We are currently experiencing the AI revolution in customer support.
From decades of customer support defined by responding to calls, tickets or queues, to the evolution of proactive support with digital platforms before the advent of AI, to the current AI-powered ecosystem that is redefining how support teams strategy, work and deliver solutions. AI-powered support anticipates needs, predicts outages, and provides immediate, seamless solutions at scale.
The most important thing is that this is a transformational and technological change.
Keeping pace with transformation
When customers undertake complex and ambitious transformation projects, be it moving to the cloud, scaling AI or modernizing complex operations, there is always an implicit requirement: systems that support critical business processes must function smoothly because the cost of downtime has never been higher.
Uninterrupted operations are essential for companies. SAP’s AI-powered support can anticipate problems before they occur, helping to keep critical processes running smoothly even under heavy loads. SAP uses SAP Business AI to prevent problems and ensure a seamless experience by avoiding system failures, platform scalability issues, and data or service overload. During peak sales periods during Cyber Week 2024, SAP achieved 100 percent uptime for SAP Commerce Cloud customers. The figures for Cyber Week 2025 show that we already have 100 percent productive time and improved GMV (gross merchandise value) for global sales events such as Singles Day (GMV of 7,108.72 million euros or an increase of 180.2 percent year-on-year, with 6,315,990 million orders or an increase of 46.4 percent year-on-year) and “El Buen Fin” in Mexico (GMV of 12,341.70 million euros or an increase of 13.18 percent year-on-year and 10,382,740 orders or an increase of 32.24 percent compared to the previous year).
Scaling self-services with AI
Structured knowledge and curated content enable SAP to develop AI and AI agents with a high level of trust. Today, over 82 percent of customer issues are resolved through self-services. This provides users with an immediate solution to their problems or the information they need to use, implement and continuously improve their SAP solutions.
AI for instant response and problem resolution
When it comes to instant customer support responses and solutions, AI-integrated services are making a remarkable impact. If SAP’s Auto Response Agent can provide the right solution with a high degree of probability based on the underlying data and information, it will save customers a lot of time and effort with this relevant solution. Additionally, the first-time resolution rate of messages automatically responded to by agents is equivalent to support interactions provided by humans.
Support for SAP Business AI
Supporting SAP Business AI is about enabling AI for customers with the right systems that support successful adoption. Because SAP offers AI capabilities across its portfolio, customers receive the appropriate support if they encounter issues early in their deployment.
For customers who are scaling AI across their company, we offer concrete processes and tools to support them so that they can implement new AI with absolute confidence. An example: The Incident Solution Matching service is integrated into SAP Joule for Consultants. It enables efficient retrieval of support information and eliminates the hassle of searching through extensive SAP documentation.
Empowering support engineers with AI
AI is not only transforming outcomes for customers, but also how our technical and expert teams deliver solutions accurately and quickly. They are relieved of logistical tasks so they can focus on support requests that require special attention. Thanks to SAP’s AI-integrated self-service offerings, we can resolve customer issues as soon as they reach us four out of five times.
AI-supported solution recommendations in self-services ensure that at least 10 percent fewer reports are created. This is a big win for the human-generated knowledge that AI-generated tools provide. Every third support report is submitted with a product component recommended by the AI to enable optimal forwarding and faster processing.
Since SAP is set up globally at different locations and therefore multilingually, standardized communication is of crucial importance. In around 10 percent of responses, support technicians use SAP’s AI-powered language optimization services.
But that’s not all. We have an agentic reporting solution, AI-powered SAP knowledge base article creation, and automated error categorization that cover use cases that help our engineers do their work more accurately and with higher quality.
And of course, SAP uses its own products and solutions and is therefore the first reference for our customers. Dr. Benjamin Blau, Chief Process and Information Officer at SAP, puts it this way: “This is “SAP runs SAP” in action. As customer zero, we validate every AI innovation in the complexity of practical use before it reaches you. We designed this multi-agent AI on our own SAP Business Technology Platform, including SAP AI Core as a foundation, and our Services and Support Data Lake. The Agentic Alert Solution is a blueprint for responsible enterprise AI that demonstrates the power and maturity of the SAP Business AI portfolio and delivers a better experience for customers through faster solutions.”
Will AI replace support teams in the future?
A short answer: no.
To illustrate this, let’s consider the example of an AI agent that automatically provides answers to customers. SAP’s immediate response and problem resolution are only activated when the system has a high probability of providing the correct solution. Our commitment to relevant, reliable and responsible use of AI helps ensure there are no real-world customer reporting experiments that deserve the attention of technical and expert teams. The deep trust that SAP has earned over more than 50 years of industry leadership, which is also placed in it by 90 percent of Fortune 500 companies, is the driving force behind this rigorous approach to AI.
What does this mean for our technical teams? Every step we take to improve our work with AI is about replacing humans. It’s more about freeing up time, energy and creative space so our professionals can focus on important tasks that require critical thinking and human insight. AI complements human expertise. Customers benefit from this blend of machine intelligence and human understanding, ensuring every solution is relevant and accountable.
It is also important to emphasize that SAP is a growth-oriented company. Using technology helps us deliver what customers expect from support teams. This allows us to continuously build knowledge and incorporate it into AI systems to enable intelligent decisions and also meet future requirements for AI-powered support.
It is true that with the introduction of AI into business processes, we are seeing job losses in the industry worldwide. But we are also seeing important new roles emerge that help us master the current reality. How many of us had heard of AI trainers or carbon accountants 15 years ago?
These are exciting times for innovation. SAP’s partnerships, such as our new collaboration with Databricks and Snowflake, enable developers to create real added value from business data and AI.
We are truly at the crossroads of innovation and transformative tools that can turn imagination into impact. SAP’s Chief Technology Officer, Philipp Herzig, sums it up perfectly:“AI is transforming business at every level, but it is people who turn transformation into progress. With SAP Business AI, we combine the best of human ingenuity and machine intelligence to achieve impactful results.”
Stefan Steinle is Executive Vice President and Head of Customer Support & Cloud Lifecycle Management at SAP.
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