SAP has announced the winners of the Hasso Plattner Founders' Award 2025, honoring the most impactful innovations from employees. In the Scaling Innovation and Emerging Ideas categories, two teams particularly stood out with their AI-driven groundbreaking projects. Their solutions demonstrate how artificial intelligence is transforming business processes, decision-making and long-term business value.
Last week, the SAP Board of Directors announced the winners of the Hasso Plattner Founders' Award (HPFA) 2025 – the company's most prestigious award for employees. Named after SAP co-founder Hasso Plattner, the award recognizes teams whose innovation, collaboration and implementation create exceptional value for customers and shape the company's long-term success.
The eleventh edition of the Hasso Plattner Founders' Award also marks a further development of the award itself. With a revised structure and a strong thematic focus on artificial intelligence, achievements are now recognized in two categories: Emerging Ideas, which honors visionary concepts that open up new architectural directions and long-term opportunities for customers and companies, and Scaling Innovation, which honors innovations that have already proven to have an impact on a large scale.
A total of 254 submissions were received from all over the world. From this, 41 finalists from nine different countries were selected. Over the past few weeks, SAP News profiled the six teams that made it to the final round, showcasing the diversity of innovation in teams around the world.
The winning teams were officially recognized on March 26th at a celebratory red carpet event at SAP headquarters in Walldorf. SAP board members Christian Klein and Sebastian Steinhaeuser introduced the finalists and announced the winners in the Emerging Ideas and Scaling Innovation categories.
Winner in the Emerging Ideas category: SAP Cognitive Twin Enterprise
The Emerging Ideas category honors bold thinking and visionary concepts that explore the future of enterprise software. This year's winner, SAP Cognitive Twin Enterprise (SAP CTE)embodies this forward-looking spirit by presenting a new approach to how organizations plan, simulate and operate in an increasingly complex and fast-moving world.
SAP CTE introduces the idea of a constantly learning, AI-powered intelligence layer based on a continuously updated model of the entire organization. It brings together data, simulation and AI on the SAP platform to enable guided autonomy across functions and support the shift from keyboard-centric SaaS to guided decision-making and agent-based action.
As a constant observer of the business environment, SAP CTE evaluates an organization's position against expected trends and potential changes. It runs what-if simulations and delivers driven recommendations for SAP applications and data across finance, spending, supply chain, human resources and customer experience, with selective, low-risk auto-execution and human control over high-risk steps. In this way, it transforms ERP into an AI-native system of foresight and increases the intelligence of the workforce.
The solution helps organizations move from reacting to events to proactive, continuous testing of scenarios, anticipating risks and evaluating options. This gives them the information they need to make critical decisions and allows them to anticipate, shape and implement what's coming in a single, connected environment.
“Winning the Hasso Plattner Founders' Award validated the vision of SAP Cognitive Twin Enterprise,” said Natalia Aksakova, Strategy & Portfolio at Global Finance and Administration, on behalf of the team. “It reassures us that we are on the right track and gives us the momentum to bring the next era of ERP to life more quickly – with the goal of defining how organizations will operate in the years to come.”
Winner in the Scaling Innovation category: SAP Document AI
The winner in the Scaling Innovation category shows how groundbreaking innovation only becomes truly transformative when it is integrated into everyday business processes and used worldwide. The SAP Document AI solution has fundamentally changed how companies process and understand the enormous volume of documents that power daily operations.
Companies in all industries continue to face the challenge of the rapid growth of unstructured data. Invoices, orders, contracts, shipping documents and many other business documents still require significant manual effort in many organizations – with corresponding bottlenecks, delays and avoidable errors. The SAP Document AI team addressed this challenge by integrating intelligent document processing directly into core business applications, enabling seamless and secure automation of document workflows.
What makes this achievement special is not only the technological innovation, but above all the scaling in practice. The solution is deeply integrated into the SAP portfolio and is used by tens of thousands of customers worldwide to process billions of documents. By directly integrating advanced AI capabilities into existing workflows, automation became accessible – without complex integrations or specialized expertise. Companies can thereby accelerate processes, reduce manual effort and improve the quality and speed of decisions.
The award recognizes the team's ability to translate excellent research and engineering into measurable business value. Their work shows how embedded AI can move from the experimental phase to a reliable part of everyday business processes. By responsibly scaling AI, the team strengthens SAP's position as a leader in enterprise automation and intelligent applications.
At the same time, the innovation underlines a long-term perspective: the continuous development of document understanding and the growing use within the SAP platform show how scalable AI can become the basis for future innovations. The award therefore not only recognizes the impact that has already been achieved, but also the momentum for the next generation of intelligent business processes.
“Winning this award is a great honor for our team,” says Tobias Weller, Chief Product Owner and Team Lead. “It validates years of hard work, close collaboration and a shared belief in the transformative potential of AI to accelerate core business processes and create real business value for our customers.”
Celebrate innovation across the AI spectrum
The Hasso Plattner Founders' Award has always recognized the people and ideas that advance SAP. By recognizing both scaled impact and visionary thinking, the prize shows how innovation occurs at every stage – from early exploration to global application. It underlines the belief that long-term success depends on delivering value today while continually reimagining what is possible.
At the event in Walldorf, employees from all over the world came together on site and virtually to celebrate the winning teams and everyone involved who contributed to the implementation of the projects. Your work represents creativity, commitment and passion – central elements of the innovation culture at SAP. As the company continues to advance its AI-driven strategy, this year's winners demonstrate how teams across the organization are turning ambitions into concrete results, helping customers work more successfully, respond faster and prepare for the future.
The winning teams will also have the opportunity to present their projects to the SAP Board of Directors in 2026. In addition, the projects will be permanently recognized in the Founders' Exhibits in Walldorf and Palo Alto, the team members will receive a personalized trophy – and with the 2025 award year, personal in-person experiences will also return for all winners, which are intended to ensure unforgettable moments.
