Most customer experience strategies start with the right goals: understand customers, respond faster, and build loyal customers over time. With a view to successfully implementing these goals, we presented Sapphire Autonomous CX as the central pillar of the autonomous company at SAP.
With AI, these goals are within reach. This allows companies to act faster, implement comprehensive personalization and explore new ways of interacting with customers. However, expectations are also rising. Every interaction now shows how well everything works.
When customers place an order or request assistance, their subsequent experience depends on what happens behind the scenes. Bad experiences are inevitable if pricing information is inaccurate, inventory levels are uncertain, or order processing is poor.
That's why the customer experience is now defined by implementation. It is not systems or intentions that shape the experiences that customers have, but rather the final result.
Agentic AI can optimize speed, intelligence and personalization. But speed alone doesn’t improve the customer experience. It simply reinforces what is already there. When implementation is aligned with processes, data and governance, AI leads to better results. If this is not the case, AI will make the lack of coordination noticeable.
Align customer experience and implementation
Autonomous CX brings Agentic AI directly into company processes instead of simply setting them up on non-networked systems. It connects AI assistants from marketing, commerce, sales and service in a common context across SAP CX, SAP Cloud ERP, supply chain systems and connected systems. Orders, inventory, pricing and financial data are defined once and used consistently, so decisions are based on actual operations.
At the heart of this change are AI assistants and autonomous agents. Assistants coordinate multiple agents across end-to-end customer-facing workflows, from product discovery to order fulfillment, interaction to service, and problem to resolution.
At Sapphire we presented assistants that implement this across the entire portfolio.
- Coordinate in marketing Content Assistant and Campaign Assistant understanding customer intent, creating content, segmenting, optimizing and implementing campaigns within governance controls.
- Link in the Commerce section Merchandising Assistant, Shopping assistant and Order Management Assistant Product search, conversion and order processing with actual operations.
- In sales, salespeople are through Sales Assistant, Deal Qualification Assistant and Deal Closing Assistant supported from the purchase signal to implementation.
- Improve in service Case Management Assistant and Service Management Assistant the processing of cases and the quality of service. Additional assistants are used here that were developed for self-service, HR service and accounts receivable workflows.
AI-supported product search and interaction, aligned with the reality in the company
SAP's collaboration with Google follows the same principle: combining AI-supported product search and customer interaction with implementation.
Together, SAP and Google are focusing on three priorities. First: The latest AI models are coming, including: Gemini, used to provide a high-quality customer experience. Second, industry standards and open protocols are supported to enable interoperability across networks. Third: Seamless, personalized customer journeys are enabled across multiple sales channels and Google interfaces such as Shopping and Gemini.
By combining SAP-managed business data with Google's AI capabilities, assistants and agents can connect customer intent from storefronts, search, and AI-powered sales channels to SAP commerce and order processes. This ensures that customers are shown what the company can deliver.
This is also the reason why SAP Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) introduces and expands areas where SAP product data can optimize an AI-powered customer experience where customer intent is formed. This means the customer experience remains aligned to prices, inventory and order processing in real time.
Innovations in SAP Commerce Cloud
SAP is regularly recognized in analyst reviews, including the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Digital Commerce. SAP has been ranked as a leader here 11 times in a row.
SAP Commerce Cloudused in the largest companies, is now being expanded to medium-sized and growing companies with SAP Cloud ERP. The new one Cloud ERP edition of SAP Commerce Cloud offers a standardized, end-to-end approach, ensures less complexity, uses artificial intelligence natively and accelerates value creation. Through close integration with SAP Cloud ERP, it connects the entire process from product search to order processing.
For companies with a high level of digitalization, SAP is expanding the composable commerce area with new and modular services for shopping carts and purchase processing. These services are integrated into core processes such as pricing, promotions, loyalty, taxes, payments, inventory, sourcing and order management across SAP and non-SAP touchpoints. This allows companies to modernize their architecture with consistent execution.
In addition, SAP is expanding its partner network Vercelto advance the development and implementation of the storefront with optimized performance, scalability and modular customer experience in the front end.
Integrated in the payments area Unified Payments on the basis of Adyen global processing directly into the commerce flow to simplify integration and achieve higher conversion rates. In addition, SAP is expanding its Open Payment Framework to include pre-integrated providers such as Checkout.com and PayPalso that customers can flexibly select providers that are easy to configure and use.
Combined, these features reduce total cost of ownership, accelerate implementation, and simplify the comprehensive delivery of a better customer experience.
Turn insights into results with sales activities
Customer experience also includes sales activities. Here, teams need clear guidelines for the next steps and must be confident that these activities can be fulfilled.
We have in SAP Sales Cloud Introduced new innovations, including field service capabilities for retail processes at consumer goods manufacturers and other field service-related environments. These features provide rich mobile user experiences that can also be used offline. This makes it easier to plan a visit to the branch, record the activity in the branches better and control the implementation in real time.
Sales executives gain connected insights that are directly linked to pricing, inventory and order processes for consistent execution and better results.
Scale reliable autonomous service
Autonomous CX is strengthened through partnerships that expand implementation and maintain trust and governance.
Our partnership with Parloa combines voice and digital self-services supported by Agentic AI with service, order and authorization data from SAP Service Cloud. AI-powered automation can handle routine interactions with complete context. If human expertise is required, escalation to the service teams occurs seamlessly and without interruption. This approach allows companies to scale services without losing trust. It also ensures that customer interaction remains connected to the actual business processes.
SAP is also expanding its partnership with Amazon to scale AI-powered services across voice and digital channels. This enables faster and more consistent solutions, with service execution based on real-time business data.
Industry AI in action
We also present Industry AI scenarios that show how assistants and autonomous functions work in real-world environments.
Autonomous Revenue Growth Management supports trade planning teams and key account managers at consumer goods manufacturers with retail sales, with the scope also extending to the agricultural industry and wholesale. Industry-specific Joule Assistants provide AI-powered insights into trade planning and execution, helping teams identify growth opportunities, optimize commercial conditions and respond to signals faster. This makes growth easier to plan and downstream exceptions can be reduced.
Unified Commerce supports merchandising and operations teams in retail, wholesale and direct sales models.
Unified Commerce connects demand, inventory and customer data across all channels, with Joule assistants providing decision support on assortment, pricing and placement. This makes implementation more consistent and decision-making faster.
The next phase of customer interaction
Given these innovations and Industry AI scenarios, a clear pattern is emerging.
AI only offers added value if its approach is based on a common, reliable context. When customer experience and implementation are consistently in harmony, quick processing creates trust instead of risk.
This is how SAP is approaching the future of customer experience: as a coordinated system in which every decision is transparent and every promise can be kept.
By Balaji Balasubramanian is President and Chief Product Officer, SAP CX.
The CX innovations and scenarios for Industry AI presented here are expected to be generally available in Q3 2026.
The capabilities announced as part of SAP's Autonomous Enterprise run across SAP Cloud ERP, including SAP Cloud ERP Private.
Gartner does not endorse any company, vendor, product or service described in its publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's business and technology insights organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties of any kind, express or implied, with respect to this publication, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
Gartner and Magic Quadrant are trademarks of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates.
