Will SAP Still be a Software Company in The Future? SAP Sapphire 2026 Keynote Recap
Christian Klein used this question to open the keynote of this year's SAP Sapphire.
But this edition felt different from previous years. Less focused on individual applications or incremental features, and much more focused on SAP’s long-term vision for what they now call the “autonomous enterprise.”
Companies are moving from simple workflow automation toward environments where AI agents actively participate in operations almost like digital colleagues.
We expect AI to coordinate processes, handle exceptions, recommend actions, and execute workflows across systems. But current LLMs alone are not enough for enterprise execution.
As Christian Klein repeated several times, AI systems still lack:
- business context
- process understanding
- governance
- authorization logic
- semantic business structures
Because of that, many companies are still struggling to find measurable ROI from AI beyond individual productivity improvements.
That’s where the new SAP Business AI Platform comes in.
SAP positioned it as the layer that combines ERP process knowledge, Business Data Cloud, AI orchestration, governance, and semantic business context into a single architecture for enterprise AI.
At one point Klein described ERP as “the brain of every company,” and that idea became the backbone of the keynote.
The argument was basically that the ERP already contains the operational logic of the enterprise: financial structures, supply chain relationships, approvals, workflows, organizational rules, and historical process knowledge.
So instead of building AI separately from enterprise systems, SAP wants AI agents operating directly on top of that foundation.
In that model, the ERP acts as the operational brain, while AI agents become the execution layer across Finance, Procurement, Supply Chain, HCM, CX, and industry workflows.
In this line, SAP announced 224 AI agents and 51 assistants embedded into those processes, but interestingly the keynote wasn’t really about the number itself. It was about orchestration.
Almost every demo showed multiple agents coordinating together inside operational workflows: handling reconciliations, approvals, exception management, downstream triggers, and recommendations through the same governance and business context layer.
Joule 2.0 was probably one of the most important pieces in that architecture. And SAP positioned it as the new interaction layer for enterprise operations.
Through Joule Spaces and Joule Studio 2.0, the idea is that users no longer need to jump constantly between applications. Instead, workflows, interfaces, analytics, and actions are dynamically assembled around the business task itself.
SAP repeatedly referred to this as:
- “app-less”
- “0-app”
- “headless experiences”
where AI agents orchestrate the process in the background while users interact through a much simpler centralized experience layer.
Another interesting concept was “Company Memory.”
SAP described it as a way to transform operational knowledge hidden in emails, approval chains, collaboration tools, policies, and process exceptions into structured knowledge that agents can use during execution.
Essentially, SAP is trying to centralize not only enterprise data, but enterprise operational knowledge itself.
But returning to our first question, will SAP still be a software company in the future?
In simple terms, the answer is no.
The direction presented at Sapphire 2026 was much closer to SAP becoming a Business AI company: a centralized operational layer where enterprise data, workflows, governance, and AI agents converge into a single architecture for autonomous enterprise execution.
But if you guys think this is useful, I can share my notes on the use cases and demos.