Over the years, enterprise IT has grown increasingly fragmented. Expansion through mergers and acquisitions, legacy investments, and function-specific tools has left organizations with overlapping applications, disconnected data models, and significant technical debt. CIOs are stuck spending more time maintaining systems than delivering innovation. In fact, up to 80% of enterprise IT effort is focused on integration and upkeep rather than value creation.
This disjointed landscape is no longer sustainable. Today, enterprises are seeking more than just better tools; they want unified systems that can respond, reason, and act with agility. At the SAP Sapphire 2025 event in Orlando, SAP made several announcements, with its innovations in AI and the Business Data Cloud being the most notable. The following analysis explores how these capabilities are reshaping enterprise operations.
Operationalizing AI: SAP’s Flywheel as a Model for Intelligent Systems
To illustrate how SAP is advancing AI integration, CEO Christian Klein introduced a conceptual model called the SAP Flywheel, where applications, data, and AI reinforce one another. As demonstrated in the figure below, this flywheel creates a compounding effect, where SAP applications generate contextual business data, which powers Joule, SAP’s business AI copilot. Joule then improves application intelligence and automation, generating even richer data, amplifying impact with each cycle.
Figure 1: SAP Flywheel connects applications, data, and AI
This flywheel effect gives Joule its edge. It draws on contextual data from SAP’s application suite to deliver precise, role-based recommendations. From identifying tariff impacts and liquidity options in finance to guiding sales planning, supply chain rebalancing, and workforce alignment, Joule connects decisions across the enterprise, functioning as an embedded intelligence layer for real-time business execution.
SAP is now extending Joule beyond its own suite, expanding its role from an embedded copilot to a cross-application assistant. By integrating Joule with WalkMe, the digital adoption platform acquired by SAP, Joule can now operate across both SAP and non-SAP environments, including browsers, third-party applications, and everyday workflows, wherever business users engage.
This reflects SAP’s intent to realize the vision of “Joule everywhere” by extending Joule’s reach beyond its core applications, evolving it into a context-aware assistant that supports workflows across diverse systems and interfaces. It allows Joule to deliver insights and act directly within the tools people already use, without disrupting their workflow.
This was illustrated by SAP’s Head of AI Advocacy, Sarah Buerkle, who demonstrated how Joule integrates across enterprise workflows through the following scenario:
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- A warehouse manager reported an issue through ServiceNow regarding a batch of materials not meeting the required specifications.
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- Joule, embedded within the ServiceNow interface, recognized the issue, identified the supply chain impact, and suggested alternate suppliers using SAP Ariba.
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- To support the supplier decision, Joule leveraged WalkMe’s integration with Google’s Gemini to search the user’s Gmail inbox, retrieve a previously received discount offer, and surface it as a viable alternative, helping the user negotiate a better deal.
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- Joule then automatically created an RFP, filled a purchase order in SAP S/4HANA, and closed the ticket in ServiceNow.
The process was completed within the user’s workflow, without requiring application switching or manual handoffs between teams. Joule functioned as a context-aware assistant, navigating across systems while understanding both the data and the underlying business process.
This represents a meaningful shift for enterprises striving for greater operational agility. By embedding AI directly into the tools and interfaces employees already use, such as desktop, mobile, collaboration platforms such as Teams, and web applications, SAP is aligning technology to user behavior rather than requiring users to adapt to system boundaries.
Data Infrastructure That Scales with AI Ambitions
While embedded AI, such as Joule, demonstrates the potential of intelligent applications, its effectiveness depends on the quality and consistency of the underlying data. For AI to deliver meaningful outcomes, it must be grounded in clean, consistent, and connected data. One of the biggest challenges enterprises face is fragmented data spread across siloed systems, making it difficult to trust insights or automate actions. As organizations look to scale AI across business processes, having a unified data foundation becomes a prerequisite.
At the event, SAP showcased how it is addressing this need through Business Data Cloud (BDC), a platform first introduced in February 2025. BDC offers SAP-managed data products that maintain consistency across key enterprise domains such as finance, supply chain, HR, and procurement. These data products are curated, SAP-managed datasets organized around key business domains, enabling consistent reporting, analytics, and automation across systems. It also incorporates a data fabric layer that connects these internal data assets with external systems. This architecture is intended to simplify integration and enable a unified view across diverse environments. SAP demonstrated the practical impact of this platform through a set of intelligent applications built using BDC.
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- Cloud ERP intelligence: It combines finance, supply chain, and sustainability data into a single view to support planning and operational decisions for private cloud ERP customers.
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- People intelligence: It integrates data from SAP SuccessFactors, SAP Fieldglass, and financial systems to provide a comprehensive view of workforce composition, skills, and planning needs.
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- Spend intelligence: It offers a 360-degree view of enterprise spending, covering direct and indirect procurement, services, contingent labor, and travel and expense data.
These applications are designed to turn data into action by delivering insights that are directly tied to business outcomes.
To unlock the full value of unified data, SAP is focusing not just on internal capabilities but also on building an ecosystem around BDC. SAP emphasized that BDC is designed as an open platform, encouraging both data enrichment and application development by partners. Partnerships are a key part of SAP’s data strategy. Two recent collaborations extend BDC’s value significantly:
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- Palantir: SAP and Palantir are collaborating to integrate Palantir’s Foundry and Ontology platforms with SAP’s ecosystem. This integration brings together operational data from BDC and Palantir’s advanced modeling capabilities, allowing enterprises to run AI-driven analysis and simulations. The combined solution supports use cases such as supply chain planning, risk assessment, and financial forecasting.
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- Adobe: In collaboration with Adobe, SAP is working to connect enterprise data from BDC with customer data from the Adobe Experience Platform. This integration enables organizations to align financial and supply chain planning in SAP with marketing insights from Adobe. The goal is to improve planning accuracy while delivering more targeted, data-driven customer engagement.
SAP also highlighted its ongoing collaboration with Databricks to strengthen the data engineering capabilities within BDC, further supporting enterprise AI development at scale. In addition, SAP is expanding infrastructure support for BDC. The platform is currently available on AWS, with support for Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Microsoft Azure expected in the coming months, giving customers greater flexibility to deploy BDC on their preferred hyperscalers.
Conclusion
SAP’s strategy, showcased at SAP Sapphire 2025, reflects a shift in how enterprise software providers are positioning themselves for the AI era. SAP’s dual focus on embedding intelligence at the application layer through Joule and strengthening the data foundation with Business Data Cloud reflects its strategy to embed AI and data into core business operations, moving beyond point solutions toward integrated decision support.
SAP is positioning itself to address structural challenges in enterprise IT, such as fragmented systems and inconsistent data, through a platform-based approach. SAP’s approach of integrating AI with process context and operational data is aimed at improving how enterprises manage fragmentation, delayed decisions, and coordination across functions. The extension of Joule across SAP and non-SAP environments, coupled with an open data strategy, indicates a deliberate push toward making AI more actionable and accessible in day-to-day operations.
By Gaurav Dewan, Research Director, and Premal Shah, Principal Analyst, Avasant