SAP Sapphire 2026 themes: AI agent accuracy, embedded domain knowledge and processes

SAP is planning to revamp its portfolio to "infuse deep domain know-how into SAP's AI agents" at its SAP Sapphire conference in Orlando.

SAP Sapphire, which will be held May 11-13, is going to have a heavy dose of agentic AI mixed with domain knowledge and process optimization, said SAP CEO Christian Klein.

Klein speaking on SAP's first quarter earnings call laid out the broad themes and product enhancements it'll be rolling out next month. SAP will also be looking to make the case that it is different in the SaaS landscape and can navigate an extremely high level of economic and geopolitical uncertainty.

Here's a look at what's ahead:

SAP Business AI is delivering value, but it's early innings. Klein cited multiple customer examples where AI agents were speeding up ERP upgrades and delivering quantifiable value by saving time, manual effort and money.

"The task for the remainder of 2026 is how we infuse this domain know-how, both from a data but as well as from a business process perspective into the AI agents," said Klein. "At Sapphire, we will make some very fundamental announcements to really show our customers how we will make this work."

Business AI will be closely linked to process automation and intelligence. "SAP's ERP developed over 50 years can also be seen as the institutional brain of every company where data and process domain know-how is getting stored," said Klein. "At Sapphire, we plan to announce some fundamental changes to our portfolio to infuse this deep domain know-how into SAP's AI agents, and we will govern the agentic AI layer for our customers."

SAP plans to win on the data and process layer. Klein argued that SAP is better set up than most software companies due to its domain expertise and process knowhow. "We expect to continue to gain market share with our best-of-suite offering because now more than ever, a harmonized data and process layer is key to harnessing the power of AI. With the infusion of AI across our products and migration tools, you will see an increasing share of consumption-related cloud revenue in our P&L," said Klein.

Klein said SAP has more than 120 mission-critical business processes. He added:

"When I actually started to harmonize data models at SAP 5 years ago to solve the integration challenge, I never thought that 5 years later, we are sitting here in front of 7.3 million data fields in our ERP where you now need to build knowledge graphs that correlate this data to actually solve some of the most complex tasks in the world."

Customers will see a shift in pricing models over time. Klein said SAP's business is already moving toward consumption and less than 40% of the company's cloud revenue is tied to licensing. Some subscription cloud revenue it tied to revenue, memory used and value metrics. Klein said:

"The ramp of consumption-based cloud revenue will be a gradual evolution and by no means a disruption comparable with the transition from on-prem to the cloud. At our Financial Analyst Conference in Orlando, we are going to show you how our AI transformation will expand SAP's addressable market as well as how both subscription and consumption-related cloud revenue will further drive SAP's growth ambition."

SAP will showcase its internal AI gains. Klein said SAP will run more autonomously in the future. "In our engineering teams, we are using AI to work more efficiently with Joule for ABAP development and by third-party tools like Claude Code and GitHub Copilot, we are increasing developer productivity already by over 30%," said Klein. "With AI assistance, our service and support teams are handling significantly higher ticket volumes without a proportional increase in headcount. AI assists 100% of support cases and 20% of our tickets are even resolved by AI, fully autonomous."

Overall, AI has boosted customer support productivity by 12%.

Core themes at Sapphire will revolve around SAP Business AI, Business Data Cloud and Sovereign Cloud. Those three topics "continue to play an important role in customer conversations and are becoming more relevant in their decision-making and deal activity," said SAP CFO Dominik Asam.

Accuracy of AI agents is a core emerging theme. Klein said SAP will outline at Sapphire how it will "not only deliver a high number of agents, but really also deliver the quality and the accuracy coming with those agents."