At SAP TechEd 2025 in Berlin, a troika of technical executives unveiled artificial intelligence (AI)-driven features in the supplier’s SAP Build platform, disclosed more agents in its Joule AI assistance portfolio and pointed to expanded partnerships with data specialist companies, most notably and recently Snowflake.
These relationships betoken, according to SAP, a commitment to opening up its platforms to build a strong foundation for AI among its customers. The main theme of the event was “getting real” about AI.
Revisiting the “flywheel” concept SAP trumpeted at its Sapphire conference in May, Muhammad Alam, executive board member and product and engineering senior vice-president at the company, said: “Innovations across SAP’s unique flywheel of applications, data and AI put developers in the driver’s seat – where they belong.”
Michael Ameling, president of SAP Business Technology Platform, stated that the supplier’s in-memory, columnar database, Hana, is the “database AI has always been looking for”.
SAP chief technology officer Philipp Herzig highlighted predictive use cases, which are the province of traditional machine learning rather than large language models. He stressed that building AI-based applications “at scale, for large, multinational” companies is of a higher order than building small applications for simpler organisations.
SAP Build, the supplier’s low-code platform for enterprise application development and automation, now enables developers to use agentic development tools such as Cursor, Claude Code, Cline and Windsurf with SAP development frameworks, using Model Context Protocol Servers.
Visual Studio Code users will be able to access SAP Build directly in their development environment with a new extension, said SAP.
The supplier also said developers will now be able to build new agents grounded in SAP business data that can act autonomously based on changing business conditions.
SAP Business Data Cloud, announced in February 2025, has been extended to use Snowflake as well as Databricks and Google. The SAP Snowflake extension brings Snowflake’s managed data and AI capabilities directly to SAP users, giving them the flexibility to choose the right compute and storage for each data and AI workload, while maintaining governance, interoperability and business context, according to SAP.
The supplier also announced a capability in the SAP Hana Cloud knowledge graph engine that maps relationships across SAP database tables, columns and data models, revealing how data fits together. SAP maintained that developers will be able to see how their data connects across systems and uncover underlying business insights.
The supplier announced what it calls an enterprise relational foundation model, described as a new class of AI that predicts business outcomes rather than the next word in a sentence. SAP-RPT-1 is said to be able to make fast and accurate predictions for common business scenarios, such as delivery delays, payment risk or sales order completion. It launched a free playground environment for developers.
The company also pledged to equip 12 million people worldwide with AI-ready skills by 2030, through a partnership with online learning platform Coursera.
