tried both RPA and traditional automation approaches without really achieving the desired effect. The key difference this time is that we broke the task down into multiple independent AI agents, each responsible for a specific part of the process. Together, they now handle what previously required manual review,鈥� says Frederik Aakerlund, IT director at Lemvigh鈥慚眉ller.

10 weeks from idea to AI agents in production

The project originated with an e-mail from Jess Frederiksen, an AI鈥憇avvy project manager in Lemvigh鈥慚眉ller鈥檚 Market and Procurement organization. After successfully matching an order confirmation with a purchase order using ChatGPT as an experiment, he approached the IT director to explore whether this could be turned into a fully integrated system solution.

From the initial tests to production deployment, the entire project took just 10 weeks. According to Lemvigh鈥慚眉ller, this short implementation timeline was critical in allowing the solution to demonstrate tangible business value quickly and build internal support.

鈥淭his was not a long-running project. In 10 weeks, we moved from idea to AI agents in production, already delivering measurable value to our procurement officers,鈥� Aakerlund says.

Over time, Lemvigh鈥慚眉ller expects the solution to free up resources equivalent to three to four full-time employees. These resources will instead be redeployed to higher-value activities, including handling the most complex and exception鈥慸riven orders.

鈥淭he objective is not to reduce headcount, but to use our expertise more effectively. The AI agents take care of routine tasks, enabling procurement officers to focus on cases where their experience genuinely matters,鈥� Aakerlund adds.

More than 100,000 order confirmations automated

Each year, Lemvigh鈥慚眉ller sends approximately 175,000 purchase orders to more than 2,000 suppliers. While part of this volume is handled in a structured manner via EDI, around 60% of supplier order confirmations are still received as unstructured documents.

With the coordinated AI agents in place, the company can now automatically identify delays, quantity changes, and price discrepancies鈥攁nd respond significantly faster.

鈥淧reviously, when order confirmations were handled manually, it could take hours or even days before changes were reflected across the organization. Today, the AI agents update the data almost immediately, allowing customers to receive a much more accurate picture of deliveries far sooner,鈥� says Klaus Heinemann, head of 麻豆原创 ERP at Lemvigh鈥慚眉ller, who led the development together with the project team. 鈥淚n addition, we now identify price discrepancies before the final invoice is issued, saving time both for us and for our suppliers.鈥�

Multiple AI agents orchestrated in a single workflow

The solution is built around three cooperating AI agents, each with a clearly defined role in the process. One agent handles incoming e-mails and attachments, a second extracts and structures data from PDF documents, and a third compares the extracted information against purchase orders in 麻豆原创 to determine whether there is a match or a deviation.

As a result, complex and unstructured supplier data can be processed in a unified, automated workflow without requiring procurement officers to open and manually review lengthy PDF files.

鈥淲hat makes this solution robust is the interaction between the agents. Each agent is highly specialized, but they are orchestrated in a way that ensures the process flows seamlessly from start to finish,鈥� Heinemann explains.

During the project, the importance of master data quality also became increasingly clear.

鈥淚n areas such as Incoterms and other master data, we identified improvements that need to be addressed. This has been an important learning not just for this initiative, but for our broader work with AI,鈥� he says.

While it is still too early to measure the full impact on customer experience, error rates, or claims, expectations are that faster and more precise handling of supplier confirmations will, over time, lead to fewer surprises and significantly improved delivery transparency. Internally, the solution has been met with strong interest and curiosity among employees.

鈥淧rocurement officers clearly recognize the value of being relieved from the most tedious routine work. This has sparked a constructive dialogue about how technology can best support their day鈥憈o鈥慸ay responsibilities,鈥� Heinemann says.

Business AI with a clear business outcome

According to Lemvigh鈥慚眉ller, the investment is expected to deliver a return within a relatively short timeframe.

鈥淲e are talking about quarters rather than years when it comes to ROI. That is why it was essential for us to get the solution into production quickly and focus on processes with a clear and measurable impact,鈥� Aakerlund says.

For 麻豆原创, the project serves as a concrete example of how artificial intelligence can be embedded directly into core business processes rather than remaining a disconnected experiment.

鈥淢any companies talk about AI agents primarily in terms of automation. Lemvigh鈥慚眉ller demonstrates that the real challenge鈥攁nd the real opportunity鈥攍ies in coordination,鈥� says David Pontoppidan, head of AI at 麻豆原创 for the Nordics and Baltics. 鈥淚t is the orchestration of three specialized agents directly within the core process that makes this solution robust. This is also where many multi鈥慳gent initiatives fail, not due to limitations of individual agents but because of insufficient coordination. Lemvigh鈥慚眉ller has succeeded by anchoring the solution in its 麻豆原创 landscape, where data, business rules, and governance frameworks are already firmly established.鈥�

He continues: 鈥淚nnovation is not about company size. Lemvigh鈥慚眉ller shows that a Danish organization with short decision paths and a pragmatic approach to technology can move faster than many large global enterprises that are still in the planning stage. Ten weeks from idea to production is far from the norm, but perhaps it should be.鈥�

Designed for operations and scalability

The solution was implemented in close collaboration with NTT DATA Business Solutions, which was responsible for making the solution production鈥憆eady and fully integrated into Lemvigh鈥慚眉ller鈥檚 麻豆原创 landscape.

鈥淏y distributing responsibilities across multiple AI agents, Lemvigh鈥慚眉ller has been able to automate a complex process without losing transparency or control. This has enabled a fast and secure transition from pilot to production and ensures a more robust solution that can easily be expanded as new requirements emerge,鈥� says Kristian Dahl, 麻豆原创 UX manager at NTT DATA Business Solutions.

According to Dahl, the modular, agent鈥慴ased architecture was a key enabler in moving efficiently from proof of concept to live operation.

First step in a broader AI agent strategy

Initially, the AI agents have been deployed for selected supplier inboxes and business areas. However, Lemvigh鈥慚眉ller already sees significant potential in applying the same agent鈥慴ased approach across additional administrative processes.

鈥淭his is the first AI agent solution we have put into production. The experience has given us the confidence to consider similar approaches across other areas, including invoice processing and order management,鈥� Aakerlund concludes.

Ellen Vig Nelausen is a Nordic Integrated Communications Expert at 麻豆原创.

AI infrastructure as strategic asset 

Although infrastructure ownership is just one element of digital sovereignty strategy, European politicians and policymakers have argued that without domestic data centers, Europe risks dependence on U.S. and Chinese providers for critical AI capabilities.

This concern is echoed by some industry leaders鈥攑articularly those in finance and regulated sectors鈥攚ho increasingly view AI infrastructure as a foundation of economic security. Specifically, they argue that sovereign data centers enable companies to comply with stringent European regulations on data protection and AI governance. They say that locally operated infrastructure ensures that data remains under European jurisdiction, reducing exposure to foreign legal regimes and enhancing trust among customers and regulators.

Security and compliance imperatives 

European leaders also frame AI infrastructure as a hedge against geopolitical risk. They argue that dependence on external providers introduces vulnerabilities, whether through legal exposure, supply chain disruptions, or political tensions.

As Christian Klein, CEO of 麻豆原创 SE, noted at the 麻豆原创 Sapphire Madrid event last month, many European customers operate in the public sector or other highly regulated industries. 鈥淕eopolitical risk is a growing concern,鈥� he said. 鈥淲hat if sanctions suddenly block data flows across borders? Or if the latest LLMs can鈥檛 be deployed in certain regions?鈥�

Christine Lagarde, president of the European Central Bank, also highlighted this concern in her November 2025 speech titled noting that Europe must 鈥渁void single points of failure鈥� in critical areas such as data centers and compute capacity.聽聽

Proponents of sovereign AI infrastructure also argue that it can stimulate broader economic growth. Data centers often anchor the ecosystems of startups, research institutions, and industrial applications, enabling Europe to capture more value from the AI stack.

From a technical standpoint, proximity also matters. Locally sited data centers reduce latency and improve performance for AI applications, particularly those requiring real-time processing or integration with industrial systems.

But despite these perceived advantages, many European business leaders have urged policymakers to take a more moderate, nuanced approach towards sovereign data. Their concerns are not about the need for data sovereignty itself, but about how it is implemented鈥攑articularly the push to rapidly build new, domestically controlled AI data centers. They emphasize that that data residency (location) is only one element of the four standard pillars of a sovereign data strategy, which also include legal sovereignty (jurisdictional control), operational sovereignty (independent operations), and technical sovereignty (data control).

In discussions with policymakers, European business leaders from diverse sectors have been warning that reducing reliance on U.S. technology too quickly is unrealistic. This reflects a structural reality: Europe remains deeply dependent on non-European providers for cloud infrastructure, chips, and AI platforms.

Research from Swiss cloud provider Proton suggests that around 75% of publicly listed European companies rely on U.S. tech services, (primarily Microsoft and Google) for critical infrastructure, including e-mail, cloud, and software. Therefore, attempting rapid substitution risks disrupting operations without delivering viable alternatives.

Barriers and concerns

Even the most ardent proponents of sovereign AI infrastructure acknowledge that there are major practical barriers to building massive AI data centers in Europe, including energy. AI data centers are extremely power-intensive, and Europe already faces grid constraints, high electricity prices, and long permitting timelines.

Without significant investment in energy systems, some European business leaders warn that new data center projects risk delays, cost overruns, or cancellation.

Another concern is that infrastructure-focused, sovereignty-driven policies may distort markets. Critics warn that infrastructure subsidies could flow to less competitive domestic providers resulting in slower innovation and the misallocation of capital resources to politically driven projects rather than economically viable ones.

In this view, sovereignty risks becoming industrial policy for its own sake, rather than a driver of efficiency or innovation. But perhaps the most significant critique is that the focus on infrastructure may distract from a more pressing issue: AI adoption.

Europe has historically lagged in deploying digital technologies. Some business leaders, including 麻豆原创鈥檚 Klein, argue that the priority should be accelerating AI use across industries and point out that infrastructure alone will not drive productivity gains. Over-emphasis on the infrastructure component of sovereignty could slow deployment through added complexity and cost. As Klein has noted, focusing primarily on infrastructure is a mistake if it is at the expense of developing AI applications and software.

Europe, he said recently, should prioritize 鈥渃ode over concrete.鈥� At the World Economic Forum in Davos earlier this year, senior executives from major European firms, including Capgemini and Ericsson, also warned against an overly protectionist approach. They argued that excluding or limiting global providers would raise prices, slow tech adoption, and reduce competitiveness.  

The business view 

From a business standpoint, AI is rapidly becoming a general-purpose technology, and the costs of AI infrastructure directly impacts productivity. If European AI infrastructure is more expensive, European companies risk falling behind global peers.

While data residency and the other elements of digital sovereignty are essential for some businesses operating in sensitive and highly regulated sectors, the sovereignty debate in Europe risks oversimplifying a fundamentally global industry. As Henna Virkkunen, the European Commission鈥檚 technology chief, noted: 鈥淣obody can be competitive alone.鈥�  

Indeed, since AI development depends on globally integrated supply chains, including semiconductors, software, and talent, fully localized infrastructure may be neither feasible nor desirable.

Rather than building duplicative infrastructure to support AI development, Europe鈥檚 real competitive advantage may lie in its treasure trove of operational data鈥攁 resource that is often difficult to access because of overly restrictive regulation and data access rules, prompting growing calls for reform from business leaders across Europe.

Easing and standardizing data access rules would help European businesses tap into this resource and compete more effectively with international rivals as they move into the next phase of AI enablement鈥攖he .

Over the past several years, procurement has steadily expanded its influence inside the enterprise. As supply chains faced unprecedented disruption, procurement leaders became trusted advisors to the C-suite on resilience, risk management, and sustainability. Their visibility increased and so did the expectations placed upon them.

Now, the playbook is being rewritten once again.

Research from the 2026 Economist Enterprise Report titled , sponsored by 麻豆原创, finds that financial performance has reemerged as the primary benchmark of procurement鈥檚 success. Drawing on a global survey of 2,648 C-suite executives, the report found that 54% cite cost control as procurement鈥檚 greatest contribution to the business, up from 43% just one year earlier. The findings point to a function that is increasingly stretched, yet positioned to deliver measurable business outcomes鈥攊f it can navigate a difficult balancing act.

Cost control returns to center stage

The shift is not surprising given the environment. Persistent inflation, tariff uncertainty, and continued investment in supply chain resilience have pushed cost management back to the top of the executive agenda. At the same time, companies are investing in dual sourcing, nearshoring, and inventory buffering to reduce exposure鈥攕trategies that strengthen resilience but often raise costs. Procurement is expected to offset those increases elsewhere.

What makes this moment particularly challenging is that procurement鈥檚 broader responsibilities have not diminished. Teams are still expected to manage geopolitical risk, advance sustainability, and support digital transformation. The mandate has expanded significantly, often without a corresponding increase in capacity, tools, or operating model support. Delivering savings, limiting cost increases, and managing input costs while fulfilling a growing strategic role is the defining tension facing procurement leaders today.

AI is becoming procurement’s digital imperative

Technology, and AI in particular, is increasingly seen as the key to resolving tension. In the Economist Enterprise study, 60% of executives identified digital transformation as procurement’s top strategic priority over the next 12 to 18 months, up sharply from 38% in 2025. More than half (56%) identified AI as the primary driver of that transformation.

The emergence of agentic AI is accelerating expectations further. More than half of executives are planning to implement or evaluate agentic AI capabilities within the next 12 to 18 months. Unlike earlier generations of AI that focused primarily on generating insights, agentic AI introduces the ability to execute workflows鈥攆rom guided buying experiences to automated purchase order creation鈥攅nabling procurement to move beyond recommendations and drive actions.

Even so, executive expectations remain grounded. Only 9% of survey respondents want AI to lead most procurement decisions within three years. Procurement鈥檚 highest-value work continues to rely on human judgment, strong supplier relationships, and the ability to navigate complex trade-offs. AI plays a critical role in strengthening these capabilities, but it does not replace them.

Realizing that potential, however, requires the right foundation. Connected data, clear governance, and close collaboration across procurement, finance, IT, and operations are prerequisites for generating AI outputs that are reliable and accountable.

Category management takes on greater importance

As procurement balances cost pressures with broader business priorities, category management is emerging as a critical discipline. The report found that category and demand management are expected to receive the second highest level of digital investment among procurement disciplines over the next three years, trailing only spend and performance analytics.

This reflects the growing complexity of procurement decisions. Category leaders are no longer simply awarding projects to the lowest-cost supplier. They are expected to weigh cost, risk, sustainability, and supplier performance simultaneously鈥攁 level of complexity that demands better analytics and faster insight-to-action capabilities.

That level of nuance can strengthen procurement鈥檚 impact, but it can also slow execution. More sophisticated category strategies require better data, sharper analytics, and faster insight-to-action capabilities. The report found that category strategy has become the third most common source of process delays, behind only contracting and sourcing.

Success increasingly depends not on collecting more data, but on turning data into confident decisions quickly. Organizations that close that gap will be better positioned to execute strategy, not simply develop it.

Procurement’s strategic value is being tested

Perhaps the most striking finding in the report is a growing confidence gap. While nearly three-quarters of executives still believe procurement collaborates effectively across the organization, that figure dropped from 90% in 2025 to 74% in 2026. Confidence in procurement鈥檚 role in shaping digital transformation strategy also declined meaningfully over the same period.

These numbers do not signal a retreat from procurement鈥檚 strategic importance. Rather, they reflect a broader shift in how enterprise decisions are being evaluated. As AI democratizes access to data across the organization, more stakeholders have the information to question decisions and demand clearer evidence of value.

Procurement leaders are now expected to control costs, manage risk, strengthen resilience, and help guide AI adoption, often simultaneously and without additional resources. The question is no longer whether procurement belongs at the leadership table. It is whether procurement can consistently deliver the value expected of it across an expanding and increasingly complex set of priorities.

Procurement鈥檚 next chapter

The Economist Enterprise findings paint a picture of a function at a pivotal moment. Cost savings has returned as the primary mandate, yet procurement is still expected to manage risk, protect supply continuity, and lead digital transformation.

Meeting those expectations will require more than layering AI onto existing processes. It demands connected data foundations that make AI outputs trustworthy, visibility across suppliers and spending, and technology that enables teams to move from reactive decision-making to proactive intervention.

The leaders who will define procurement鈥檚 next chapter are those who can turn AI, data, and connected processes into faster decisions, stronger resilience, and measurable business impact.

Gordon Donovan is vice president of Research for Procurement and External Workforce at 麻豆原创.

Travelers nowadays have very strict requirements. From booking a ticket to arriving at a destination, they expect fast, convenient, and prompt assistance when they face issues along the way. No matter how perfectly a system is designed to meet needs, there will always be situations that can鈥檛 be avoided. Delays, confusing booking systems, long customer service wait times, and much more create frustration for travelers.

AI is reshaping how the travel and transportation industry is doing business. It delivers more avenues to provide customer care aside from the typical communication channels such as e-mail, short messaging services, and social media. AI provides smarter, faster, and more personalized customer experiences, leading to happier customers and therefore growth in revenue for the business. AI is no longer optional, it is now becoming a necessity.

Beyond tickets and timetables: how AI orchestrates the customer journey

Previously, travelers preferred travel agents over booking apps, relied on printed tickets, and valued personal service and human interaction. However, mobile apps for bookings, check-ins, and payments are now widely used. Travelers also expect real-time updates and personalized recommendations that provide seamless, end-to-end experiences.

麻豆原创 delivers an ecosystem that can provide the tools needed to meet these expectations. Using 麻豆原创 Service Cloud, organizations can manage cases, complaints, and information requests efficiently. AI can respond within seconds, unlike traditional customer service processes that rely on manual handling of support tickets. AI-powered chatbots can also manage a high volume of customer conversations simultaneously. Here is an example integration strategy:

Intelligent selling services for 麻豆原创 Commerce Cloud

Intelligent selling services for 麻豆原创 Commerce Cloud are AI-powered services that leverage machine learning and artificial intelligence to help deliver personalized customer experiences and optimize booking strategies. These services help analyze customer booking patterns, provide contextual data across customer touchpoints, and offer recommendations that can lead to increases in revenue.

Travel accelerator

The travel accelerator for the 麻豆原创 Commerce solution is an industry-specific solution designed to enable travel companies to deliver omnichannel digital traveler engagement through 麻豆原创 Commerce Cloud. For customers that already have an existing 麻豆原创 Commerce Cloud solution, they can use the travel accelerator to help tailor it for travel business demand. It can provide real-time information to offer personalized customer experiences and reinforce customer loyalty.

Loyalty management program through integration

Organizations may need a system to reward customers for coming back, like earning points, perks, or special treatment when you repeatedly book with the same travel company. For this, an integration to a loyalty management program, either 麻豆原创 Customer Loyalty Management or a third-party solution, can be used.

The way forward

can help you achieve your business goals. As a starting point, we can create a service engagement plan that provides a tailored approach to meeting your KPIs. During this phase, we also deliver sessions to help you set up 麻豆原创 Sales Cloud, 麻豆原创 Service Cloud, and 麻豆原创 Commerce Cloud while working to ensure that travel and transportation industry best practices are followed.

With AI capabilities available across every solution, you can now categorize your customer base based on travel behaviors and patterns, as well as perform sentiment analysis on customer reviews and support tickets. The Advanced Success Plan can serve as a strategic partner in helping achieve AI objectives. Our experts, backed by deep industry knowledge, can provide guidance on the most effective path forward.

To deliver services that are aligned with each customer’s specific goals, we have organized our offerings into four phases: implementation, pre-go-live, post-go-live, and continuous improvement.

Implementation

During the implementation phase, our focus is on providing adoption guidance to help set up the solutions, from front-end applications to back-end systems. We work alongside the team to establish core capabilities needed for a successful implementation and to help ensure the solution is aligned with business requirements.

This includes, but is not limited to, application user management, key user extensibility, the 麻豆原创 CX AI Toolkit, integrations, security considerations, and other essential platform capabilities. Our goal is to help build a solid foundation that supports scalability, maintainability, and future growth while enabling teams to get the most value from the platform.

Pre-go-live

In the pre-go-live phase, our focus is to validate and safeguard the solutions that have been built throughout the implementation. The goal is to make sure systems are configured correctly, performing as expected, and ready at go-live.

This includes conducting detailed reviews of business configuration settings, evaluating system performance, validating integrations, reviewing security and user access setups, and assessing analytics and reporting capabilities. We also help identify potential risks, gaps, or areas for optimization before launch, working to ensure issues are addressed proactively.

In addition, we work with teams to confirm readiness across key functional and technical areas, helping ensure that testing has been completed successfully, critical business scenarios have been validated, and the solution is aligned with operational requirements. Performing an adoption checkpoint during this phase helps reduce risk, improve system stability, and support a smoother go-live experience.

Post-go-live

During the post-go-live phase, we work closely with the team to help ensure that recommendations and best practices identified throughout the implementation have been properly configured and are delivering the intended results.

As users begin working in the production environment, new questions, opportunities for optimization, and minor challenges often emerge. During this stage, we provide continued guidance and support to help address those items, whether they are related to business processes, system configuration, integrations, extensibility, analytics, or overall solution adoption.

Our functional and technical experts remain available to review issues, provide recommendations, and help navigate any areas that require additional attention. We also help identify opportunities for further improvements and knowledge transfer, working to ensure the organization is well-positioned to maintain, enhance, and scale the solution over time.

Continuous improvement

Finally, as part of the continuous improvement phase, we help stakeholders remain informed about new innovations and enhancements introduced through 麻豆原创 release cycles. By staying up-to-date with the latest capabilities, the team can continue to maximize the value of the solutions and drive ongoing business success.

Tara Tracey is global product owner of the Advanced Success Plan at 麻豆原创.
Geoffrey Arado is product manager for 麻豆原创 Customer Experience.

They see a personalized ad, explore a product through an AI assistant, respond to an offer in their inbox, and open your app expecting everything to simply work. They expect relevance, continuity, and immediacy across every interaction in their entire journey.

Instead, they hit friction:

• They鈥檙e asked to repeat information they already shared.
• Promotions don鈥檛 reflect inventory availability.
• Fulfillment updates arrive late or not at all.
• And when support is needed, no one has the complete picture.

These are not isolated breakdowns. They are systemic customer experience failures.

In the era of agentic AI, those moments compound quickly. Customers now assume brands understand who they are, what they need, and what is happening in real time, and they expect businesses to act on that intelligence instantly across the entire customer journey.

The agentic era is accelerating this shift dramatically.

This goes beyond surfacing insights or recommendations. Agentic AI systems are increasingly capable of planning, reasoning, decision-making, and coordinated action across networks of agents. AI is fundamentally reshaping how customer experiences are created, delivered, and optimized in real time.

But it also exposes a fundamental truth: when AI moves faster than your data, systems, and processes, it reveals everything that鈥檚 broken.

That tension鈥攂etween rising customer expectations and disconnected CX reality鈥攊s exactly what 麻豆原创 and Google Cloud are solving together with .

The customer experience reality: ambition outpacing execution

Most organizations want to deliver seamless, connected experiences, but they struggle to operationalize those moments.

According to 麻豆原创 research, 78% of businesses say AI will be essential for retaining customers in 2026. Yet fewer than two in five share their customer data across CX (37%) or CRM (39%) platforms.

This is an enterprise operations problem, and its impact is felt across the entire CX business. And when these touchpoints are disconnected, the customer feels it first. And by the time the company feels that friction, it may be too late to win that customer back.

A new model for customer experience built on trusted enterprise data

麻豆原创 Customer Experience plays a key role in the expansion of 麻豆原创 and Google Cloud’s partnership to enable a fundamentally new approach to CX鈥攐ne that connects data, AI, engagement, and commerce in real time.

鈥淎gentic customer experience starts deeper in the stack than the customer ever sees鈥攊n the quality of the data, the way processes run, and the strength of the platform underneath. With 麻豆原创 and Google Cloud, we鈥檙e building that foundation together, so AI moves beyond insight to action. This delivers continuous, intelligent experiences with the control, context, and execution required at enterprise scale.鈥�

Muhammad Alam, Member of the Executive Board of 麻豆原创 SE, 麻豆原创 Product & Engineering

麻豆原创 Commerce Cloud endorses Universal Commerce Protocol: powering the next era of agentic commerce

As digital commerce enters the age of AI-driven experiences, a new standard is emerging to reshape how consumers discover and purchase products.

The Universal Commerce Protocol is an open standard designed to enable AI agents to manage the entire shopping journey, from product discovery to checkout and even post-purchase support.

Unlike traditional commerce integrations that rely on fragmented APIs and bespoke connections, UCP creates a shared language for retailers, payment providers, and AI systems. This allows intelligent agents to interact directly with commerce platforms, dramatically simplifying how products are surfaced, evaluated, and purchased.

In essence, UCP transforms commerce from a series of disconnected steps into a unified, agent-driven experience.

, long known for powering enterprise-grade digital commerce for global brands, is now aligning with this new paradigm. As part of the growing UCP ecosystem, 麻豆原创 plans to work with Google to enable its customers to participate in AI-native commerce experiences that extend beyond traditional storefronts and help its merchants鈥� products be discovered and purchased across the Gemini app and Google Search, including AI Mode.

鈥淥ur goal with UCP is to build an open, trusted standard for the future of AI-driven commerce,鈥� said Ashish Gupta, VP/GM, merchant shopping at Google. 鈥淗aving a leader like 麻豆原创 endorse the protocol is critical as we work toward bringing seamless, secure agentic commerce to everyone.鈥�

For merchants, this means dramatically lower integration costs, faster onboarding into new AI-driven channels, and the ability to reach new customers beyond their storefront experiences.

In addition, 麻豆原创 Commerce Cloud will leverage Google Gemini capabilities to power a Shopping Assistant that brands can deploy directly to their own customers. This enables organizations to offer a real-time, AI-driven shopping experience across their digital touchpoints. The Shopping Assistant engages shoppers through chat, voice, and text to help them discover products, answer questions, and turn intent into transactions.

Unlike traditional storefront interactions, the Shopping Assistant can create a persistent, conversational experience that follows the customer across the shopping journey, continuously refining recommendations and guiding decisions in real time.

It can also curate creative ideas鈥攕uch as themed outfits or complete event concepts鈥攂y intelligently combining products based on customer requests. By unifying behavioral signals, real-time inventory, and promotional intelligence, it can increase conversion rates, improve average order value, and ensure every recommendation is both relevant and fulfillable.

麻豆原创 Engagement Cloud and Google Cloud: how agents work together for marketing

This new expanded partnership comes alongside another historic milestone for 麻豆原创 and Google Cloud, announced earlier this year. A fundamentally different approach to marketing execution is now offering marketers a new model for engagement that is built on trusted enterprise data.

By combining customer data and real-time signals like inventory, orders, and fulfillment status with operational truth, marketing teams can now build, launch, and optimize personalized customer engagements, grounded in business context and executed at scale through an autonomous multi-agent framework.

At the heart of this partnership:

• 麻豆原创 Business Data Cloud聽(麻豆原创 BDC) connects semantically rich data across the enterprise with AI to help enable real-time insights and drive personalized interactions grounded in business context. This includes 麻豆原创 Business Data Cloud Connect for Google BigQuery with bidirectional, zero-copy data access and built-in enterprise-grade governance and security.

• Google BigQuery聽unlocks real-time signals across the Google ecosystem, such as geolocation, weather, ad engagement, and rich analytics, for AI-driven segmentation, personalization, activation and analytics.

• 麻豆原创 Customer Experience聽solutions can provide the real-time behavioral context: customer profiles, transactions, orders, service interactions, and consented engagement data.

• 麻豆原创 Engagement Cloud can activate enterprise data, AI insights, and predictions through intuitive tools and AI agents to help securely orchestrate real-time, personalized interactions across the entire customer life cycle.

Why this partnership matters

The collaboration between 麻豆原创 and Google reflects a broader shift in how commerce and marketing teams operate.

For commerce leaders:

• From search to agents: Consumers are no longer just searching. AI agents are acting on their behalf, making decisions, and completing purchases.
• From channels to ecosystems: Commerce is moving beyond owned channels into distributed, AI-powered environments like search, assistants, and chat interfaces.
• From integration to interoperability: Open standards like UCP eliminate the need for one-off integrations, enabling scalable participation in the AI economy.

With UCP, AI agents can seamlessly access product catalogs, manage carts, process payments, and handle post-purchase workflows, all without forcing retailers to rebuild their infrastructure.

For marketing leaders:

• From prompt to performance: Agentic intelligence becomes operational where business goals, enterprise signals, and marketing processes direct AI agents, translating into real customer interactions and automated lifecycle journeys.
• From manual to generative: Advanced generative capabilities powered by Google Gemini models, such as Nano Banana 2, introduce new agentic skills that help marketing teams dynamically generate messaging, imagery, and campaign variations.
• From dark data to unified data context: With every interaction grounded in business context and continuous engagement signals, messages become truly dynamic. Text messages can turn into immersive conversations with Google Rich Communication Services (RCS) and advertising creative and offers can continuously evolve.

Agents collaborate across 麻豆原创 and Google Cloud to personalize, activate, and continuously optimize campaigns in real time across engagement channels and media networks.

鈥淲ith this partnership, 麻豆原创 and Google Cloud bring together connected AI and a unified data foundation to create real-time understanding of the customer and business context. This enables organizations and CX teams to move from fragmented interactions to continuous, intelligent execution鈥攅mbedding AI into end-to-end processes and unlocking meaningful gains in productivity, speed, and business impact.鈥�

Jan Gilg, Global President Customer Success & Americas, Member of the Extended Board

Unlocking new value for enterprises

For 麻豆原创 Commerce Cloud customers, this partnership can unlock several strategic advantages:

• Increased discoverability in AI-driven shopping experiences
• Faster time-to-market through standardized integrations
• Ownership of customer relationships, even in third-party AI environments
• Future-proof architecture aligned with emerging commerce standards

As AI continues to compress the distance between intent and transaction, accessibility to agents becomes just as important as visibility in search results. In this new model, success in commerce is no longer defined by storefront experience alone鈥攊t鈥檚 defined by how effectively your products, data, and systems can be accessed, interpreted, and transacted on by AI agents.

For customers, this partnership unveils a new network of interoperable AI agents, grounded in enterprise data and shared context聽across 麻豆原创 and Google. Organizations can achieve measurable outcomes, including:

• Faster speed-to-market through autonomous campaign and content generation
• Lower operational overhead by eliminating manual execution steps
• Always鈥憃n optimization that continuously improves performance
• Higher ROI through relevant, timely, and consistent engagement at scale

Marketers can spend less time managing workflows and more time shaping strategy, creative direction, and customer value.

鈥淲hat matters is delivering real value to our customers. As customer experience becomes more agentic, organizations need to move faster, stay connected, and operate consistently across every interaction. By bringing commerce, marketing, and service together, we help our customers reduce complexity, respond more quickly, and deliver more relevant experiences that strengthen engagement and drive sustainable growth.鈥�

Manos Raptopoulos, Global President Customer Success Europe, APAC, Middle East & Africa and Member of the Extended Board 麻豆原创 SE

The future of AI-driven commerce and marketing: what this means for your CX strategy

The partnership between 麻豆原创 and Google for marketing and commerce聽marks a foundational shift toward what many are calling an agentic revolution鈥攁 world where AI doesn鈥檛 just assist CX teams and shoppers but actively participates in the buying process and shapes their customer experience.

For enterprise CX leaders, the message is clear: success in this new era will depend on how well your commerce and marketing platform can communicate with AI agents. With 麻豆原创 and Google Cloud, 麻豆原创 Customer Experience is positioning itself鈥攁nd its customers鈥攖o thrive in that future.

Fewer opportunities for early talent 

The job marketplace has contracted significantly for those with less than five years of professional experience. Research published by 麻豆原创 shows that openings in the 10 most common entry-level job titles declined by 35% in just one year, from 2024 to 2025.*

Budget constraints, hiring freezes, and uncertainty around the ROI of early talent as AI increasingly takes on routine and manual tasks are among the reasons cited by HR leaders today.  

Applications skyrocket  

AI is also having a major impact on the recruitment process. With such limited opportunities available, more than half of early talent candidates use AI to help them land a job鈥攁 process that now takes eight months on average and involves more than 300 job applications.*

HR is feeling the pressure managing the candidate pipeline, with聽the number of applicants per early talent job opening doubling since 2021.聽A聽high volume of candidates聽are聽submitting聽AI-generated r茅sum茅s and applications, and it鈥檚 becoming much harder to detect high-fidelity signals around skills, fit, and potential.聽

It鈥檚聽a painful聽scenario for everyone involved. Fragile and unsustainable. And the聽implications聽will be聽profound for enterprises that聽don鈥檛聽act quickly.聽聽

HR leaders voice concerns  

Playing out the current聽trajectory聽to its natural conclusion, what happens when all the聽fresh talent eventually dries up? Already,聽HR leaders聽are alarmed by this risk.聽鈥淯ltimately, if we stop investing in early talent, we will wind up eliminating our talent pipeline,鈥� one聽global head of early talent聽programs at a high-tech organization聽told researchers.*

A senior HR director at a high-tech organization commented: 鈥淚f we continue down this path and don鈥檛 provide a way for early talent to get started, it鈥檚 going to lead to massive skill shortages in the future.鈥� 

Widespread reductions in early talent hiring will lead to skills gaps that聽will聽prove expensive to remedy. Organizations will struggle to build company capabilities,聽retain聽knowledge, and develop future leaders.聽聽

But by far the most common concern from leaders was around not seeing early talent as AI-native. If the AI capabilities of this cohort are overlooked, companies may miss out on a key opportunity to scale AI innovation and adoption across the business.  

What鈥檚 the answer?  

Today,聽there鈥檚聽an opportunity for HR leaders to be more intentional聽and strategic, to reimagine聽their approach聽to early talent from the ground up. With the right early talent strategy, organizations can gain a competitive advantage.

Here are three steps to consider. 

Step 1: Rethink entry-level roles 

Traditionally, junior employees have mainly been given routine, repetitive tasks. Combined with frustratingly slow career progression, the result is eroding morale and commitment.  

This聽approach must evolve.聽The nature of work is changing rapidly,聽and early talent no longer need to take on those routine tasks. These employees need the opportunity to develop at speed and to be supported in performing聽work that聽meaningfully addresses聽business challenges.聽聽

HR has the chance to reshape entry-level positions,聽to provide support, guidance, and tools to enable聽junior staff聽to contribute聽in聽more聽impactful聽ways. This may involve them聽working聽with proper guidance聽to support聽more critical聽projects, interacting with customers,聽and聽even聽owning some tasks end to end.聽

This approach not only enables early talent to contribute more positively to the business at an earlier stage, but when combined with clear goals, regular feedback loops, and occasional coaching, it also fosters greater engagement and commitment. 

Step 2: Support your strategy with technology 

Hiring and developing early talent have become more complex鈥攆rom deciphering AI-generated applications, to redesigning roles and meeting their aspirations in a fast-changing business context. And with the nature of early talent work shifting, leaders need tools to help understand the new capabilities that will predict long-term success and demonstrate the value of early talent initiatives.  

Here鈥檚 where technology can help. During the hiring process,聽technology聽can help聽employers聽see beyond the聽noise of聽AI聽applications聽and rediscover the聽meaningful聽signals聽they聽need to create candidate shortlists and strengthen hiring decisions. Meanwhile, technology can also help to maintain engagement with other high-potential聽candidates聽who applied鈥攆or when the next opportunities arise.聽聽

Once early talent begin work, today鈥檚 technology can help you track their participation in early talent programs and progression towards their goals. It also helps facilitate individualized learning opportunities and demonstrate the ROI of your early talent investments. For research-based recommendations on the role of technology in early talent selection and development, check out this . 

Step 3: Reframe the business case for early talent 

As the nature of early talent work is changing alongside the technology used to support them, HR leaders agree that the old business case for early talent investments needs to be reimagined. Many organizations are focused on mitigating critical skill gaps and engaging in large-scale AI transformations. While early talent lack experience, they are eager to engage in continuous learning and understand how to work effectively alongside AI. 

Research also reveals that鈥攁s they work alongside modern tools and technologies鈥攅arly talent can contribute to high-value, meaningful work much faster than in the past.  

A modern early talent business case is one that involves focusing on faster time to meaningful work, reducing critical skill gaps, and leveraging the AI-native capabilities of today鈥檚 entry-level workers.  

Build your early talent strategy 

Will HR leaders watch on as a generation of AI-savvy talent remains underused, or act now and build the skills pipelines necessary for a future-ready workforce? 

Get further insights on this topic by reading our report, 鈥�.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;痴颈蝉颈迟&苍产蝉辫;辞耻谤&苍产蝉辫; to stay tuned for when phase two of this research gets published later this year. 

Dr. Autumn D. Krauss is chief scientist at 麻豆原创 SuccessFactors.

*, 麻豆原创, 2026. 

This recognition reflects 麻豆原创鈥檚 broader vision for AI-driven, skills-based workforce orchestration, where hiring is no longer a standalone process but part of a continuous, intelligent system connecting people, skills, and business outcomes. With innovations across 麻豆原创 SuccessFactors solutions and the addition of SmartRecruiters to the portfolio in September 2025, 麻豆原创 is enabling organizations to move beyond transactional recruiting toward agentic, autonomous talent strategies that continuously adapt to change.

SmartRecruiters for 麻豆原创 SuccessFactors: AI at the center of hiring

combines a modern, AI鈥憂ative recruiting platform with 麻豆原创鈥檚 core HCM to help create a more connected and intelligent hiring experience at global scale. Hiring becomes part of an integrated flow of workforce decisions鈥攍inked directly to skills, planning, mobility, and long-term business strategy.

With embedded AI across the hiring lifecycle, organizations can:

• Deliver intuitive, consumer鈥慻rade candidate experiences at scale, from first interaction through new hire onboarding.
• Empower recruiters and hiring managers with AI鈥慹nabled insights and automation directly within daily workflows.
• Strengthen hiring decisions by connecting recruiting data to skills, roles, and workforce plans.
• Scale globally with confidence, balancing centralized governance with local market flexibility.

SmartRecruiters鈥� AI hiring companion, Winston, works alongside to help automate repetitive tasks, surface top candidates, and explain recommendations transparently, which allows recruiters to focus on higher鈥憊alue decision鈥憁aking while moving faster and with greater confidence.

New capabilities, including agentic interviewing and real鈥憈ime candidate engagement, are helping organizations accelerate hiring while improving candidate experience at scale. For example, early adopters of AI鈥慸riven screening have seen up to a in time鈥憈o鈥慸ecision, demonstrating how AI can streamline evaluation without sacrificing quality.

At the same time, innovations like agentic CRM are helping organizations activate existing talent pools鈥攕urfacing, ranking, and re鈥慹ngaging candidates automatically鈥攖urning recruiting from a reactive process into a continuous, dynamic pipeline.

From recruiting to Autonomous HCM

SmartRecruiters plays a key role in 麻豆原创鈥檚 broader shift toward Autonomous HCM鈥攚here AI-driven agents can continuously orchestrate workforce decisions across hiring, planning, development, and mobility.

Rather than treating hiring as an isolated function, 麻豆原创 is embedding AI across 麻豆原创 SuccessFactors solutions to create a unified, skills-based system of action. Workforce planning, learning, and talent acquisition are directly connected, enabling organizations to align skills with business and financial priorities in real time.

At , this vision came to life through innovations that increase agility and responsiveness. Intelligent agents can identify skill gaps, recommend hiring or redeployment strategies, and take action鈥攖urning talent management into a dynamic, continuously optimized system.

Within this model, hiring becomes one of several coordinated levers in an adaptive workforce strategy, ensuring every decision is guided by real-time data, skills intelligence, and evolving business needs.

Customer impact: AI鈥慸riven hiring in action

Organizations across industries are already seeing the impact of AI鈥慸riven, connected hiring.

Retailer selected SmartRecruiters to improve the candidate experience and reduce drop-off in a high-volume hiring environment. Today, the company processes 50,000 applications each month, reducing the application processing time from 28 days to just four and cutting time-to-fill from 56 days to just 20鈥攄emonstrating how speed and experience directly improve hiring outcomes.

Global real estate services firm implemented SmartRecruiters to increase visibility into recruitment activity and create a more consistent experience across its EMEA business. As a result, Colliers achieved a direct hiring rate above 80%, reduced agency reliance to roughly 7% of hires, and improved first鈥憏ear retention by 25%, showing how connected hiring can lower costs while strengthening long鈥憈erm talent outcomes.

and discover how AI鈥慸riven, connected hiring can help turn talent acquisition into a true strategic advantage.

About the Fosway 9-Grid™
Fosway Group is Europe鈥檚 #1 HR industry analyst. The Fosway 9-Grid™ provides a unique assessment of the principal talent supply options available to organizations in EMEA. The analysis is based on extensive independent research and insights from Fosway鈥檚 Corporate Research Network of over 250 organizations, including BP, HSBC, PwC, Sanofi, Shell, and Vodafone. Visit the Fosway website at www.fosway.com for more information on Fosway Group鈥檚 research and services.

Across industries, customers are moving from pilots to production. They are investing in systems that can run pricing, orders, fulfillment, and service end-to-end, with AI actively driving decisions and outcomes. They are not looking for more tools. They are looking for results.

This is where 麻豆原创 has a clear point of view. Customer experience (CX) only works when it is connected directly to execution.

麻豆原创 Customer Experience is integrated with 麻豆原创 Cloud ERP across pricing, order management, fulfillment, billing, and service. AI operates inside these processes using real business data. That means every customer interaction can reflect what the business can deliver.

This is the shift now underway, and it is creating immediate opportunities for partners.

麻豆原创 partners are the ones who bring this to life. They take product capabilities and turn them into working solutions that improve conversion, increase fulfillment accuracy, and reduce service cost.

The next wave of growth will be led by partners who move quickly and build on this foundation.

Customer experience is now measured by what gets done

Customer experience is no longer judged by engagement metrics alone. It is judged by outcomes. Customers expect:

• Accurate pricing at the moment of purchase
• Real product availability, not estimates
• Orders that are fulfilled as promised
• Service that resolves issues without repetition or delay

When these things work, the experience works. When they fail, the problem is immediately visible.

AI is increasing the speed of every interaction. It is also exposing execution gaps faster than ever before. If pricing, inventory, or order data are inconsistent, customers see it instantly.

This is why customer experience and execution can no longer be separated.

AI is now driving actions, not just insights

AI is already acting inside key business processes. As seen in the , in 麻豆原创 CX today:

• Marketing, content, and campaign assistants can orchestrate segmentation, content creation, and optimization based on live performance signals.
• Commerce, merchandising, shopping, and order management assistants can connect discovery, conversion, and fulfillment to real-time inventory and pricing.
• Sales assistants help guide deal qualification and deal execution by linking pipeline signals to pricing, availability, and fulfillment data.
• Case and service management assistants help automate routine interactions while maintaining full context across orders, entitlements, and history.

These are not future scenarios. These capabilities are available and in use. But they only work when they are connected to trusted business data.

Without that, AI creates errors at scale. With it, AI drives measurable improvement.

Autonomous CX connects experience to execution

Autonomous CX connects core products and processes across the business, operating on a shared business context. It brings together 麻豆原创 Commerce Cloud, 麻豆原创 Sales Cloud, 麻豆原创 CPQ, 麻豆原创 Service Cloud, 麻豆原创 Field Service, 麻豆原创 Engagement Cloud for marketing, and 麻豆原创 Cloud ERP across finance, supply chain, and order management.

This is not a set of disconnected applications. It is a unified system where customer interactions and operational processes run on the same data foundation. Pricing, inventory, orders, and service are consistent across every touchpoint.

As a result, AI can move from recommendation to execution, working to ensure that every interaction is grounded in what the business can deliver. It can also remove the integration gaps that slow down CX execution.

麻豆原创 CX partners are moving faster from projects to outcomes

This shift is changing what customers expect from partners. Customers are not asking for system implementations. They are asking for outcomes such as:

• Faster time to deploy
• Higher conversion rates
• Improved order accuracy
• Lower cost to serve

麻豆原创 provides a strong starting point with embedded assistants, standard integrations, and prebuilt industry scenarios. Partners are building on this to deliver complete solutions. This is where differentiation happens.

Where partners are creating value today

The opportunity is not theoretical. It is already visible in active partner work.

Across 麻豆原创 CX:

• The cloud ERP edition of 麻豆原创 Commerce Cloud can connect storefront, pricing, ordering, and fulfillment in one model.
• 麻豆原创 Revenue Growth Management and 麻豆原创 Retail Execution support trade planning and in-store performance.
• Intelligent applications help package AI use cases across marketing, sales, and service.
• 麻豆原创 Service Cloud with partner integrations such as Parloa enables automated, context-aware service interactions.

麻豆原创 CX partners are turning these capabilities into repeatable offerings. Examples include:

• Industry packages for retail and CPG combining commerce, pricing, and fulfillment
• Preconfigured deployments of 麻豆原创 Sales Cloud and 麻豆原创 Service Cloud that reduce time to go-live
• Integration connectors linking 麻豆原创 CX with existing commerce, loyalty, and service platforms
• Extensions to CPQ and sales workflows that improve deal margin and approval speed
• Service automation scenarios that reduce manual case handling using real order and entitlement data
• AI-driven discovery connected directly to 麻豆原创 Commerce and 麻豆原创 Commerce, order management

These are practical, deployable solutions that can deliver measurable results.

The ecosystem is expanding what鈥檚 possible

麻豆原创 is strengthening this model through partnerships. Recently announced partnerships with companies such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Parloa, and Vercel enable new interaction models like conversational commerce, AI-driven search, and composable digital experiences.

What matters is that these experiences connect back to 麻豆原创 for execution. Orders, pricing, fulfillment, and service remain consistent across every channel. This gives partners the freedom to innovate on the experience layer while relying on 麻豆原创 for reliable execution.

A new economic model for partners

The economics for partners are changing. With Autonomous CX, partners can build:

• Industry solutions that can be reused and scaled
• Implementation packages that shorten delivery timelines
• Extensions and integrations that apply across customers
• Ongoing services for AI optimization and governance
• New offerings built around AI assistants, AI agents, and orchestration
• Higher-value transformation programs that combine AI, data, and process design

This creates a more predictable and repeatable revenue model. It also strengthens long-term customer relationships.

Now is the time to act with 麻豆原创 CX

Customers are making decisions now. They are selecting platforms and partners that can deliver AI-driven execution across customer experience. They are looking for partners who can:

• Connect CX to ERP processes
• Deliver solutions that work out-of-the-box and scale
• Improve measurable business outcomes

麻豆原创 provides the foundation. The platform is in place. The capabilities are real. The next step is execution.

Partners who move now can define the use cases, build the offerings, and lead in their industries. The momentum is already building. This is the moment to accelerate it.

What partners should do next

To move from opportunity to execution, partners can act now.

• See what is available today. Explore the latest AI-driven CX capabilities and partner opportunities in the .
• Understand the foundation for Autonomous CX. Learn how 麻豆原创 connects experience to execution with the .
• Deepen expertise and accelerate readiness. Gain a stronger understanding of Autonomous CX and partner use cases:
• Engage now and shape the next wave. Join the upcoming executive briefing to understand how to position and deliver these solutions:
  • June 18:
• Strengthen credibility and scale impact. Advance your go-to-market and positioning through certification:

麻豆原创 is not asking partners to start from scratch. The platform, capabilities, and ecosystem are already in place. The opportunity now is to build, differentiate, and lead.

Karl Fahrbach is chief partner officer at 麻豆原创.
Balaji Balasubramanian is president and chief product officer for 麻豆原创 Customer Experience.

is a site where potential and existing 麻豆原创 customers can explore 麻豆原创 Business AI solutions, access pre-built applications and content, and discover use cases, services, reference architectures, and best practices鈥攁ll free of charge.

The self-service portal offers opportunities to not only explore solutions but get a feel for how 麻豆原创 technology could work in your organization. Cost and ROI estimator tools prompt users to input information unique to their organization鈥攃ustomizations, hyperscalers, and number of users, for example鈥攁nd get tangible, personalized use cases to bring back to the business. Maturity assessments use details about an organization鈥檚 current platform strategy and architecture landscape to guide users on next steps to achieve the Autonomous Enterprise.

The site also includes missions that provide step-by-step guidance on how to materialize 麻豆原创 solutions, including what solutions and services may be needed, what the architecture can look like, how other customers are deriving value, and more. For AI specifically, there are almost 400 features and agents available for customers to explore in the 麻豆原创 Business AI Catalog.

At 麻豆原创 Sapphire Orlando, two customers using 麻豆原创 Discovery Center shared the value they鈥檙e getting from the site and how it鈥檚 guiding their approach to digital transformation.

Agilent

is a global leader in life sciences, diagnostics, and applied chemical markets, producing and supplying analytical laboratory instruments, software, consumables, and services. Looking to avoid manual analysis and late detection in tariff and compliance changes, Agilent turned to 麻豆原创 Discovery Center. 鈥淲e have one core principle: do not solve the problem that has already been solved,鈥� Manthan Peshne, chief enterprise architect at Agilent Technologies, Inc., said. 麻豆原创 Discovery Center allowed Agilent to stay true to this principle.

鈥淲e started exploring 麻豆原创 Discovery Center and we found quite a few good building blocks, essentially in the form of missions,鈥� Peshne said. 鈥淲e also looked at some composable services which we could assemble together鈥t鈥檚 not a complete solution鈥ut we found a completely unrelated industry and use case that we could use.鈥� Using a mission set in the context of the oil and gas industry, the Agilent team was able to explore how an AI agent could interpret unstructured regulatory signals, extract the tariff context, determine its relevance, and convert that fragmented information into actionable alerts. Not only did Agilent find a solution to its problem, but the 麻豆原创 Discovery Center mission accelerated design thinking and development for the project.

鈥淲e also ended up with an enterprise pattern by building this solution, which gives us a platform where I could replicate this to other scenarios where I have external inputs or signals that we need to capture and put in the context of Agilent data,鈥� Peshne added.

Sutherland  

 is an AI-driven business transformation company that designs, runs, and automates enterprise operations at scale to help its clients achieve real, measurable business outcomes. A large part of this includes building and delivering production-grade agentic AI solutions on top of leading foundational models.

For Sutherland, 麻豆原创 Discovery Center has kick-started many projects. 鈥淚nstead of starting an MVP to see what the problem is and where to start, we have a ready-made solution from which we can pick up from,鈥� Amar Busireddy, 麻豆原创 enterprise architect at Sutherland Services, said. 鈥淚t gives us a start somewhere around 20%-30% depending on the scenario.鈥�

Having a starting point boosts confidence, Busireddy said, and enables Sutherland鈥檚 consultants to create solutions faster, which means faster time-to-value for its customers. Specifically, the missions available in 麻豆原创 Discovery Center have helped: 鈥淲e are using missions to kick-start educating our consultants and with implementing and helping our customers,鈥� Busireddy said. Missions around Joule are plentiful, including how to integrate the AI solution with 麻豆原创 SuccessFactors solutions, 麻豆原创 Ariba solutions, and 麻豆原创 S/4HANA.

鈥淭here are many reference architectures given for many problems, which might not be sufficient for us or might not fit our requirements 100%, but that definitely give us the direction on what to use and what not to use. From there, we can plan budget and time,鈥� he said.

麻豆原创 Discovery Center: The starting point

The experiences of Agilent and Sutherland show that 麻豆原创 Discovery Center is more than a resource hub鈥攊t is a catalyst for action. By offering practical guidance, reusable missions, reference architectures, and planning tools that help evaluate fit, cost, and value, the site enables organizations to accelerate innovation without starting from scratch. For organizations looking to turn AI ambition into actionable business outcomes, 麻豆原创 Discovery Center is the place to begin.

is the digital tool for customers and partners to easily interact with 麻豆原创 and get immediate guidance to the best solution. With this portal, users can access important alerts, metrics, and insights about their 麻豆原创 product portfolio from a single access point. The integration of Joule in 麻豆原创 for Me is not just a feature drop or a UX redesign. This is an inflection point in how customers access products, support, and self-service.聽

We are moving from a click-and-search portal to a conversational, agent-driven enterprise ecosystem. For users, this is an experiential shift with significant business outcomes. By taking over the tedious work of clicking, searching, parsing, and diagnosing, Joule helps free up IT administrators, consultants, and business leaders to focus on what truly matters: driving innovation and scaling their business.

鈥淭he successful launch of Joule in 麻豆原创 for Me is the result of strong collaboration, innovation, and a shared commitment to improving customer experience. It demonstrates how 麻豆原创 continues to turn its AI strategy into real, tangible value, delivering solutions that are not only powerful but also practical and user-centric.鈥�

Gerlinde Wallner, Organizational Change Manager and Coach, Strategy & Operations, 麻豆原创

What can users expect from this new unified, AI鈥憄owered entry to 麻豆原创 for Me?

• Effortless navigation across the portal
• Fast access to relevant information
• Advanced self-service with guided support
• Accelerated task execution without needing to know where to click

In their fast-paced business environments, users don鈥檛 have to search through complex menus or multiple touchpoints. Joule in 麻豆原创 for Me can simplify their path to support. They can simply ask, explore, and act to experience personalized, conversational access to support, self-service, and key tasks in 麻豆原创 for Me.

鈥淛oule is transforming 麻豆原创 support by making it more intuitive and intelligent. We can guide users conversationally to the right outcome鈥攏o searching, no guesswork鈥攁ccelerate self-service and task execution, and deliver context-aware, personalized support directly within 麻豆原创 for Me.鈥�

Corinne Reisert, VP, Customer Support Experience 麻豆原创 for Me, Global Customer Support, 麻豆原创

In addition to introducing Joule in 麻豆原创 for Me, 麻豆原创 takes advantage of AI-powered agentic case resolution, which brings AI agents into support workflows to help analyze new cases, detect duplicates, suggest routings, and draft responses. For select priority cases, AI agents can recommend replies, which helps reduce manual effort, improve triage accuracy, and shorten resolution timelines. This is available now to 麻豆原创 customers.For more information, see .

Joule in 麻豆原创 for Me is being rolled out in phases as of May 2026, at no extra cost to customers.

鈥淲ith 麻豆原创 runs 麻豆原创, we show our customers how we scale agents across the enterprise to deliver real outcomes. Joule in 麻豆原创 for Me exemplifies how conversational and agentic AI can fundamentally transform the way users operate and offer customers a simple and intuitive path to access 麻豆原创鈥檚 services and support.鈥�

Benjamin Blau, Chief Process & Information Officer, 麻豆原创

While Joule in 麻豆原创 for Me already helps deliver a simpler and more intuitive way to access information, support, and guided actions, this is just the starting point. As 麻豆原创 continues to advance its AI strategy, customers can look forward to new scenarios, expanded agent capabilities, and deeper integration across services and support processes. This launch establishes the foundation for a more conversational and autonomous customer experience, one that will continue to evolve as 麻豆原创 brings the next generation of AI-powered innovations to life.

Stefan Steinle is executive vice president and head of Global Customer Support at 麻豆原创.

This journey cannot be defined by technology alone. It requires dialogue, shared learning, and real-world insight. That is exactly why we are launching the podcast, a new series we will be hosting together.

Why this conversation matters now

Organizations today face unprecedented volatility, from geopolitical uncertainty and supply chain disruptions to energy challenges and rising resilience requirements. In this environment, the cost of inaction is increasing. Businesses must become faster, more adaptive, and structurally more resilient to stay competitive.

The Autonomous Enterprise offers a response. It combines three critical capabilities:

• Data-driven decision-making
• Automated execution
• Governance-by-design

Together, these capabilities enable organizations to move beyond isolated AI pilots toward measurable outcomes and enterprise-wide impact.

The shift is not just technical, though. It is organizational and strategic. The leaders we talk to are no longer asking whether they should adopt AI. The question now is how fast they can scale it and how they can generate tangible business value.

From concept to operating model

At its core, the Autonomous Enterprise reframes AI鈥攏ot as a feature layered onto applications, but as an integral part of the operating model itself.

Three priorities define this model:

• Business value: focusing on measurable outcomes rather than experimental use cases
• Predictability: improving decision-making through trusted data and advanced forecasting
• Scalability: moving from proof-of-concept initiatives to enterprise-wide deployment

We are already seeing this shift change how organizations think about their systems and processes. Systems of record are evolving into systems of action. AI agents are moving from simple assistance toward execution. And AI is becoming embedded end-to-end, rather than confined to isolated scenarios.

At the same time, governance, auditability, and traceability are becoming non-negotiable. Enterprises must be able to stand behind every AI-driven decision with transparency and confidence.

What we are setting out to do

In this podcast series we want to create a space to explore these changes in depth and bring the voices shaping this transformation into the conversation. Each episode features discussions with 麻豆原创 leaders, customers, and industry experts who are actively building and operating autonomous capabilities today.

Some of the questions we will be digging into:

• What does the Autonomous Enterprise look like in practice?
• How are leading companies scaling AI across core business processes?
• What are the biggest barriers, and how can they be overcome?
• How do organizations balance automation with governance and trust?

鈥攏ow live鈥攆eatures 麻豆原创鈥檚 Peter Maier, responsible for Strategic Customer Engagements in the Office of the CEO at 麻豆原创, who brings these ideas into focus through practical, real-world context. In our conversation, he outlines how organizations are moving beyond experimentation toward measurable outcomes, more trusted and predictive decision-making, and scaling AI across the enterprise.

What we found particularly compelling is how clearly this reinforces a broader shift already underway: AI is no longer something applied on top of the business. It is becoming part of how the business runs.

How companies can get started

While the vision is ambitious, the path to becoming an Autonomous Enterprise does not require a 鈥渂ig bang鈥� transformation. The most effective approach is incremental and outcome driven.

Organizations can begin by focusing on a single high-value process, making it more intelligent, more automated, and more transparent. From there, they can expand step by step, scaling what works and continuously demonstrating measurable impact.

Success depends on more than technology, though. Trust plays a central role. Employees, executives, and stakeholders must understand and trust how AI decisions are made. This requires transparent and explainable systems, reliable high-quality data foundations, and strong governance frameworks embedded from the start.

Change management is equally critical. Becoming an Autonomous Enterprise is as much about people as it is about platforms. Organizations must align training, redesign roles, and empower employees to co-create how AI is integrated into their work.

A shared journey forward

The Autonomous Enterprise is not a branding concept. It is a new way of running a business鈥攐ne that is more automated, more data-driven, and ultimately more resilient. And no organization will navigate this journey alone.

That is the spirit behind this podcast. We want it to be a platform for shared learning, bringing together perspectives from across industries, functions, and geographies. Whether you are just beginning your AI journey or scaling enterprise-wide transformation, we hope these conversations give you practical insights and inspiration.

We would love for you to join us. Listen in, engage with the discussion, give feedback, and help shape what comes next.

Benedikt Gieger is AI strategy lead for 麻豆原创 Supply Chain Management.
Julia Kloppenburg is a technology consultant for Customer Engagement & Adoption at 麻豆原创.

鈥淟ast year, we were in the process of planning the optimization of our talent discovery tech stack and then something happened,鈥� Eric Goldstein, global head of Talent Discovery for 麻豆原创, said. 鈥淲e acquired SmartRecruiters in September, so we had to pivot in an agile way.鈥�

SmartRecruiters for 麻豆原创 SuccessFactors enables enterprises to manage the entire hiring lifecycle, from sourcing to onboarding, with AI-enabled recruiting capabilities that can result in faster time-to-hire, improved candidate experiences, and deeper analytics for workforce planning.

For 麻豆原创, this means adding much-needed rigor and precision to its global talent acquisition operations. This will not only elevate the quality of hires but also the candidate experience, which Goldstein identified as the 鈥渂iggest game changer.鈥�

Building a more intelligent hiring process

SmartRecruiters for 麻豆原创 SuccessFactors helps optimize processes, increasing transparency and personalization. This means improved experiences and processes for candidates, hiring managers, and recruiters. 鈥淲e have been through a time where we focused solely on the recruiter experience. Then it was fashionable to focus only on the candidates. Now we really see that with SmartRecruiters, it really is an enhanced experience for all stakeholders that are involved in the recruiting process,鈥� Ilka Sagner-David, global head of Talent Discovery Solutions and Innovations at 麻豆原创, said.

Candidate perspective

Seventy percent of candidates that apply for jobs are mindful to take their valuable time to do so, Goldstein shared, reiterating that it is important for companies to match that commitment when shaping and delivering the candidate experience. With SmartRecruiters for 麻豆原创 SuccessFactors as the foundation, it becomes possible for every pre-qualified applicant to interview, receive personalized and constructive feedback post-interview, and maintain 24×7 interaction with agentic AI built into SmartRecruiters.

鈥淚n our opinion, only responding with polite, automated rejection notes is not enough. [Candidates] need to be provided with some constructive, actionable feedback鈥攁nd that鈥檚 what we [at 麻豆原创] are going to be able to do,鈥� Goldstein said.

Hiring manager perspective

SmartRecruiters for 麻豆原创 SuccessFactors can give hiring managers a more precise and consistent way to identify strong candidates, helping to reduce time-to-hire while improving hiring quality. AI-prompted interview questions focused on skills can support more relevant and structured conversations while greater transparency across interview panelists can create better alignment throughout the evaluation process. In addition, AI-supported feedback collection can make it easier for interviewers at 麻豆原创 to capture timely, consistent insights, enabling its hiring teams to make more informed decisions with greater confidence. 

Recruiter perspective

Recruiters are often bogged down by manual tasks, such as outreach, prospect identification, and candidate screening, making it nearly impossible for them to step into the role of a trusted advisor. With SmartRecruiters for 麻豆原创 SuccessFactors, recruiters can experience automated internal and external prospect identification, personalized outreach and prioritization of candidates, and, therefore, the ability to focus on higher value-add advisory and relationship management.

鈥淚t鈥檚 going to allow the recruiters to focus on relationship management with candidates and hiring managers, really challenging the feedback of how well the interview panel measures skills proficiency,鈥� Goldstein said.

Bringing AI into the candidate journey

A key to the successful delivery of these benefits is SmartRecruiters Winston for 麻豆原创 SuccessFactors, an AI-driven, candidate-facing agentic experience. At 麻豆原创 Sapphire Orlando, Karl Baert, global head of People Solutions for 麻豆原创, demonstrated how Winston can facilitate the application experience for candidates.

In the demo, he acted as a candidate applying for an open position at 麻豆原创, showing how through a natural language conversation with Winston, he completed his application by uploading his CV and verifying some personal details with Winston. 鈥淎ll that information is very, very quickly brought together so with just a few questions my application is done,鈥� Baert said, adding that 鈥渢here鈥檚 also a few checks happening along the way because we want to make sure the data we are collecting is the right quality.鈥�

Winston also collects feedback from the applicant. 鈥淢easuring the quality of your agent and what鈥檚 happening with it is important. It鈥檚 something that really needs to be actively monitored just to ensure that the information provided by the agent is accurate,鈥� Baert said.

鈥淭he implementation of SmartRecruiters is the foundation for infusing AI into our processes,鈥� Sagner-David said. But, she added, 鈥渨e shouldn鈥檛 just plan to transfer everything tomorrow, but ensure we鈥檙e liberating AI when it makes sense.鈥�

The next step

Currently, SmartRecruiters for 麻豆原创 SuccessFactors is being implemented into 麻豆原创鈥檚 HR systems for two phases of user acceptance testing, with the global go-live expected in September.

麻豆原创 bringing SmartRecruiters for 麻豆原创 SuccessFactors to life across its own organization is more than a technology rollout, it鈥檚 a glimpse into the future of hiring at scale: more intelligent, more human, and more connected. By combining AI, better experiences, and real-word enterprise rigor, 麻豆原创 is not only transforming how it hires but also helping to define what modern hiring can look like for companies everywhere.

What it cannot say is why this supplier keeps slipping, what resolved a similar dispute last time, or that the same supplier has a delayed shipment in logistics and a renegotiated contract in procurement at the same moment.

The reasoning behind enterprise decisions has stayed locked in human judgment, scattered across systems.

For 50 years, enterprise software has been an excellent system of record. Closing the reasoning gap on top of it is what enterprise AI was always meant to do.

From AI-first to AI-native

The first wave, the AI-first approach, added intelligence inside existing applications. A feature can summarize an invoice or suggest a journal entry, but it lives within one application and cannot see across the landscape. Three barriers keep it confined: It lacks business and process context, it sits on disconnected systems without a shared data model, and it lacks the governance to be accountable at scale.

Meanwhile, the pace of change is unforgiving. Agentic systems, new interaction models, and new ways of grounding AI in business data are arriving faster than most architectures can absorb. As 麻豆原创 CEO Christian Klein noted this year at 麻豆原创 Sapphire, 80% accuracy may suffice for consumer AI; it is nowhere near enough for the world鈥檚 most business-critical processes. Bolting more intelligence onto isolated applications will not close that gap. It only multiplies the silos.

So what does it actually take to move beyond isolated AI features and build an enterprise that reasons, learns, and acts as one, without sacrificing the trust, governance, and reliability the business depends on? It is the question CIOs, CTOs, and enterprise architects are working through right now.

The foundation behind the Autonomous Enterprise

It takes a new foundation, and that is exactly what 麻豆原创鈥檚 provides.

This is not a white paper that sits on a shelf; it is the technology foundation 麻豆原创 is actively building to bring the Autonomous Enterprise to life: a business where agents, orchestration, and data work in one continuous loop to turn intent into trusted outcomes.

The shift it enables is from AI-first to AI-native, where software operates across the landscape as a system of context: an intelligence layer connecting data, process knowledge, decision history, and semantics. Agents reason over the whole picture, not fragments. Every interaction feeds intelligence. Every correction becomes a learning signal. Value shifts from software as a service to outcome as a service.

AI-native paves the way for the Autonomous Enterprise: one system of context that understands disputes in service, delays in logistics, and contract changes in procurement all at once, and can act on them with full governance and accountability.

Philipp Herzig, CTO and Member of the Extended Board, 麻豆原创 SE

Crucially, AI-native does not replace what already works. It pairs two complementary paths. The deterministic path keeps the predictable, rule-based execution that compliance depends on. The probabilistic, AI-native path adds reasoning that learns from data and experience. One is reliable but rigid. The other is powerful, but without context and control, often confidently wrong. Context engineering, guardrails, and observability bind the two, turning raw capability into reasoning the enterprise can trust.

The architecture delivers this through four reimagined layers that together form a cognitive core:

• The user experience layer shifts interaction from navigating apps to stating intent, with Joule as the central engagement point.
• The process layer turns applications into capability providers that expose stable APIs, events, and data for agents to orchestrate.
• The foundation layer is where data and AI come together as the intelligent core: orchestration, reasoning, and model services on one side; 麻豆原创 Business Data Cloud and the 麻豆原创 Knowledge Graph on the other, with 麻豆原创-trained models, including 麻豆原创-RPT-1 for structured business data, sitting alongside leading third-party models in one governed generative AI hub.
• The platform layer provides the runtime, governance, and harness that turn stateless models into reliable enterprise agents.

It defines the cornerstone architectural building blocks for agentic systems across experience, process, data, and platform, turning 麻豆原创鈥檚 unique business context into a living system of intelligence

What does this look like in practice? A finance analyst asks Joule to resolve high-value disputes likely to delay payment. Joule does not act alone. It coordinates AI assistants, which in turn direct specialist AI agents through agentic orchestration: the assistant decomposes the goal, delegates to a finance agent and a service agent, and reconciles their results. People set direction; assistants coordinate; agents execute. Those agents draw on the right information through context engineering, find the correct data through semantic grounding in 麻豆原创 Knowledge Graph, and act within governed boundaries, routing only exceptions to a human. Each resolution becomes a decision trace that makes the next one smarter.

This is not theoretical. During the 2026 keynote at 麻豆原创 Sapphire, 麻豆原创 COO Sebastian Steinhaeuser pointed to life sciences customer Takeda, which is achieving up to 10% productivity gains, up to 25% reduction in revenue loss from stock-outs, and up to five percent reduction in safety stock through autonomous regulated manufacturing. That is what AI-native looks like at work.

Frontier models are available to everyone. Business context is not. Each resolved dispute, each corrected decision, each completed process adds to it, compounding with every interaction.

Trust is engineered in, not bolted on. A set of cross-cutting, 麻豆原创-managed qualities holds the layers together: integration, identity, security, observability, and extensibility, with resilience, compliance, and sustainability handled by the platform.

Autonomy only creates value when it is governed, so agents become first-class principals with their own agent identity, scoped to a bounded subset of permissions and audited like any enterprise actor. Harness engineering wraps each model with the sandboxing, memory, and guardrails that make it dependable.

As the paper puts it, the model reasons but the harness governs, and it is the harness, not the model, that determines the ceiling. Open standards such as the Model Context Protocol and Agent2Agent protocol let agents interoperate across the enterprise, while sovereign cloud options keep data residency and compliance built in.

This direction is being shaped with the customer community, not handed down to it: the architecture carries forewords from the leaders of the German-Speaking 麻豆原创 User Group (DSAG) and Americas鈥� 麻豆原创 Users’ Group (ASUG) alongside 麻豆原创鈥檚 own.

The North Star is a living document. Published openly on , it will keep evolving as the technology and the agentic ecosystem advance, and as customer feedback shapes the design. If you build with 麻豆原创 or build on 麻豆原创, this is your invitation: Read the architecture, push back where it should be sharper, and contribute. The same invitation extends to the wider 麻豆原创 Architecture Center site, where 麻豆原创鈥檚 reference architectures are being built openly with the community. 

Read the AI-Native North Star Architecture and 听辞谤 .

Beyond the architecture itself is a single commitment: building systems that learn rather than dictate. For 麻豆原创 customers, 50 years of process knowledge, governed data, and trusted decision frameworks compound into a new kind of enterprise intelligence that is reliable, transparent, and deeply human.

The Autonomous Enterprise will not arrive as a single product launch. It will be built layer by layer, decision by decision, on the foundation described here, one grounded interaction at a time.

is head of the Office of the CTO at 麻豆原创.
is vice president of the Office of the CTO at 麻豆原创.

AI works when the foundation is right 

The energy and utilities sector is investing heavily in AI. Business聽leaders worldwide are embracing artificial intelligence to increase efficiency, unlock new business models, and prepare for the energy transition. A successful proof of concept is often the first milestone鈥攂ut it marks only the beginning. The聽real challenge聽lies in scaling pilot projects across the entire听辞谤ganization.聽

In this context, the time and effort聽required聽for a full implementation聽is聽frequently聽underestimated. Around six months are needed to build a robust data foundation. A further聽12聽months pass before initial results manifest in the form of a measurable return on investment. Large-scale rollout can take another three years. The reasons for this are manifold:聽

• Unrealistic expectations: Many people use AI in their daily lives for simple tasks and expect similarly seamless effects in complex enterprise environments. 
• Legacy infrastructure: Historically grown system landscapes cannot be transformed overnight. 
• Regulatory complexity: In regulated industries such as electricity, gas, and water supply, compliance requirements are particularly high. They must be factored into every architectural decision from the very beginning. 
• Lack of AI-specific talent: What is needed are people who genuinely understand both the business and AI. This bridge between IT and the business side will become increasingly important in the future. 
• Organizational聽change management:聽Technology alone is not enough. Organizational transformation is and聽remains聽the decisive success factor.聽

From AI hype to real value 

Building a new application is聽only the first聽step.聽On the path to scaling, lifecycle management, identity and access management, security, compliance, and governance must all be consistently taken into account.聽Release management, testing, and continuous improvement processes add further complexity.聽鈥淭he聽companies聽that聽invest in the right foundation today will benefit from AI to its full extent tomorrow,鈥� says Andre Bechtold,聽president and聽head of 麻豆原创 Industries & Experiences.聽

For companies, this means overcoming fragmented data silos and developing an integrated data strategy. Legacy systems must be integrated into a modern data and AI platform on which AI models can genuinely create value. Torsten Welte,聽head of Energy & Natural Resources Industries聽at 麻豆原创,聽summarizes聽it as follows:聽“AI is fundamentally transforming the energy industry. The business must understand what is technologically possible. And IT must understand what the business needs.”听

聽can聽provide聽the聽essential foundation for this. AI is already natively embedded in the suite in the form of Joule. This聽can open up聽concrete use cases for the energy industry:聽in the area of asset management and predictive maintenance, utilities聽can聽proactively manage assets and grids before disruptions occur. The Utilities Customer Self-Service Agent, in turn, enables 24/7 self-service for customers and can reduce service costs by up to 90%.聽

Distributed energy requires intelligent networking 

The topic of聽distributed聽energy聽resources (DER) remains of聽central importance. In the past, energy flowed in only one direction: from the power plant to consumers. In the future, it will be bidirectional. Consumers聽that聽generate their own energy will actively feed it back into the grid.聽

DER聽describes precisely聽this principle: the generation of electricity through millions of decentralized resources such as solar panels, EV chargers, heat pumps, and battery storage systems聽by聽consumers and so-called聽prosumers. These assets generate vast amounts of data. Their orchestration聽represents聽one of the key challenges of the energy transition.聽

The 聽solution聽provides a platform聽for聽a聽single source聽of truth: technical assets, commercial contracts, and customer data are brought together in a coherent data model. This helps create the foundation for new business models such as smart tariffs, dynamic pricing, energy sharing, and demand response.

麻豆原创 consistently relies on a growing partner network built around its own data platform. Markus Bechmann,聽global VP and聽co-head聽of聽Industry Business Unit Utilities聽at 麻豆原创, describes it this聽way:聽“Dynamic pricing and smart tariffs are no longer distant concepts.聽They聽are the business models聽of聽tomorrow. With 麻豆原创, energy providers already have the technological foundation today to seize these opportunities.”听

麻豆原创 Experience Centers: experiencing AI, not just discussing it 

To make AI tangible, 麻豆原创 Experience Centers offer visitors the opportunity to experience AI in real-world scenarios beyond classic demo environments. One central example is the 麻豆原创 Energy Park in Walldorf. Using real infrastructure on the campus, 麻豆原创 demonstrates how the company itself is implementing the energy transition. This includes e-mobility, intelligent asset management, and energy communities. 

A new chapter for the energy industry 

The 麻豆原创 for Energy & Utilities Conference in Toulouse has once again demonstrated that AI in the energy industry is no longer a topic for the future. However, the path from pilot project to company-wide transformation requires more than technological enthusiasm. To meet the challenges of the energy transition, what is needed鈥攁longside technological innovation鈥攊s a solid foundation of data, processes, and organization.

As discussed in a new whitepaper, , this perspective is grounded in interviews with supply chain leaders across six industries: automotive electronics and software, agricultural equipment, chemicals, global technology, automotive supply, and home appliances.

Their experiences reveal where companies are investing, where adoption challenges remain, and where the next wave of value is likely to emerge.

Supply chains are entering an era of permanent disruption

Four structural forces are reshaping global supply chains simultaneously: geopolitical instability, economic pressure, demographic shifts, and accelerated digital transformation.

Since 2017, relative to trade among closer partners, signaling growing fragmentation in global commerce. , while labor shortages and digital skill gaps continue to constrain operations.

Europe alone could face by 2028, and 63% of companies cite .

Together, these pressures are pushing supply chains beyond the limits of the traditional 鈥減lan-source-make-deliver鈥� model.

Companies are shifting from optimization to AI-enabled orchestration

Supply chains are increasingly viewed as strategic levers for resilience, service differentiation, and competitive advantage.

Across all six companies interviewed, each is investing in at least three forward-looking AI use cases in planning alone.

• A leading agricultural equipment company has deployed more than 1,000 AI agents to support orchestration, scenario planning, and value chain visibility. A global chemicals company is embedding AI across planning and scenario management while emphasizing explainability and trust.
• A home appliance company is applying AI selectively to improve forecasting, transport optimization, warehouse safety, and logistics costs.

The common theme: organizations are redesigning how the enterprise senses, decides, and acts.

Resilience is now defined by decision velocity

In today鈥檚 fragmented environment, resilience is no longer about static buffers. It is about how quickly companies can convert disruption signals into coordinated action across sourcing, production, planning, and logistics.

• An automotive electronics and software company centralized electronics ordering across roughly 30 plants and redesigned crisis-management processes, reducing disruption response times by approximately 95%.
• A global technology company adopted a regional 鈥渢wo-leg鈥� supply chain model, using inventory strategically to respond faster to disruptions.

The emerging differentiator is not forecast accuracy alone, but the speed from disruption detection to execution. Visibility remains important, but visibility without coordinated action is no longer enough.

Trust and governance are the biggest barriers to scaling AI

Despite rapid interest, . The challenge is not model accuracy alone; it is trust, explainability, fragmented systems, and manual overrides.

• One global chemicals company found that scaling AI depended less on technical performance and more on whether users could understand and trust the outputs. This led to stronger human-in-the-loop governance and progressive autonomy thresholds.
• A major automotive electronics company requires transparent, traceable AI reasoning before planners rely on AI-generated recommendations.

The path to autonomy will be incremental: companies will first augment human decision-making, then automate routine and semi-structured decisions as governance, trust, and data maturity improve.

The next frontier is the Autonomous Enterprise

The Autonomous Enterprise is an operating model where AI workflows, contextual business data, and embedded governance work together to anticipate disruption, coordinate action, and continuously improve performance.

The shift is moving from isolated copilots to coordinated agent-to-agent workflows spanning the supply chain.

In autonomous production environments, supplier reliability agents can monitor vendor risk while workforce orchestration agents align labor capacity with demand. Procurement agents execute sourcing decisions, and production planning agents dynamically rebalance schedules in response to changing conditions.

A similar pattern is emerging in asset management, where alert-processing, maintenance, warehouse replenishment, and goods-movement agents collaborate to resolve operational issues with minimal human intervention.

The business impact is significant. Agentic AI has by 20 to 30%, , and helped .

Collectively, these improvements mark the transition from reactive supply chains to systems that can increasingly anticipate, decide, and execute autonomously.

Building the autonomous supply chain

Capturing this opportunity requires three capabilities that remain fragmented in many organizations today:

• Organizational intelligence: The ability to detect patterns, anticipate risks, and reason across constraints
• Contextual data: Trusted operational data, business rules, workflows, and policies that ground AI decisions in enterprise reality
• Embedded execution: Integrating intelligence directly into workflows so actions can move from recommendation to execution without manual intervention

This creates a virtuous cycle: better data improves decisions, better decisions improve processes, and improved processes generate richer operational data over time.

Importantly, companies do not need to rebuild the enterprise from scratch. Deterministic systems of record remain essential for control, compliance, and auditability. The real transformation lies in rewiring how decisions are made and governed.

Organizations moving fastest are focusing first on high-value, high-frequency decisions such as forecasting, inventory optimization, disruption sensing, transport planning, procurement workflows, maintenance, and customer-service resolution.

The bottom line

The future of supply chain management will not be defined by more digital tools alone. It will be defined by the ability to operate the supply chain as a connected, adaptive, and increasingly autonomous system.

For leaders who move first, supply chain will evolve from a cost-management function into a competitive differentiator, enabling faster time to market, stronger service levels, and greater resilience. The organizations that lead will not be those running the most AI pilots. They will be the ones using AI to redesign how the enterprise senses, decides, and acts across the end-to-end supply chain.

For more information about Autonomous Supply Chain Management, download the white paper, .

Hagen Heubach is chief marketing officer for Supply Chain Management at 麻豆原创.

Demand for professionals who can build, govern, and orchestrate these agents is rising faster than supply, making graduates with hands-on agent-building experience among the most sought-after profiles in today’s job market.

This year at 麻豆原创 Sapphire, 麻豆原创 laid out its vision for the Autonomous Enterprise, where AI agents manage and execute business processes end to end. For universities, this raises an immediate question: How do graduates get ready for a world where AI agents are part of daily operations?

麻豆原创 is now providing new no-cost offerings and resources for universities that give lecturers and students hands-on access to AI agent building, process management, and enterprise architecture tools. The goal is to help higher education keep pace with the rapid adoption of agentic AI in industry and prepare graduates for a changing job market.

Preparing the next generation of AI agent builders

麻豆原创 has put together a new set of offerings and resources that help universities embed agentic AI-related concepts and technology into their teaching hands-on. Three offerings, each covering a different angle of agentic AI, are now accessible at no cost for academic lecturers and their students:

• : Before building an agent, the process it will operate in must be understood. 麻豆原创 Signavio Process Transformation Suite gives lecturers and their students access to process mining, modeling, and process transformation capabilities. They can model and analyze existing processes, spot inefficiencies, and design improved workflows that include AI agents. Additionally, students and lecturers can now experience process modeling with 麻豆原创 Signavio Process Modeler as part of 麻豆原创 Learning Hub, student edition.
• : For students to understand where agents sit within an organization’s IT landscape, this is the tool. Newly available at no cost for academic lecturers via 麻豆原创 Learning Hub, student edition, 麻豆原创 LeanIX lets students model enterprise architectures and reason about what changes when introducing AI agents into an existing system landscape.
• : Lecturers and their students can access an agent-building environment from 麻豆原创 and leverage various enablement resources. These allow students to explore configuring and building an AI agent, either in a guided demo experience or in a live system hands-on.

What makes this especially valuable is how the pieces connect. Students can explore different components of agentic AI hands-on using 麻豆原创 solutions. They learn that building an agent is only part of the job. Understanding process context, architectural and governance implications is equally important.

Collaboration with educational institutions globally

麻豆原创 will also collaborate intensively on embedding agentic AI into teaching with lecturers from more than 10 universities globally, including:

• Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Hungary
• E枚tv枚s Lor谩nd University, Hungary
• Hasso Plattner Institute, Germany
• HEC Montr茅al, Canada
• Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany
• National University of Singapore Business Analytics Centre, Singapore
• TEC de Monterrey, Mexico
• Technical University of Munich, Germany
• Tongji University, China
• Technical University of Dresden, Germany
• University of California, Irvine, U.S.

The institutions will get exclusive early access to 麻豆原创’s latest agent building platform capabilities, benefit from agent building deep dives for students with 麻豆原创 experts, and from the opportunity to articulate academic needs with regards to teaching agentic AI related concepts hands-on to 麻豆原创.

鈥淲e want students to work with the same tools and scenarios that companies are using right now,鈥� Dr. Katharina Schaefer, head of Academic Partnerships at 麻豆原创, said. 鈥淏y giving lecturers free access to our agent-building resources, we make it easy for them to bring that reality into their courses. Students who build AI agents on real enterprise processes during their studies will have a head start when they enter the job market.鈥�

For faculty, the practical element is what counts. Students do not just read about AI agents in a textbook. They build them on real systems with real constraints.

“What excited me is that students get to work with enterprise-grade tools, thanks to this new platform,” said Prof. Jes煤s Aguilar-Gonzalez, TEC de Monterrey. “Students from our School of Engineering & Sciences build agents connected to real business processes and have to think about architecture and governance. That is much closer to what they will face in their first job than any textbook exercise.”

What sets this apart is its enterprise context: Agentic AI is taught in connection with business processes and the system landscape that supports them, so students learn how AI fits into real operations rather than experimenting in isolation.

Building the workforce of the future

As part of the , 麻豆原创 has been partnering with more than 2,800 educational institutions for decades to enable students to learn, research, and innovate with business applications and technology. With these offerings, 麻豆原创 supports students in developing sought-after 麻豆原创 skills, preparing them for job opportunities worldwide.

Ready to bring agentic AI into your classroom? Visit the or reach out via universityalliances@sap.com to get started.

He mentioned driverless cars in San Francisco, autonomous drones conducting warfare, and robots that are trained to care for humans as real humans would. Speaking at the recent TAC Insights sponsored conference featuring , Weber admitted he finds it all rather scary, but also very exciting.

For an energy company operating critical infrastructure, this pace of technological change is not just fascinating or frightening鈥攊t creates a responsibility to adopt innovation in a controlled, resilient, and purpose鈥慸riven way.

Riding the waves

Weber sees these developments as a continuation of various “big waves” of technology that keep touching our hearts and minds as they shape the world around us. Who can imagine the world without the internet? Who can deny that the mobile phone didn鈥檛 revolutionize the consumption of IT when people started expecting the same ease of use in the workplace?

鈥淎I is creating the same response,” Weber explained. “ChatGPT makes my life easier at home solving gardening issues, so I expect it to make my life easier at work.鈥�

One of E.ON鈥檚 biggest challenges is closing the widening gap between the rapid pace of technological innovation in the outside world and the organization鈥檚 internal ability, shaped by its structure and DNA, to absorb and implement these changes effectively.

This tension became evident when leadership questioned whether sustained IT spending at large scale was justifiable. It soon became clear that continuous investment is the price of system stability, affordability, and resilience in a digitized energy system if E.ON is serious about becoming the leading playmaker in Europe鈥檚 green energy transformation.

To achieve this ambition, the company has defined three strategic priorities鈥攇rowth, sustainability, and digitalization鈥攔ecognizing that falling behind in digital capabilities would carry far greater long-term costs.

鈥淏ringing the system up to speed requires internal readiness. It means we must think deeply about investments, prioritization, and most importantly, people and culture,鈥� said Weber. 鈥淥ne thing is sure: we won鈥檛 be going back to what was normal speed before.鈥�

Becoming strategic

E.ON operates across three domains: energy grid, customer solutions, and energy infrastructure solutions. 聽This broad scope creates a high level of operational complexity, requiring scalable, transparent, and collaborative ways of working across the organization.

To meet these challenges, E.ON is strengthening its internal capabilities and investing in its people. By expanding in-house expertise, the company has welcomed over 1,000 specialists, including more than 500 in data and 300 in cybersecurity, fostering greater ownership, collaboration, and innovation across the organization.

This move reflects a broader philosophy. IT is no longer just a support function; it is foundational to pioneering the energy transition and delivering competitive advantage.

As E.ON鈥檚 transformation unfolds against a backdrop of rapid technological evolution, AI is at the heart of the current inflection point. Technologies like AI-powered assistants and automation tools are not novelties; they are actively redefining how customers interact with services. E.ON recognizes this shift and is embedding advanced technologies directly into its core systems, rather than treating them as add-ons.

Closing the gap

Weber explained that digital transformation at E.ON means putting the right technology into the core of the business to better serve its 47 million customers.

It starts with platform standardization, followed by cloud ERP transformation and the 麻豆原创 S/4HANA migration. Instead of building fragmented custom solutions, this strategy allows the company to integrate leading technologies into a cohesive architecture, ensuring scalability while avoiding unnecessary complexity. These basic investments in foundational infrastructure have delivered tangible results, including an 77% reduction in IT downtime within five years.

A key lesson from E.ON鈥檚 journey is the importance of embedding digital capabilities into the heart of operations. 鈥淲e鈥檝e moved away from isolated innovation hubs such as digital labs or experimental ‘garages’ in favor of integrating digital tools directly into business processes,鈥� Weber explained.

While innovation is essential, E.ON places equal emphasis on governance and control. Managing a digital ecosystem at this scale requires strong oversight to ensure security, consistency, and cost discipline. The company implemented centralized governance structures, including standardized contracting and unified IT system management to help maintain control without stifling innovation.

Equally important is investment in people. Through targeted training and capacity building initiatives, employees are empowered to turn new technologies into measurable business impact.

Harnessing AI

As with many companies, AI is at the center of E.ON鈥檚 forward-looking strategy, but the company is approaching it with deliberate caution. Rather than rushing to build proprietary platforms, E.ON is leveraging partnerships with established technology providers while maintaining flexibility in its IT portfolio. This approach allows the company to explore the potential of AI in customer service automation, predictive maintenance, and operational optimization without overcommitting to unproven solutions.

鈥淚n essence, our experience highlights a broader truth about digital transformation,鈥� said the IT expert. 鈥淪uccess really depends on balance. We absolutely must push innovation forward, but not at the expense of stability, cyber security or governance.鈥�

Equally, digital tools alone are not enough. Without proper training and alignment with business needs, even the most advanced technologies can fail to deliver value. E.ON addresses this through a “BizDevOps” mindset, ensuring that digital initiatives are an integral part of business goals and supported by the right capabilities.

In summary, E.ON鈥檚 transformation illustrates what it takes to modernize at scale in a complex, highly regulated industry. By doubling down on IT investment, bringing expertise in house, and adopting a disciplined yet forward-looking approach to innovation, the company has positioned itself for the future of energy.

The result is not only improved system performance or reduced downtime. It鈥檚 a fundamental shift in how technology drives business success, turning technology into a cornerstone of making new energy work鈥攔eliably, affordably, and at scale.

What made the event distinctive was its candor. Customers did not come to present polished success stories. They came to compare realities. And those realities were refreshingly honest.

Why direct procurement is hitting a breaking point

The pressure on direct procurement is not coming from one direction. Geopolitical instability and accelerating technological change are forcing sourcing decisions earlier in the product lifecycle, at precisely the moment when many organizations are least equipped to act. Meanwhile, institutional knowledge is leaving faster than systems are modernizing. The experienced individuals who once held fragile processes together are retiring or moving on, and the systems meant to replace that knowledge are not yet ready.

The result is an operating model that prevents procurement leaders from influencing value at the moments that matter most. Several customers described a tension they are actively dealing with. Sourcing is being pulled upstream into design and development, while the tools and processes that support it are still anchored downstream.

What customers shared about their reality

While all participants operate with a strong 麻豆原创 footprint, spanning and , many acknowledged that direct materials sourcing remains fragmented and disconnected from the digital core. The picture they described was familiar but worth stating plainly: engineers, buyers, and suppliers still collaborating through e-mail, local tools, and disconnected applications; there’s an overreliance on a small number of experienced individuals to make things work; and multiple ERP landscapes run in parallel, with direct sourcing living largely outside all of them.

One observation stood out clearly. The real friction is not the sourcing events themselves. It is the handoffs, the gaps between systems and teams where decisions get made too late, data is reconciled manually, and no single digital thread connects product intent to sourcing execution.

In other words, the process functions, but it functions in silos.

Participants also noted that traditional indirect source-to-pay approaches simply do not support direct materials adequately. They lack native support for procurement embedded in new product development, sourcing scenarios that evolve with engineering change, demand aggregation across programs, and contracts treated as executable objects rather than static documents. That last point came up repeatedly, particularly the need to treat contracts as executable objects. This is also where the add-on in 麻豆原创 S/4HANA is starting to resonate more strongly in ongoing customer discussions.

Where customers are focusing next

What emerged from the discussions wasn鈥檛 a long list of priorities, but a firm shift in where companies are focusing their efforts.

Moving sourcing upstream into product development鈥攔ather than reacting after design decisions are already locked鈥攚as a consistent theme. So was reducing dependency on hero buyers: individuals whose personal expertise and relationships are currently holding critical processes together.

Commodity volatility and renegotiations also came up as structural challenges, not one-time events. Organizations want to handle these systematically rather than heroically. And several participants raised the reality of managing multi-year 麻豆原创 S/4HANA journeys without stalling progress in the meantime鈥攁 genuine tension that demands honest road map planning.

While the direction is widely understood, most organizations do not yet have the setup to execute against it at scale.

These priorities help explain why customers are increasingly adopting the 麻豆原创 Ariba direct materials sourcing add-on alongside , , and 鈥攃apabilities that together can support the connected execution model direct procurement actually requires.

How AI fits into direct procurement

AI generated significant interest, but expectations were measured and, I would say, appropriately so.

The consistent message was this: AI only matters once the fundamentals are addressed. Agent-based capabilities depend on clean processes and consistent data. Without a unified digital thread across product design, sourcing, contracting, and execution, AI does not generate insight鈥攊t amplifies noise.

Leaders also expressed clear skepticism toward black-box automation. They want AI that is explainable and embedded directly into sourcing, negotiation, and execution workflows, not layered on top of broken processes and presented as a fix.

This thinking aligns closely with 麻豆原创鈥檚 vision for the Autonomous Enterprise, introduced at 麻豆原创 Sapphire just weeks after our Walldorf discussions. The vision anchors AI agents directly in transactional business processes, data, and governance鈥攅xactly what customers said they needed before they could trust AI in direct procurement environments. Hearing them articulate that requirement so clearly, before the announcement, felt like meaningful validation.

Where this is all heading

The Walldorf roundtable confirmed a clear trajectory. Direct procurement organizations are moving away from heroics and spreadsheets and toward system-led execution. They are aligning sourcing transformation with their 麻豆原创 S/4HANA road maps and preparing their organizations鈥攏ot just their systems鈥攆or a future where AI supports decision-making across the full procurement lifecycle.

Direct procurement, seen through this lens, is not a standalone transformation. It is a foundational building block. Connecting product, sourcing, contracts, and execution through a single digital thread is what enables AI to operate accurately, compliantly, and at scale. That connection has to exist before any of the more ambitious automation goals become realistic.

For 麻豆原创, conversations like the one in Walldorf directly inform our product direction and investment priorities. There is no substitute for sitting in a room with people navigating these challenges every day, without a script.

What was clear in Walldorf is that the direction is no longer in question for participating organizations. The challenge now lies in execution and in how quickly organizations can move from fragmented, person-dependent processes to cohesive models that reflect how direct procurement operates today.

Karolina Bombardelli is global go-to-market lead for Direct Procurement at 麻豆原创.