Chief Executive Officer & Member of Executive Board, SAP
SAP Business AI Platform and Autonomous Enterprise | SAP Sapphire Orlando 2026
SAP Business AI Platform brings together business data, process context, and governance to help enterprises scale AI with confidence.
In this SAP Sapphire Orlando 2026 keynote segment, Christian Klein, SAP's Chief Executive Officer, explains why enterprise AI needs more than generic models. While AI can generate text, images, and code with increasing speed, mission-critical business processes require accurate, reliable, and compliant outcomes.
The video introduces SAP Business AI Platform, which brings together SAP’s AI foundation, SAP Business Data Cloud, and SAP Business Technology Platfor...
About Christian Klein
Christian Klein, CEO of SAP, stated during a July 24 Bloomberg interview that the company was "very happy" with its second-quarter performance, citing accelerated cloud growth and noting that 90% of cloud deals included AI. He described AI as a "disruption to the software industry" but argued that SAP's value lies in its ability to provide business context and domain logic that large language models lack. Klein emphasized that SAP maintains an open platform with APIs and third-party agent integration, and said the company sees "not one winner" in the AI layer for ERP. Following the departure of chief product officer Muhammed Alam, Klein took over oversight of development, saying that "it's good to be close to development these days" as the company shifts from coding features to coding AI agents. On the July 23 earnings call, Klein said customers are realizing they need to "modernize" ERP landscapes alongside AI adoption, and noted that "a lot of customers" are choosing to do both with SAP. He discussed the company's AI agent hub and its new end-to-end user experience, Jewel Work, which has 4,000 internal users. Regarding pricing, Klein stated that "with AI... we can completely reset the price level" toward outcome-based pricing. He also said SAP had adjusted hiring plans and would "nowhere near" hire the number of people planned at the beginning of the year, citing increased productivity from AI tools.
Transcript (11 segments)
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Host0:05
Please welcome to the stage, Christian Klein.
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Christian Klein0:13
Wow. Hello, everyone. Welcome to Sapphire 2026. Welcome to all our customers, partners, media, and analysts, and of course to my best friend, Joule. It's great to be back in Orlando. Sapphire is such a fantastic opportunity to connect with people from all around the world and to feel the energy of the wonderful SAP community, especially in times of incredible change and speed. Sapphire is more important than ever.
Some time ago, when we started to prepare this keynote, I asked myself the question, will SAP actually be a software company in the future? Are you scared by this question? I'm not scared. For me, the time right now is the beginning of something even better. And today, we want to show you why. So let's come back to this question at the end of the keynote.
There is no doubt that AI is changing everyone's life, starting with my own life. As a CEO, I use AI for all kinds of tasks. I use AI to bounce around ideas for our next strategy refresh or to analyze the market sentiment before earnings and to prepare my customer meetings or this keynote today. And as a dad, I use AI to draw pictures with my kids, and AI does certainly a much better job than I could ever do.
But take a closer look at this unicorn. The unicorn is not perfect. It actually has three ears. My daughter told me that at least it doesn't have two horns. So for her, an 80% accurate drawing of a unicorn is still good enough to make her happy. In business, it's different. If AI agents run your payroll, your financial close, or do the demand and supply chain planning, 80% accuracy is just not good enough. When you run the world's most mission-critical businesses, your AI agents, they should not guess. They should deliver accurate, reliable, and compliant outcomes.
According to a recent Stanford AI survey, almost every company is now using AI. But many see only little value. Why do we face such huge challenges with AI in business? At the top of this iceberg, visible to everyone, is that large language models are getting better and better at tasks like generating text or images, or in specific domains like writing software. All of these use cases are related to publicly available content the models are trained on. But if you go below the waterline, beyond the level of sales demos and into the real business world, you've got to find out that none of these models are trained on your business data and processes. These AI agents also don't naturally adhere to governance requirements like your security compliance framework, your data privacy requirements, or to your company's identity and authorization rules. All AI agents, including Joule, have faced these challenges. Until now.
Let us now show you how SAP will solve this challenge. The path to the solution starts with the brain of every company. Do you know which brain I'm talking about? 100 points. The brain of every company is the ERP. For over 15 years, we have been developing an ERP with incredibly deep process and data domain know-how. On top, all your governance requirements and customer-specific extensions are stored in the ERP. The ERP is the trusted system of execution running your company.
So how can we now infuse this deep business domain know-how sitting in your ERP into our AI agents? Let me illustrate this with the following prompt. First, I'm asking Joule, provide me an update on my total year financial forecast with the latest sales and pipeline data, plus supply chain data. To understand my question, the prompt is processed by a large language model. So far so good. But going forward, the LLM now has access to the brain of every company, your ERP, to first find the right process from thousands of business processes in your company. Then, with the Knowledge Graph, select exactly the right data from over 7 million data fields stored in your ERP landscape. And finally, before the outcome is shared, we check all your identity and authorization rules to ensure the outcome is not only accurate, but also compliant.
Well, the team delivered, building nothing less than a new SAP. We are bringing together LLMs with 50 years of business know-how stored in our ERP. By merging our AI Foundation with our Business Data Cloud and Business Technology Platform. And today, I'm super proud to launch our new SAP Business AI Platform, which forms the basis for our vision of the future of business: the Autonomous Enterprise. Where agents run the business and you can focus on what truly matters.
Let me start with the foundation. The heart of this new platform is the rich context layer. Here, we infuse the deep ERP business domain know-how into the AI agents. Through our Knowledge Graph, our AI agents have now a compass, a map, to find the right process and data in your ERP universe. And to provide the agents even more context, we are also introducing our new SAP Domain Models. They have been trained on SAP's code to even better understand the business logic of your company. But we don't stop here, because you run your business not only with SAP solutions. Actually, why not? Our AI agents have to also understand non-SAP data. That's why we included our SAP Business Data Cloud in the context layer to build one semantic data layer across SAP and non-SAP. No more silos. No spaghetti data sprawl because no AI agent can compensate for a broken data model.
Let's move on to the build layer of the new platform. Here, we are introducing Joule Studio 2.0. Our new build layer is open and agnostic. You can bring your own LLM or you use SAP's own models. You will be able to develop agents faster than anywhere else. Because Joule Studio 2.0 is integrated with the context layer and has direct access to all of your business logic. And finally, in the governance layer, we run all SAP AI agents for you. So you don't have to deal with the complexity and governance requirements sitting below the waterline of the iceberg. Via our AI Agent Hub in LeanIX, we also invite you to actually maintain and provide together all the agents running in your company, and we will govern non-SAP agents for free.