SAP executives emphasized to an audience of developers, system architects and technologists at SAP TechEd in Berlin that they play a central and critical role in the ‘Agentic AI revolution’.
As SAP CEO Muhammad Alam, responsible for SAP Product & Engineering, emphasized, we are entering a new era: “the era of agentic AI, where AI is no longer just a tool but becomes your trusted team member.”
Together with SAP’s Chief Technology Officer Philipp Herzig and Michael Ameling, President of the SAP Business Technology Platform, Alam opened the keynote with the words: “As developers, you are not on the edge of this AI revolution. You are the revolution. And we are here to empower you for what is to come.”
Developers are “supercharged”
The three SAP executives made it clear that AI will not replace developers. “The truth is: developers are not going away,” says Alam. “They will be empowered. They will become architects of intelligent, connected companies. So the real question is not whether we need developers, but how quickly we can empower them to succeed and lead in this AI-native era.”
Ameling, Alam and Herzig outlined SAP’s vision, highlighting the integration of AI, data and intelligent agents to transform business processes and drive innovation. They also emphasized the importance of a unified data foundation and the use of advanced AI models and agentic technologies in the SAP ecosystem.
In this new business environment, speakers say, every company will become a data company and every user experience – from the frontline to the boardroom – will be AI-driven.
“As developers, you don’t just code anymore,” said Alam. “You design intelligent workflows and control AI agents to achieve real business results.” SAP’s strategy relies on empowering developers with applications, connecting them with data and “supercharging” them with AI.
SAP BTP is the foundation for AI agents
All of this runs on the SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP), which serves as the basis for building and managing AI agents – both SAP-developed and custom-built agents.
While SAP BTP acts as the engine, the Business Transformation Management Portfolio is the navigator that ensures technology is translated into real business value. It connects strategy, processes and people and transforms AI-driven potential into sustainable transformation on a large scale.
Alam identified three key themes during the keynote:
First, SAP continues to focus on openness. In this context, he announced SAP Snowflake, providing Snowflake’s full data and AI capabilities as a solution extension to the SAP Business Data Cloud (SAP BDC). This partnership corresponds exactly to the wishes of mutual customers, as Alam emphasized.
Second, SAP will provide developers with the most context-rich agentic platform – including a variety of out-of-the-box agents that can be customized. “Today you’ll learn how to build your own Joule Agents as part of SAP Build using low-code and pro-code tools in Joule Studio’s Agent Builder,” said Alam. “We are also standardizing AI agent interoperability with the agent-to-agent protocol, so your agents can collaborate securely across different ecosystems.”
Third, he announced SAP’s first Foundation Model designed specifically for structured business data: SAP RPT-1, pronounced “SAP Rapid One.” “Our relational pretrained transformer delivers enterprise-grade accuracy and scalability, outperforming both LLMs and AutoML for tabular AI – critical to building reliable, value-added agents,” said Alam.
“In short: We rely on an open ecosystem, equip agents with deep process and data context and give them the tools to strengthen AI and agents,” he emphasized. As the keynote continued, Ameling and Herzig explained these and other innovations and explained how they will help developers work more efficiently and achieve more.
SAP BDC and Snowflake
Ameling elaborated on the new partnership with Snowflake, which gives SAP customers access to Snowflake’s fully managed data and AI capabilities. Together with the introduction of SAP BDC Connect for Snowflake, Ameling said this will result in cost savings and a simplified data landscape. “This enables you to seamlessly integrate SAP and non-SAP data products between SAP BDC and Snowflake, so you can deliver and share intelligent applications faster through your favorite data marketplace.”
Ameling also highlighted SAP HANA Cloud as “the database AI has been waiting for.” With SAP HANA Cloud and SAP BDC, says Ameling, SAP offers the best business data fabric to overcome these challenges. “Without SAP HANA Cloud, you would have a separate database for each individual data representation, resulting in fragmented data silos that limit your AI potential. With SAP HANA Cloud, we have unified all of these powerful engines into one integrated, multimodal database.”
Building on this, Herzig emphasized that every company needs a strong database, because “AI is nothing without well-organized data… Our AI Foundation sits on this database, which enables you to not only use the latest AI technologies on the market, but also to expand SAP’s AI capabilities and develop your own solutions that are deeply anchored in the business process and the data.”
SAP sets new standards with a tabular foundation model
Herzig explained that SAP RPT-1 was designed to solve a key problem for developers and enable them to deliver significantly better predictive capabilities, enterprise-grade accuracy, and scalability to business customers.
Until now, says Herzig, “we had to repeatedly resort to classic machine learning to train so-called ‘narrow’ AI models that were specifically developed for each (business) task. This meant that you had to train a hundred different models for ten prediction tasks across ten different entities.”
“What we really want is to get rid of all these models and instead introduce a single large model that only requires a small amount of data to learn,” he said. That’s exactly what SAP RPT-1 is. “We believe that SAP RPT-1 is the most powerful predictive foundation model currently available,” continued Herzig. It delivers significantly higher forecast quality, is very fast and extremely resource-efficient.
Joule, Joule Agents and AI assistants
The SAP CTO also emphasized that the company wants to offer developers the most contextual agentic platform. He noted that SAP has already shipped 20 Joule Agents across various business areas and about 40 will be available by the end of the year. These agents can access more than 2,100 pre-built Joule skills. In addition, customers already have access to more than 300 embedded AI scenarios across product lines, including Joule Agents – with a total of 400 use cases expected by the end of the year.
Ameling added: “Our promise is simple: Build with Intent. You describe the desired outcome and SAP Build uses AI agents to generate code, logic and user interfaces for you – with seamless access to your applications and data while you stay in the flow… Joule for Developers enables immersive coding experiences to make intent-based development simple and intuitive.”
SAP goes one step further by providing extensions to work directly with VS Code, Windsurf, Cursor, OpenAI Codex, Claude Code, Cline and other tools in SAP Build. “You choose the tool and we meet you where you are,” Ameling said. He also announced that fine-tuned ABAP LLMs with ABAP 1 will be released at the AI Foundation in the fourth quarter of this year.
SAP is redefining how developers interact with AI through innovations in Joule and agentic AI – but also in physical AI. A warm welcome was given by Torsten G. Mueller, Group CIO and COO BPS at Sartorius, to explain how the partnership between Sartorius, NEURA Robotics and SAP brings to life robots that understand the what, when and how based on live business context. “This is really how we imagine the future, isn’t it? People and robots work together harmoniously – through Joules, through AI,” says Herzig.
Quantum computing
Looking to the future, Herzig ended the keynote by talking about another “computing paradigm that is still difficult to understand”: quantum computing. He clarified that SAP is not building a quantum computer itself, but is working with leading quantum hardware providers such as IBM to evaluate the potential of quantum computing for business processes and applications.
“We believe quantum computing will be part of your technology stack in the future, along with classical and AI-based computing, and we are integrating it into the processes and applications you already use so that it easily appears in your company’s workflows,” Herzig said. “And of course we scale all of this with the cloud. Now SAP is there for you – and you are optimally equipped for your business.”
