- SAP Managed Tags
If you're a developer working in or around SAP, Sapphire can feel like drinking from a firehose of buzzwords. But if you zoom in a bit, this year had quite a bit that’s relevant if you build, extend, or operate on SAP.
This isn’t a recap of every announcement. Just the ones that I thought matter most to folks writing code, managing extensions, or figuring out how all this new AI stuff fits together. It was often the items that I found our team of Developer Advocates discussing in our back channel as we watched the Keynote together this morning.
AI Runtime, Prompt Optimization, and a Foundation for Builders
One of the more impactful announcements this year was the launch of the newly, updated AI Foundation. This isn’t a single tool, it’s a collection of services meant to help developers build, extend, and run AI more effectively across SAP. Personally, I'm looking forward to playing around with this soon. Maybe seeing it some of our upcoming CodeJams.
The most interesting piece of the AI Foundation might be the AI Agent Runtime in SAP BTP. It gives you a way to run AI agents natively, not as one-off scripts or sidecar tools. Alongside that, SAP introduced a Prompt Optimizer, which can take vague prompt ideas and turn them into tuned, testable input saving hours of trial and error. This also promises to make your prompts model agnostic, doing for AI what SAP has done for years when it comes to running applications on different operating systems.
Joule Studio, part of SAP Build, now supports skill and agent creation with low-code tools, hooks into SAP data, and context via the Knowledge Graph. You can bet we will see a whole more about Joule Studio later this year at SAP TechEd!
OSS Note 3437766: Availability of Generative AI Models
SAP Sapphire Innovation Guide 2025 | Business AI
Joule Agents: More Than a Copilot
Joule is evolving. This year, the story was about Joule Agents; modular, task-specific AI workers that will observe, reason, and act.
These agents are powered by SAP’s reasoning models, built on top of structured enterprise data, and connect across systems. They’re not stuck inside SAP thanks to Agent2Agent, a new protocol developed with Google, agents from different vendors can work together.
Full SAP Joule Agents announcement
Business Data Cloud: Structuring for AI at Scale
AI is only useful if it understands your data. That’s where SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC) fits. It’s a harmonized foundation of curated, governed data built specifically to fuel AI-powered scenarios across SAP.
This year’s additions include:
- Intelligent apps like People Intelligence and Spend Control Tower
- A knowledge graph that gives agents and analytics the ability to understand data relationships
- Availability across Google BigQuery, AWS, and Azure
Explore the full BDC announcement
Perplexity Partnership: Smarter Answers with a Wider Context
SAP and Perplexity AI are working together to bring a new kind of search-and-answer capability to Joule. The idea is to combine SAP's structured business data with trusted real-time external content to generate more complete, context-aware answers.
So, if you’re asking Joule about something happening within your business, you’re not limited to internal systems. Joule can pull in relevant external information from the web with full sourcing details.
Details on SAP + Perplexity partnership
SAP BTP: Better Tools, Cleaner Extensions
Plenty of updates to SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) this year, most of them developer-relevant:
- SAP Build is getting more capable. Joule Studio lets you build agents. New tools help you extend apps with less wiring.
- AI-assisted ABAP tooling helps you migrate ECC code and align with clean core expectations. (See recent videos on SAP Developers Channel for examples).
- Integration Suite adds predictive monitoring for APIs and an AI adapter that lets you slot in your own LLMs.
- And finally, BTP services will be available through hyperscaler marketplaces like AWS and GCP later this year.
Final Thoughts
Sapphire 2025 sets the stage for TechEd 2025, naturally. If you want to get your hands-on with many of the announcements from today, then already start planning to attend TechEd or one of the TechEd on Tour events.
Some of the things we can look forward to trying out soon:
- An AI runtime with tooling
- Agentic AI that spans systems
- A data layer built for AI use, not just reporting
- BTP enhancements that feel aligned with how developers work
If you’re working on AI extensions, modernizing ABAP, or trying to get your data story right; this is the time to get ready to learn!
| User | Count |
|---|---|
| 10 | |
| 2 | |
| 2 | |
| 2 | |
| 2 | |
| 2 | |
| 2 | |
| 1 | |
| 1 | |
| 1 |
