The software sector in 2026 was under heavy pressure as Wall Street panicked about a coming “SaaSpocalypse.” This was the idea that AI based on Large Language Models would weaken traditional subscription-based business models. Billions in software market value disappeared within days. Enterprise software stocks were treated like businesses with uncertain futures.
Certainly, SAP’s stock is down. SAP is the largest provider of enterprise software – software used by big companies to run their business. The stock had fallen roughly 30% over the past year, driven by lower-than-expected cloud revenues. These revenues are a proxy for future growth.
Addressing the AI Threat Directly
SAP’s CEO, Christian Klein, addressed these issues directly at Sapphire. Sapphire is the company’s flagship annual conference, where thousands of business leaders, developers, and partners gather to hear about SAP’s latest offerings.
“Some time ago, when we started to prepare for this venue, I asked myself the question, ‘Will SAP actually be a software company in the future?’ There is no doubt that AI is changing everyone’s life, starting with my own life as a CEO. I use AI for all kinds of tasks.” But AI still makes mistakes. In business, an answer that is 80% right is just not good enough.
“According to a recent Stanford AI survey, almost every company is now using AI. But many see little value,” Mr. Klein continued. “Large language models are getting better and better at tasks like generating text or images, or in specific domains like writing software. All of these use cases are related to publicly available content the modules are trained on. But if you go below the waterline, beyond the level of sales tables, and into the real business world, you find out that none of these models are trained on your business data and processes. These AI agents also do not naturally adhere to governance requirements like your security compliance framework, your dataset privacy requirements, or your company’s identity and authorization rules.”
How Will SAP Make AI More Reliable and Compliant?
The brain of every company is the enterprise resource planning system. SAP is the largest provider of ERP solutions. Since 1972, SAP has “been developing an ERP with incredibly deep process and data domain know-how,” the SAP’s CEO pointed out. “All your governance requirements and customer-specific extensions are stored in the ERP. The ERP is the trusted system of execution running your company. So, how can we now infuse this deep business domain into our AI agents?”
Mr. Klein ran an onstage demo. He asked Joule, what they call their agent framework, to write an update on the business’s total year financial forecast based on the latest sales pipeline data, plus a forecast of what the supply chain could actually produce.
“The prompt is processed by a large language model, so far, so good,” the CEO exclaimed. “But going forward, the LLM now has access to the brain of every company, your ERP, to first find the right process from 1000s of business processes in your company, then with the Knowledge Graph, select exactly the right data from over 7 million data fields stored in your ERP landscape, and finally, before the outcome is shared, we check all your identity and authorization rules to ensure the outcome is not only accurate but also compliant.”
Let’s pause for a second. What is a knowledge graph, and why is it important? A knowledge graph is a system that structures and connects complex data into a network of meaning. For example, in the supply chain realm, it maps real-world entities (e.g., parts, suppliers, shipments, and locations as nodes) and their relationships (e.g., “supplies,” “routes through,” or “depends on” as edges). This allows a digital twin of the supply chain to be created based on the data, not based on what humans think the network is.
Graph databases work best when the data that is being worked with is highly connected, with complex many-to-many relationships. This is an incredibly powerful tool that should have been a standard part of enterprise and supply chain solutions years ago. We expect AI to find hidden links. Knowledge graphs are key for this.
At the heart of SAP’s Business AI platform is the context layer. “Here we infuse the deep ERP business domain know-how into the AI agent through our knowledge graphs,” the CEO continued. “Our AI agents now have a compass and map to find the right process and data in your ERP universe,” and to provide the agents with the pertinent context.
These graphs are being complemented with new SAP domain models. These models have been trained on SAP code to even better understand the business logic of a company. Further, SAP also has a contextualization solution called Reltio. This tool allows companies to create a single gold record for all their master data, end-to-end.
So, SAP is “building nothing less than a new SAP,” Mr. Klein proudly asserted. “We are bringing together LLMs with 50 years of business know-how stored in our ERP by merging our AI foundation with our business data cloud and business technology platform.”
The SAP Business AI Platform
The new SAP Business AI platform forms the basis for SAP’s vision of the autonomous enterprise, where agents will execute business operations, and managers can focus on more strategic issues.
SAP understands that large companies have heterogeneous IT environments. Agents must also understand non-SAP data. “That’s why we included our SAP Business Data Cloud in the context layer to build one semantical data layer across SAP and non-SAP” applications.”
For large companies, governance issues are critical. Non-SAP agents should be put into the SAP environment.
Philip Hertzig, SAP’s chief technology officer, was then brought to the stage to expand on SAP’s Business AI Platform. “Before we start building anything, it would be great to know what to build. What has the highest impact on the business? In the past, you had to do time-consuming research or AI discovery workshops. Now it is as simple as typing, ‘Show me my top three business challenges.’”
The IT behemoth has something they call a ‘process consulting agent, part of SAP’s Signavio solution, that goes deep into the actual business processes to diagnose the biggest opportunities. Once identified, agents can be built in the Joule Studio.
“It’s the place where we extend, build, and integrate AI experiences,” Hetzig stated, “like never before. Since its launch, customers and partners have built phenomenal things with the Joule Studio.” ABB now handles more than 15,000 RFQs automatically every year, saving them millions of Euros.
The platform allows companies to move from AI pilots to deployed agents much faster and more accurately than before.
Anthropic Endorses SAP’s AI Strategy
Daniela Amodei, co-founder and president of Anthropic, spoke via video link at the event. She announced that SAP is integrating Anthropic’s Claude model into the newly launched SAP Business AI Platform. No technology in my lifetime has ever captured the attention of business executives like LLM AI. And no AI company is more respected or has more buzz than Anthropic.
There is a certain irony in Ms. Amodei speaking at Sapphire. In February, Anthropic showed a product demo that illustrated how quickly they could build an enterprise application. This helped to set off the SaaS apocalypse.
“We build Claude,” Ms. Amodeo said. “The AI that enterprises trust most. At Anthropic, we build frontier AI systems, and I’ve learned that when the stakes are high, enterprises reach for the AI they trust. We’ve built the company around the conviction that as AI becomes more capable, enterprises need to understand how it makes decisions, and to know it will operate within the boundaries they set.
“Earning that trust has costs. We have delayed launches over safety concerns, and published research, even when it’s controversial. These are not easy decisions in the fastest-moving industry on earth, but we believe they’re the right ones to make.”
“Which brings us to SAP. The world’s largest enterprises run on SAP. And that’s exactly where Trusted AI belongs. By combining Claude with SAP’s depth and scale, we can help hundreds of thousands of organizations use AI throughout every part of their business.
“Inside Joule, Claude will power agents that take action across finance, HR, procurement, and the supply chain. This puts AI to work inside the systems you’ve already invested in, and the processes your people already rely on. SAP is a great example of a company that is bringing AI into the enterprise in a way that their customers can actually trust.”
