The key takeaways from SAP TechEd

Artificial Intelligence took center stage as SAP showcased how businesses can harness AI to drive smarter, faster decision-making across their operations. Understanding and using AI is crucial for businesses looking to thrive in today's rapidly evolving technological and economic landscape. By embedding AI into core operations, organizations can reach new levels of efficiency, innovation, and competitiveness. SAP AI capabilities can be categorized into three categories:

1. Embedded AI capabilities have been added across the SAP cloud offering, from predictive analytics to supply chain optimization. There are over 100 embedded AI scenarios currently, and SAP is continuously developing additional AI capabilities. SAP customers can expect more out-of-the-box capabilities going forward. Understanding the roadmap is important when planning your own custom AI developments.


2. Joule, SAP's AI-powered co-pilot that was introduced last year, has now received more comprehensive roadmap updates. Joule is designed to streamline decision-making and improve productivity across SAP cloud solutions. Joule changes the way that users interact with SAP solutions, moving from performing transactions to a more analytical way of working. SAP TechEd introduced the Joule Studio in SAP Build as a Lab preview. The service is something to look forward to as it has built-in capabilities to support organization-specific workflows, manage your own Joule skills, and integrate with third-party systems and autonomous AI agents.
 
3. AI Foundation is providing SAP customers with all the capabilities needed to build their own custom AI scenarios. AI Foundation has developed fast in the past year and offers a comprehensive toolset for business AI development, from prebuilt AI services to AI lifecycle management on GenAI Hub and comprehensive data management and modeling capabilities.

The push towards modular, flexible ERP systems was another dominant theme at SAP TechEd. SAP highlighted its vision for composable ERP with several sessions focusing on a clean core strategy, meaning keeping the system as standard as possible. They also covered reference architectures, harmonization of data models across SAP offerings, and continuing to invest in SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) capabilities. 

SAP BTP is a key enabler of composable ERP architecture because when development in the cloud becomes more efficient, there is less temptation to develop things inside the core business systems. For me, there were four key things covered at TechEd that you should familiarize yourself with in 2025:

1. The Terraform provider for SAP BTP enables you to automate the provisioning, management, and configuration of resources. By leveraging this provider, you can simplify and streamline the deployment and maintenance of BTP services and applications. You can reuse the reference architectures and significantly speed up environment-related activities.

2. The SAP Build Extensibility Wizard allows both on-stack and side-by-side extensions. The Extensibility Wizard empowers both technical developers and business users to create enhancements and extensions without modifying the core ERP system, ensuring easier upgrades and long-term system maintainability. 

3. Data and Analytics new functionalities, including the Knowledge Graph Engine and embedded Data Lake capabilities on Datasphere. On the SAP Analytics Cloud, the new Smart Assist features for generating natural language insights from visualizations and identifying relationships and patterns within datasets provided food for thought. The Just Ask feature might be the way for some on-premise S/4HANA and ECC customers to interact with their enterprise data more efficiently (while not having the full Joule capabilities).

4. Autonomous AI agents are potentially marking a significant leap forward in enterprise automation. While still partly promiseware, these agents are designed to handle complex processes with minimal human intervention. Agents leverage machine learning to continuously improve their performance by learning from historical data and real-time feedback. This is definitely a space to follow and test in your business context.

As I reflect on the event, one thing is certain: the future of enterprise innovation is more interesting than ever, and SAP is at the helm of this exciting transformation. Whether you’re a developer, a business leader, or a tech enthusiast, the insights from TechEd 2024 are bound to spark ideas and inspire action. 

Join Vincit and SAP at The Annual SAP BTP Afternoon by Vincit on the 23rd of January to learn more, discuss these topics, and network with colleagues across different industries.