SAP CEO Klein: Our AI agents want to solve the complex business processes

SAP CEO Christian Klein said the company is focused on developing AI agents to automate the toughest business processes.

Klein, speaking at a Goldman Sachs investment conference, said SAP's C-level conversations previously revolved around migrating to the cloud. Now the conversation is AI focused and enterprises want to automate processes and manage AI agents more easily.

"Our ERP wants the most complex business processes in the world, and we need to solve the most complex challenges of our customers with our agents. So all the agents we are shipping will solve complex business challenges, not the low-hanging fruit, which you can easily do with any LLM," said Klein.

• SAP's second quarter: The AI takeaways
• SAP eases ERP maintenance and support rules for on-prem customers
• SAP Sapphire 2026: SAP makes its case that it should your autonomous enterprise platform
• SAP acquires Dremio, Prior Labs as it builds out its data platform plan
• SAP acquires Reltio to build out SAP Business Data Cloud

SAP is also betting that its AI agents will be more accurate. "Data, ontology and Business Data Cloud are super important," said Klein, who noted that the company's semantics are its crown jewels. Even so, SAP will work with key players like Snowflake and Databricks to work with non-SAP data.

Klein also said enterprises can build the semantic layer with Palantir, but SAP offers more out of the box. "The data correlations need to be understand via knowledge graph, via the semantic layer, which sits on our new AI platform," said Klein.

And then there's the compliance issue. Klein said:

"A lot of customers came to us and said, Christian, even for this simple AI use case, identity management, authorization, has the agent now read access, change access or write access. Compliance requirements, FedRAMP here in the U.S. In Germany, we are not short of bureaucracy as well. So there are a lot of requirements as well, which is understood by our ERP, but not yet understood if a customer tries to run those agents on their own."

"With the new platform, we are going to manage every agent which is built on this platform, either if it's built by SAP, built by our partners or built by a customer, which is a huge differentiator."

According to Klein, SAP will be model agnostic with its Joule Studio because it delivers the best price outcome and results.

When questioned, Klein acknowledged that SAP is a bit late with its new platform and army of ERP AI agents. "We could have shipped the platform already at the beginning of the year, no problem. But then again, every SAP customer would need to manage the agents by their own," said Klein who noted customers don't want to manage agent sprawl. "I told my product managers, we are not going GA as long as we cannot prove that we can manage the whole life cycle. We need to prove that our agents can work more accurate. The Joule Work is way more accurate. We need to prove that the governance is managed by SAP. And if we can prove that, I mean, we will use all of these LLMs, not one, so they will be partners."

Klein added that Joule Work will play a big role and has 150 customers using it so far.

The catch is that Klein said these AI use cases require a move to the cloud and S/4HANA. "There's 60% of our installed base not yet in the cloud," said Klein. "There's work to be done."