Dive Brief:
- SAP continues to position its AI strategy as central to its value proposition, highlighting both the changes it’s seeing for customers and for its own employees during its Q2 earnings call last week.
- SAP’s cloud revenue grew 24% in Q2, executives said during the company’s earnings call Thursday, a strong quarter despite fears that AI could disrupt the business. CEO Christian Klein cited ERP migrations as a driver for growth. Overall revenue was up 11%, to $11.24 billion, despite a slight decline in services revenue as the company reallocates consultants to build agents and grow AI adoption amid a sharper focus on its enterprise AI offerings, Klein said.
- “The autonomous enterprise is anchored in AI agents that can run end-to-end business processes accurately, compliantly and cost effectively and always with the human in the loop,” Klein said during the call.
Dive Insight:
SAP has been charging ahead on its AI investments — both for its customers and its internal operations — as its cloud business continues to grow. Business AI has become core to the vendor’s strategy, Klein told investors during the company’s Q1 2026 earnings call in April.
The company launched an enterprise offering called SAP Business AI Platform at its annual Sapphire conference in May, including Autonomous Suite, which sits atop the platform and adds AI agents to existing SAP business applications to automate end-to-end processes.
“The reality for many enterprises today is that [large language models] don’t understand business data, processes and governance,” Klein said during Thursday’s call. “AI token spend doesn’t mirror outcomes. Lock-in to single frontier vendors is a growing concern and AI sovereignty is becoming more important.”
Klein cited recent acquisitions that target customer data landscapes as being central to advancing its AI strategy, including data lakehouse platform Dremio and data management provider Reltio for bringing SAP and non-SAP data together and for governing it, providing end-to-end management of AI agents as they’re used across a company’s workflow.
The company has also expanded and added new partnerships geared toward enabling its enterprise AI efforts, including with Google Cloud and Microsoft to unlock agent-to-agent interoperability. It’s also expanded its partnership with Snowflake to allow data integration with SAP Business Data Cloud, and with Nvidia to provide the security layer by embedding OpenShell for SAP AI agents in the SAP Business AI Platform.
The partnerships reflect ongoing efforts among tech vendors to foster greater interoperability and enable AI agents to access the data they need to function.
As they invest in their AI offerings for clients, the company is also working on its own AI transformation, Klein said Thursday. That includes a focus on hiring AI talent and reskilling current employees with a range of code camps and in-person training. The company has a goal of reaching more than 90% of its employees over the next few months.
“We are moving with full speed to turn SAP into an autonomous enterprise,” Klein said. “In engineering and technology, we are transforming our operating model from software development to building AI at scale.”
