Dive Brief:
- SAP saw cloud revenue jump 22% in Q3 2025 despite uncertainty surrounding U.S. trade policy earlier this year, executives said Wednesday during the company’s earnings call.
- The growth marked the fifth consecutive quarter of high cloud revenue increases, SAP CEO Christian Klein said. However, it still marks a decline in growth from 24% in Q2. “For Q4, we are executing against a strong pipeline – which gives us confidence in accelerating total revenue growth ambition for 2026,” Klein said.
- The global ERP vendor noted a total revenue of roughly $10.5 billion for Q3 2025, representing a 7% increase year over year. The number is down from a 9% increase year over year in Q2.
Dive Insight:
SAP plans to continue to seek cloud revenue growth from its cloud ERP suite and modernization programs like RISE and GROW, attempting to draw customers toward system upgrades and SAP Business Suite services.
Alphabet, Ericsson, Lufthansa and Tapestry are among the enterprises that opted for SAP’s RISE offering in Q3 2025, executives said. RISE with SAP helps customers move on–premises ERP implementations to the cloud.
SAP’s cloud backlog – estimated revenue based on committed cloud contracts – rose 23% year over year in Q3 2025 or a total of $21.8 billion (18.8 billion euros).
“The performance of its cloud business is the most critical focus for SAP,” Forrester Senior Analyst Akshara Naik Lopez said in an emailed statement.
SAP’s cloud revenue focus comes as AI agents are taking industries by storm – capabilities SAP is also planning for.
The provider plans to continue releasing AI agents, orchestrating its network of agents across the company’s value chain via AI assistants to support specific individuals and functions, Klein said.
AI assistants can operate as the interface between an AI agent and a human. Klein said SAP is working with industry customers to co-develop and refine the assistants to increase business value.
“Imagine, for example, an AI assistant for supply chain management, supporting a planner to reroute goods, optimize inventories or connect new suppliers seamlessly,” Klein said. “Think of these assistants as team leads who bring just the right technical agents into the conversation from a pool of hundreds.”
SAP’s ambition is to accelerate total revenue growth through 2027, Klein said, adding that AI “is becoming the key enabler of our growth.”
A wide range of industries are pursuing AI agent capabilities, including global financial services company BNY and retail giant Walmart. BNY has 117 agentic tools “touching everything that happens in the bank,” said Leigh-Ann Russell, CIO and global head of engineering at BNY.
“Our agents have solutions, they’re working on different parts of the bank, they’re working semi-autonomously,” Russell said, speaking during the Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo in Orlando, Florida.
Russell said BNY has “digital employees,” which differ from AI agents. While an AI agent has a defined scope of work, a digital employee has its own login and works autonomously with supervision in the bank’s ecosystem, Russell said.
“We have multiple personas,” Russell said. “We have digital engineers. Our digital engineers are doing vulnerability management. They’re finding code that has vulnerabilities. If it’s low complexity and they know, they’ll fix the code autonomously and then they’ll submit that to the manager. If it’s high complexity code, they’ll let their managers know.”
