In a full room, customers from some of the biggest pharma, food, and industrial companies shared their goals, wins, fears, and challenges about using AI to deliver business results. SAP Connect Day for UX in Newtown Square brought dozens of business and technology leaders together to hear from SAP experts about the latest embedded AI capabilities in SAP S/4HANA Cloud and use our AI-powered tools to build apps. It was a day of learning, networking, and sharing that left everyone energized. In this post, I’ll share what we discussed and where you can learn more about those topics.

 

 

AI in SAP Cloud ERP makes people more productive

In the opening session, VPs of engineering, Sebastian Steinhauer and Katja Zoch, shared SAP’s UX strategy and showed many new AI innovations that are built into SAP Cloud ERP. These complement Joule and give customers the option to use familiar processes and apps, but with the advantage of having the ability to harness the power of AI to get more work done in less time with fewer errors. Sebastian and Katja used multiple polls to see how people are using AI today and assess their readiness to adopt new functionality from SAP.

 

The biggest change since our last SAP Connect Day for UX in Palo Alto was a big increase in people using agents for workflows. Using AI to generate text or summarize information remain the top use cases.

AI makes application development more accessible to more roles

Next, Ian Quigley, who leads a PM team in the UX Foundation organization, talked about our approach to application development and shared the tools and technologies we use internally to build apps for SAP S/4HANA. Then, participants had the opportunity to use these tools to build an app with no coding. AI generates the initial app and then you can use a vibe-coding approach to edit the app to meet your specific needs.

One of the questions from the audience was whether a person needed developer skills to use these tools. To make sure the app is production-ready, the answer is yes. But for generating a very solid prototype, a business analyst, product manager, or product owner could certainly use them.

 

 

AI-powered assistants reduce repetitive tasks, freeing time for more strategic topics

After lunch, Conrad Bernal, product manager for embedded AI topics, showed a new approach for automating repetitive tasks. He focused on how SAP power users, who often perform dozens of iterations of a business process, can now automate common tasks, including some that span multiple transactions. After some background on the business need and a live demo, he led a discussion in which people in the audience could share how they might use this feature and what new capabilities they would want to see to make it more useful.

 

 

The amount of AI in the user experience depends on how much users trust the AI

Bastian Schiele from cbs Corporate Business Solutions had a session on “The next UI is AI.” He discussed how the limiting factor of how quickly companies can implement AI into their workflows is not usually technology, it’s trust. He reviewed four scenarios and explained how people are willing to use different amounts of AI depending on whether they are monitoring a situation, performing actions with a human in the loop, running autonomous agents that require human intervention only for handling exceptions, or using AI to bridge the physical and digital worlds. He recently published an article on this, which you can read on LinkedIn.

 

The future will blend new experiences with existing apps

The final “one more thing” presentation was the most popular and thought-provoking. Each of the SAP presenters showed some previews of what we are working on. Since two of the talks were on unreleased products that are still in the planning stage, I’ll focus on Joule Work, which SAP announced at Sapphire 2026.

The Joule Work demo showed how a text-based prompt allows the user to retrieve information as either a conversation or a screen that shows relevant content, even if it spans multiple transactions or even SAP systems. Of course, this sparked some great conversations about the future of work and how people will adopt this new approach to working with SAP systems.

Compared to previous Connect Days or Innovation Days that we have hosted, the questions from the audience demonstrated a much deeper understanding of how AI works, the various AI-powered options that SAP provides, and how they plan to integrate multiple AI tools into their workflows. Some of the questions included:

• How do Joule and Joule Work fit together and what should I use now?
  Joule refers to the conversational interface as well as the overall AI brand at SAP. Joule Work is the new interface that combines several ways to interact with SAP systems and the data that power them. Joule work includes several options to perform tasks in your SAP environment.
• Do I have to choose between Joule Work and SAP Fiori?
  No – both the Fiori application experience and Joule Work engagement layer experience are complementary. People will use both for several years, just at SAP GUI and Fiori have coexisted for the past decade. 
• Should we keep using and building SAP Fiori apps?
  Yes – We are continuing to build SAP Fiori apps for SAP Cloud ERP and keep enhancing the tools for creating SAP Fiori apps. As you saw in the application development demo, we will continue to add more AI to reduce the amount of coding required to create new apps.
• When SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition get the embedded AI features that are in Public Edition?
  We are working on moving most of the embedded AI capabilities to private cloud. Here is our current plan as of May 2026. As with any development plans or roadmaps, this is subject to change.

	Public Edition Beta	Public Edition GA	Private Edition GA
AI-assisted features in SAP Cloud ERP
AI-assisted enterprise search		x	FPS02
AI-assisted easy filter		x	FPS02
AI-assisted smart summarization		x	FPS02
AI-assisted error explanation		x	Planned
AI-assisted easy fill		x	Planned
AI-assisted task automation (Smart Helpers)	x		Planned
AI-assisted features in My Home
AI-assisted Smart Personalization (Cards)		x	Planned
AI-assisted Smart Personalization (Apps and Tiles)		x	Planned
AI-assisted task automation (Smart Helpers)	x		Planned
AI-assisted smart solutions for situations in My Home	x		Planned
Smart summarization and broadcast via email for executives	x		Planned

 

Thanks to everyone who made the day a success

SAP Connect Day for UX was a team effort. A big thanks to my colleagues in SAP Marketing, especially Rhonda Brown, who helped fill the room with local customers. ASUG’s Chris Mitchell also helped with marketing the event by announcing it in several ASUG newsletters.

Thank you to all the UX Foundation developers, architects, product managers, and colleagues who built the features we showed, tested the systems, and created the hands-on exercises.

And thank to you all the colleagues at cbs Corporate Business Solutions who set up the venue, managed the logistics, provided delicious food and made everything run smoothly.

Most of all, thank you to the attendees. Your energy, probing questions, and open sharing made for a great experience and helps us understand where you are in your AI journey and how we can best prioritize what to build next.

 

Next steps

• Register for the monthly SAP Fiori development roundtable call to meet other developers and architects who build SAP Fiori apps.
• Subscribe to the SAP Fiori development newsletter, in which we share updates on SAP Fiori elements, SAP Fiori tools, SAPUI5, and SAP Build Code every other month. 
• Visit the updated developer.sap.com site to see over 1400 tutorials. Thanks Thomas Jung and Rich Heilman for sharing this information with the attendees.
• Join us at our next SAP Connect Day for UX in 2026 in Walldorf on December 8.

 

On behalf of the SAP UX Foundation Team, Peter Spielvogel.

 

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