Flywheels, golf, robots that know your business, and the death of SaaS. That was SAP Sapphire in a nutshell.
Our team flew to Orlando and took notes during the opening keynote, where Christian Klein and his team laid out what’s next for SAP’s platform and strategy.
Here are the key takeaways from Sapphire 2025:
Keynote Day 1 – Suite-as-a-Service, Joule Everywhere, and the End of SaaS
1) Suite-as-a-Service is SAP’s new bet
Forget “Best-of-Breed” and loosely connected SaaS tools. According to SAP, that model doesn’t hold up in an AI-driven world. Their replacement? Suite-as-a-Service.
The logic is tied to what they call the flywheel:
- Applications generate business data
- That data trains and fuels AI
- The AI gets embedded back into the apps to make everything smarter
It’s a feedback loop. But it only works when the apps, data, and AI live inside the same ecosystem. Fragmented systems break the loop.
This echoes the same logic we saw at ServiceNow Knowledge 2025, where Bill McDermott said:
“We’re watching the biggest shift in enterprise architecture since the rise of the cloud.”
And that “the current CRM is broken” because we can’t keep operating with a siloed mindset and expect to meet today’s expectations.
2) Joule is the interface now
We’re entering a new era where the software works for the user (not the other way around). Joule is no longer just a feature. It’s the interface layer.
SAP showed how Joule, their AI agent, lives across the suite, handling tasks, surfacing insights, and coordinating between systems:
- Lives across every SAP application
- Surfaces insights contextually (“based on what’s happening on your screen”)
- Offers next-best actions, not just answers
- Connects with non-SAP apps like ServiceNow, Gmail, and LinkedIn (via WalkMe integration)
- Coordinates tasks across systems (e.g., generating an RFP from an email and pushing a purchase order through S/4HANA)
SAP calls this the move from “insight to action” to “reason and act.”
They describe this as a “super user” experience, where the agent handles complexity behind the scenes and users just see results. SAP also projects this could boost productivity by more than 30% this year.
3) Prompt engineering is over. Benchmark engineering is next.
SAP introduced a new tool called Prompt Optimizer. Its job is to rewrite prompts in the background, so users don’t have to worry about phrasing or formatting.
The shift is subtle but meaningful: Rather than teaching users how to craft better prompts, SAP wants to remove that step entirely and focus on what they call benchmark engineering, just tell the system your goal, and let it figure out how to get there.
One particularly interesting point: thanks to SAP’s multi-model support, Prompt Optimizer adapts your input to optimize for the model you’re using.
4) AI agents are heading into the real world
Possibly the boldest announcement of the keynote was SAP’s partnership with NVIDIA.
The goal? Extend the agent architecture into the physical world through robotics.
They’re testing use cases where robots, powered by Joule and SAP BTP, can handle real-world tasks like inspections.
“Robots that understand the business.”
These are business-aware robots connected to the same data, processes, and logic that power SAP’s digital systems.
In practice, that means:
- Robots integrated with SAP BTP and Joule
- Awareness of business processes (e.g., inspections, procurement)
- Real-time business rules (e.g., compliance, thresholds)
- Access to live data (e.g., sensor readings, service tickets)
- Ability to make decisions, not just execute commands
CX Keynote Day 2 – Resilience by Design: How Global Brands Are Rebuilding with SAP
Day 2 of SAP Sapphire was all about what real transformation looks like under pressure. One idea kept surfacing throughout the keynote. We are operating in a moment defined by global uncertainty. Budgets are tight. Pressure is high. Customers are demanding faster time-to-value. And technology is evolving faster than most companies can react.
In this context, the CX keynote focused on enterprise architecture, not as an IT initiative, but as the backbone of business resilience. Several global brands took the stage to share how they restructured their systems, empowered their teams, and simplified complexity using SAP’s suite of solutions.
1) Mercedes-Benz: redesigning at scale
Katrin Lehmann, CIO of Mercedes-Benz, opened with a reality check. When she stepped into her role, she found over ten thousand applications running across the company. That number alone signaled deep fragmentation.
The real surprise came from one specific process: source to pay. Their internal assessment showed a performance score of just 31 percent. Long cycle times, low automation, and disconnected tools were dragging down operations. Some of those processes were not even running on SAP.
To move forward, Mercedes used SAP’s intelligent transformation agents. These tools mapped their entire ecosystem—both SAP and non-SAP systems—and provided a clear view of where the breakdowns were happening. From there, they generated a transformation plan that was not just a tech migration. It was a complete redesign of the enterprise architecture.
In Lehmann’s words, this was not a lift-and-shift. It was a business-wide transformation that touched every function. And what used to take months of committee reviews and fragmented planning was replaced with automated roadmaps, digitized project plans, and a shift to a modular suite using SAP Ariba, SAP S/4HANA, and SAP BTP.
Mercedes is now using clean core automation and side-by-side simulations to compare old processes with future states. They are seeing up to 30 percent cost reductions and 35 percent faster execution cycles.
2) Phoenix Global: From chaos to control in just 8 months
The day’s most raw and relatable story came from Jeff Suellentrop, CIO of Phoenix Global. In his words, the company had grown too fast. They opened eight new sites in two years, but were still operating with spreadsheets, paper, and systems that could not scale.
That unchecked growth almost led to bankruptcy.
Suellentrop’s response was to make a clean break. The company dropped every legacy system and went all in on SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud. In just eight months, they went live and began digitizing every site. Preventive maintenance, AI-driven models, and efficient operations followed. They are now seeing millions in potential savings. But more importantly, they finally have control.
3) Mars Wrigley: The architecture behind your favorite candy
Will Beery, Global CIO of Mars Wrigley, and Praveen Moturu, Vice President of Enterprise Digital Platforms at Mars, brought a different kind of complexity to the stage. This is not a startup trying to modernize or a company racing to catch up. Mars Wrigley is a massive, diversified enterprise with decades of growth—both organic and through acquisitions.
From M&M’s and Snickers to KIND and Nature’s Bakery, their portfolio spans retail, health foods, and legacy confectionery. The challenge was not just scale. It was speed.
Their solution was a hybrid cloud model. Retail operations run on public cloud to stay agile. Core systems remain in private cloud for control. But the real advantage comes from how everything connects.
By using SAP’s Business Suite and a model-driven transformation approach, Mars built an architecture that lets them integrate new acquisitions quickly and efficiently. With over 200 applications already connected, they also invested heavily in change management and training. As they pointed out, implementing technology is not enough. People have to adopt it for the transformation to succeed.
The Bigger Message: Complexity is the Hidden Cost
SAP’s CRO, Jan Gilg, summarized it with a stat. In 2000, a company with 10 billion dollars in revenue ran around 10 apps. Today, it runs over 600.
Yet during that same period, global productivity slowed. From 1995 to 2005, during the ERP era, productivity grew by 2.6 percent annually. From 2005 to 2025, in the age of SaaS and cloud, it dropped to 1.5 percent.
This is the core of SAP’s argument. Adding more software does not create more value. Without integration, standardization, and architecture designed to scale, it creates silos. It slows teams down. It makes growth harder, not easier.
This phenomenon, often referred to as SaaS sprawl, is becoming one of the biggest hidden costs for enterprises. We recently broke this down in more detail in our article at Inclusion Cloud: What Is SaaS Sprawl? Causes, Challenges, and Solutions
4) What comes next: toolchains, AI, and real-time action
The keynote closed with a look at what powers all this transformation underneath.
SAP’s Integrated Toolchain brings together architecture visualization, scenario simulation, governance, and user adoption in one platform. It is aligned with the RISE with SAP methodology and is being expanded to include AI insights, new planning dashboards, and full lifecycle transformation support.
SAP is also doubling down on AI. Joule is now a central part of how users interact with the platform. SAP plans to embed 400 AI use cases across the suite by the end of the year, with the ability to build custom models through its AI Foundation and new AWS-supported services.
5) AI Agents now help you design your architecture
One of the most forward-looking moments of the CX keynote was the demo of SAP’s AI-powered transformation agent. What used to be a months-long, high-cost process involving consultants, manual mapping, and endless committee reviews is being redefined by intelligent automation. SAP showed how companies can now use these agents to analyze their current system landscape, detect fragmentation, and generate a target architecture based on SAP’s reference models—all within minutes.
With a single click, the agent produces a digitized transformation plan in SAP Cloud ALM. It includes timelines, scope, milestones, and technical dependencies, automatically structured for execution. This shift removes much of the friction that used to slow down major architecture decisions: “We were able to generate a target architecture with just one click.”
But the power of this approach goes beyond planning. The agent also enables side-by-side simulations, comparing today’s processes with potential future states. This makes it possible to evaluate architecture options not just in theory, but in terms of real business impact. CIOs can now see, before committing, how changes would affect cost, speed, and scalability. In the keynote, SAP claimed this capability alone helped Mercedes-Benz achieve up to 30 percent lower costs and 35 percent faster execution cycles.
More importantly, the agent continues to add value post go-live. Using transformed data and clean code automation, it runs test cases, monitors system behavior, and identifies areas for ongoing optimization. In a world where transformation is not a one-time project but a continuous process, this kind of adaptive, AI-supported architecture is game-changing.
The Final Message: Lead or Lag
Thomas Saueressig, Executive Board Member at SAP for Customer Services and Delivery, closed the keynote with a reminder:
“The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second-best time is now.”
The same applies to transformation. If you haven’t started, start now. If you’ve already begun, now is the time to scale.
Because when you combine:
- Unmatched applications
- Unparalleled data
- Responsible, enterprise-grade AI
You don’t just keep up. You lead.
That’s what makes a business resilient, intelligent, and unstoppable.
Transformation is no longer a project. It is the foundation of resilience. And the companies that get their architecture right will be the ones ready for whatever comes next.
But none of this works without people. Every speaker on stage, from SAP leadership to customers, emphasized the same point. Talent, change management, and continuous learning are what turn strategy into results.
At Inclusion Cloud, as proud SAP partners, we help companies transform, adapt to change, and prepare for what’s ahead.
If you need elite resources to modernize your architecture for tomorrow, the moment is now. Contact us.
