Introduction
ESG reporting software is moving from an emerging category to a mission-critical business capability, driven by regulation, finance-led operating models, and a clear shift in buyer expectations. Even as regulatory scope evolves, demand remains strong: organizations still need to maintain or expand sustainability reporting, strengthen data integrity, and prepare for recurring disclosure requirements.
At the same time, manual and fragmented reporting models are no longer sustainable. Sustainability teams continue to face growing time burdens, computational complexity, and error risk when ESG data is collected across spreadsheets and disconnected processes. This is increasingly a finance-led concern as well: CFOs and finance leaders are becoming more influential in ESG funding decisions and are placing greater emphasis on the integrity of non-financial data.
AI is raising expectations even further. Business leaders increasingly expect reporting processes to become faster, more automated, and more intelligent. Still, sustainability AI can only create trusted business value when it is grounded in governed, traceable, enterprise-grade ESG data. Without this foundation, AI-assisted reporting can accelerate drafting, but it cannot reliably explain, evidence, or defend the data behind the disclosure.
This is where SAP Business AI becomes central to SAP Sustainability Control Tower. SAP’s approach is not AI added on top of disconnected sustainability data. It is AI embedded into business processes, supported by enterprise context, governed workflows, and traceable data from SAP and non-SAP systems. SAP Sustainability Control Tower is designed to support this journey by centralizing sustainability data and insights, helping organizations ensure compliant reporting, embed sustainability into core processes, and drive measurable progress across the enterprise.
These latest updates build on that foundation. They strengthen the data, integration, workflow, analytics, and reporting capabilities that make AI-assisted sustainability management credible in practice.
Here’s what’s new in SAP Sustainability Control Tower as of Q2 2026:
Expanded coverage of pre-delivered regulatory scope
To help organizations accelerate their sustainability reporting readiness, SAP Sustainability Control Tower continues to expand its SAP-provided ESG reporting content. These enhancements support customers by providing additional value for ESRS metric coverage across existing SAP-owned and custom metrics.
Recent master data enhancements include new and enhanced dimensions, measures, and data points. For dimensions, new and enhanced content includes gender attributes, human rights incident values, grievance mechanism recipient types, and severity of human rights incidents. For measures, new content includes human rights incidents, monetary sanctions due to human rights incidents, and enhanced naming for the count of governance body members.
SAP-provided metric coverage for ESRS data points has also been significantly expanded. As of April 2026, SAP Sustainability Control Tower includes 200+ quantitative metrics and 650+ qualitative metrics, supporting organizations with a broader set of content for ESRS data-point requirements. This includes quantitative coverage across areas such as climate change, pollution, water and marine resources, biodiversity and ecosystems, resource use and circular economy, own workforce, and business conduct. Qualitative coverage spans ESRS 2 general disclosures and topical standards across environmental, social, and governance topics. Documentation is available in Help for SAP Sustainability Control Tower.
That growing catalog gives customers a stronger starting point, while still leaving room to extend the model for company-specific or industry-specific reporting needs.
Data collection process enhancements
Governed ESG reporting depends on clear ownership, timing, and workflow. SAP Sustainability Control Tower supports form-based data collection for scoped measures and metrics, helping organizations define how data should be collected, when it should be collected, and who should provide and approve the submitted information.
With the data collection process, users can define data collection forms and set up data collection instances to trigger workflow-based data collection for selected items. They can assign processors for a given period and define approvers to review submitted data for approval or rejection.
Recent enhancements extend support to qualitative metrics in form-based data collection. Users can group qualitative metrics within a single form, and when new fiscal variants are activated, existing forms linked to inactive fiscal variants are automatically deactivated. In addition, table headers remain visible while scrolling, making larger data collection forms easier to use.
The qualitative metric data entry experience has also been redesigned. Users can select from all available metrics and add data at the high-level corporate summary level or at a more granular reporting structure level. Relevant details are available in the reference section on the data entry screen, helping users understand the context for the information they are entering.
The reporting line is now also available as an organizational boundary in data collection. Users can create a reporting scope using the reporting line organization type when setting up organizational boundaries, then run “check for updates” in the Configure Data Collection or Configure Data Entry app to add the new entries to the configurable items list.
SAP Sustainability Control Tower also enhances integration with SAP Sustainability Footprint Management for greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions data. Customers can import GHG emissions data from SAP Sustainability Footprint Management into SAP Sustainability Control Tower while preserving native source granularity.
The integration helps eliminate the need for external data transformation and aggregation. Period type can be configured per integration scenario, with supported period types including monthly, quarterly, and yearly based on the active fiscal year variant. Data is ingested into SAP Sustainability Control Tower at the selected granularity, without forced transformation, and replicated to target systems using the configured period type.
Recent enhancements include a new UI control for period granularity selection and configurable period selection, including single-period and period-range options. Fiscal year variant support also helps enable more accurate period mapping.
The same principle of flexibility applies to the broader ESG data model, where customers often need to adapt standard content to their own structures and reporting practices.
ESG Data Foundation extensibility
As sustainability reporting requirements evolve, organizations need flexibility to adapt data models, extend content, and transport configuration across environments. SAP Sustainability Control Tower provides an open, extensible ESG Data Foundation that supports both standard SAP content and customer-specific extensions.
Customers can add custom measures across Data Provider Interfaces and add up to 20 custom dimensions for SAP-provided or custom measures. The content lifecycle for extension artifacts supports custom measures, dimensions, and metrics, with export and import via JSON file format.
Recent enhancements improve the content lifecycle for extension artifacts. Export and import are available in the Manage Metrics, Manage Measures, and Manage Custom Dimensions apps. Export selection can be based on naming conventions and includes dependent custom measures and custom dimensions to help ensure consistency.
Import supports consistency in the target tenant during object creation, and can now also update existing extensibility artifacts.
SAP Datasphere content coverage
SAP Sustainability Control Tower also keeps enhancing its integration with SAP Datasphere. Users can leverage SAP Datasphere integration to load actual data into the Manage Quantitative ESG Data app and to upload master data for reporting structures, such as business locations, legal entities, and reporting lines, into the Manage Master Data app.
The SAP Datasphere content package supports multiple Data Provider Interfaces, including accounting, corruption incidents, emissions, generic measures, general measures, injury, land site, people, resource use, water withdrawal, waste, energy, and removal reversal carbon credit. Recent enhancements include updates for emissions and people DPIs, as well as new content for removal reversal and carbon credit scenarios.
The next step is to make those connected data flows easier to apply in regulation-specific scenarios, such as the EU Taxonomy.
EU Taxonomy data integration enhancements
For EU Taxonomy reporting, SAP Sustainability Control Tower now offers enhanced capabilities to manage master data and measures data in a more integrated way.
In the Manage Master Data app, users can configure and manage master data and EU Taxonomy filters in one place. This includes managing company code values used by EU Taxonomy in the legal entity dimension, defining filters applied to SAP S/4HANA master data and activity data, importing master data and hierarchies from files, and importing master data and hierarchies from SAP S/4HANA with the SAP Data Framework.
In the Manage Quantitative ESG Data app, users can import EU Taxonomy measures data, including activity data and denominator data. The integration supports imports from files and SAP S/4HANA, with validation rules to check consistency against master data and filters defined in the Manage Master Data app.
Analyze ESG Data app enhancements
SAP Sustainability Control Tower continues to evolve the Analyze ESG Data app from a reporting experience into a steering experience. The app helps users explore ESG performance with more flexible analysis, personalization, and target comparison capabilities.
Recent updates introduce target-versus-actual visualization in charts for selected metrics, periods, and reporting structures. This enables immediate performance comparison without additional configuration.
Users can also benefit from a flexible chart-specific configuration model that allows independent control over metric selection, filters, drilldowns, chart types, reusable public or private configurations, default views, and embedded descriptions for context.
The multi-chart analytics experience has also been enhanced. Users can display up to six charts in parallel, combine chart and table views, and adjust drilldowns directly in charts. This supports faster exploration and side-by-side analysis across different sustainability performance perspectives.
Generate ESG Reports with AI enhancements
The Generate ESG Reports with AI app matures as a way to reduce manual effort while giving users more control over ESG report creation. Users can generate ESG reports using prebuilt templates and AI-assisted drafting to support timely, accurate, and consistent reporting.
When generating a report, users can preview or download the result as a PDF. For added customization, users can manually edit sections, and reports are now available in DOCX format.
SAP’s built-in AI assistance supports dynamic revisions. Users can select a passage and use the Revise option to receive suggestions to shorten or lengthen the text, helping refine the final ESG narrative with greater ease and speed.
In addition, each report can be generated in one of 20 languages using AI-based translation.
Planned features and roadmap highlights
Forward-looking statement: The following roadmap items are planned and may change.
Looking ahead to the remainder of 2026, SAP Sustainability Control Tower plans to continue strengthening regulatory coverage and embedded AI capabilities for audit-ready ESG reporting.
Planned topics include further coverage of ESRS metrics, reporting scope management with inbound interfaces for materiality assessment results, SAP Sustainability Footprint Management integration for energy consumption, unit of measure management, evidence management for data collection, availability of sustainability metrics data product in SAP Business Data Cloud, integration with SAP Success Factors through SAP Business Data Cloud, validation rules, SOC 2 certification and user experience improvements for the overall reporting flow.
SAP Sustainability Control Tower also plans to expand support for IFRS sustainability disclosure requirements. Planned IFRS content provisioning includes comprehensive IFRS coverage, compatible metric definitions that enhance the ESRS offering, and IFRS-specific metric definitions.
Moreover, SAP Sustainability Control Tower is designed to support interoperability across sustainability reporting standards. Within metric general information, customers can see interoperability between disclosure requirements across standards such as ESRS and IFRS, helping organizations address multiple reporting frameworks through a single reporting effort.
SAP also continues to explore AI-enabled support for sustainability regulatory readiness. The Sustainability Regulatory Readiness Agent is one of the planned agents, designed to help accelerate governed, audit-ready sustainability reporting by automating the assembly of reporting scope based on materiality assessments, creating data points for new regulations, mapping existing metrics, and proposing custom metrics where coverage gaps exist.
Stay tuned for more and check SCT Roadmap Explorer.
Additional information
For in-depth details on SAP Sustainability Control Tower, we recommend browsing the SAP Help Portal. For an overview of all new features and functions, check the What’s New section, which is updated with every new software release.
Stay tuned for more updates as SAP Sustainability Control Tower continues to help organizations move from ESG data to actionable insights, compliant reporting, and measurable sustainability performance.
