Earlier this week, our team of SAP experts attended the 2025 SAP Sapphire & ASUG Annual Conference in Orlando, Florida. This year’s conference was once again a fantastic opportunity to hear more about the latest trends, challenges, and opportunities in the SAP landscape. We heard from business leaders across industries about how they’re using SAP solutions for better decision-making and keeping up with today’s pace of innovation. 

At this year’s event, SAP announced the integration of over 130 out-of-the-box AI capabilities across its cloud portfolio, including the embedding of Joule and generative AI into the SAP Business Suite. During the keynote, it was shared that SAP’s transformation prep services and tools can cut project cost by 30%, and that 40% of the world’s GDP is now influenced by companies utilizing RISE with SAP.  

SAP also announced it’s shifting the lens of RISE and GROW. Until recently, RISE was offered as a bundle centered around SAP S/4HANA Private Cloud, but now, it’s no longer tied to a single solution. Within the context of the SAP Business Suite, RISE has evolved into a broader framework focused on guiding customers through their transformation journey, serving as the default path for existing on-premise SAP ERP customers moving to SAP Business Suite, which encompasses SAP’s full cloud portfolio, including both public and private cloud ERP.

Likewise, GROW has been repositioned to support new customers, including best practices, accelerated adoption services, a supportive community, and educational resources aimed at helping organizations begin and advance their journey with the SAP Business Suite.

Below, we share some of our key themes and takeaways:

2025 SAP Sapphire Conference

1. Unlocking Enterprise-Wide Value with Artificial Intelligence & Joule 

Artificial Intelligence (AI) was again a hot topic this year, particularly as we heard more about its generative AI copilot, Joule. SAP has embedded Joule across all its major applications, referring to it as being “everywhere, everything, and everyone.” SAP expects every user to become 30% more productive as a result. Joule already has over 1,600 skills built in, and SAP plans to deliver 400 AI use cases by the end of 2025.  

SAP has released new developer tools to enable custom AI use via SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) and also announced new and evolving AI partnerships (NVIDIA, Google, Perplexity, and Palantir). 

We heard about demonstrated use cases for AI to automate and streamline common tasks across business functions, including report generation, workflow suggestions, queries, and HR interactions. Discussions highlighted a shift from “insight to action” to “reason and act,” encouraging teams to leverage AI to make data-driven decisions and put them into action.

SAP CEO Christian Klein also presented what they call the “flywheel effect,” leveraging data, applications and AI. Deeply integrated business applications within SAP’s Business Suite share a high-quality, context-rich data layer, which combined with AI embedded throughout end-to-end processes, provide momentum to the flywheel to continuously unlock more value.

We also heard more about “prompt optimizer” as part of SAP Business AI’s new AI Foundation to help developers create prompts more efficiently and reduce the need for prompt engineering. 

2. Value-Focused Journey to S/4 with RISE and SAP Toolchain 

There’s been a major mindset shift from major S/4 implementation projects to a more modular S/4 transformation journey, simplifying the path with RISE but highlighting the importance of ROI/lifetime value and change management considerations.  

Leveraging SAP’s Toolchain (Signavio, LeanIX, Walk Me, Joule, etc.), organizations can focus on on 1) reduced cost of transformation; 2) faster time to business value and increased business agility; and 3) faster continuous innovation. SAP BTP acts as a connective layer to enable clean core strategies, extensions, AI, and workflows across the suite of business applications, and Signavio is a key enabler to accelerate and de-risk S/4 journeys (discovery, benchmarking, transformation tracking). 

3. AI-Infused Supply Chain Focused on Resilience & Intelligence 

Resiliency and adaptability are key in today’s landscape of supply chain uncertainty – and SAP is keeping up. SAP provided demos on AI-infused supply chain scenarios that can detect disruptions, automate actions, and simulate cost/benefit tradeoffs (i.e., cost, time, and emissions). Language was largely focused on building an adaptable, intelligent supply chain to drive resilience in uncertainty and quickly react to disruptions.

With their announcement of new AI agents for supply chain management, such as Production Supervisor agent, Shopfloor Supervisor agent, and Maintenance Planner agents, organizations can take a proactive approach to monitoring and recommending actions. Additionally, integration with Palantir Ontology and Foundry platforms enables real-time visibility and advanced analytics in manufacturing and ops. With these embedded AI tools, organizations gain greater insights into their predictive analytics across logistics, inventory, and supplier risk. 

4. Holistic Sustainability with SAP’s Green Ledger 

Sustainability continues to be a hot topic for businesses across every industry. SAP has been committed to ways to enable more sustainable, cost- and resource-effective processes, and they talked about a few ways they do this. 

One is through SAP Green Ledger, an app on SAP BTP, that brings carbon tracking into the financial ledger so companies can manage emissions. Another is through its enhanced Sustainability Control Tower, which allows cross-functional ESG tracking with global frameworks. SAP has also pushed “green by default” reporting integrated into ERP and the supply chain.  

As a result, we anticipate seeing more companies shift from manual ESG compliance to incorporating automated sustainability with AI.

Looking Ahead 

The 2025 SAP Sapphire Conference provided another valuable opportunity for us to learn, connect, and grow alongside so many passionate, innovative SAP peers. It also shed light on what we anticipate to see in the SAP space in the near future.  

Businesses will need to move beyond implementation to maximize the value of their SAP investment. This means leveraging the full suite of applications and tools to drive value and quality (think Signavio, LeanIX, Walk Me, Joule, testing automation, etc.) and prioritizing a clean core strategy to more easily take advantage of new features and capabilities that are being quickly released. Understanding where there are pain points and manual processes today will be key areas of focus to further drive ROI. 

They’ll also need to shift to a more modular mindset – instead of infrequent, large-scale implementations, leaders will need to prepare the organization and teams for a higher volume of smaller, value-driven transformations. 

The ability to navigate complex S/4 transformations will start with strategy, process design, change management, and implementation. A common theme we heard from customer success stories was the attention given to the preparation and planning phase ahead of migrating to S/4 – not only laying out the plan for what your organization will do, but how it will do it and defining what success looks like. It’s essential to assess the readiness of your people, leadership, data, and technology to craft a holistic strategy for navigating the transformation. 

Further, partnering with a trusted SAP advisor with deep industry expertise – from life sciences, to retail, to consumer products – will enable businesses to make the most out of their S/4 journey and better align their transformation to overall business goals. If you’re looking for guidance, our team can help. 

To chat more about these key takeaways from the 2025 SAP Sapphire Conference – or other trends and themes shaping the SAP landscape today – reach out to us today.