The new TDD AI Unit SKU; excellent price point for SAP partners!

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Update 12/12/2025.  Added a question about running Document Grounding on TDD

In this blog post I want to share some of my thoughts on the new TDD AI Unit SKU recently released by SAP.

In general, I think the new TDD AI Unit offering is very “partner friendly” First, the price is very low.  SAP has LLM costs every time partners use the AI features, so there is no surprise that SAP at least charge some money for the offering, especially when SAP has the strategy of charging for TDD systems in general. However, compared to productive AI units, the price is very partner friendly and shows that SAP really want to drive AI adoption.   Second, I like the fact that most of the dynamics are the same as for the productive AI units.  The only remark s about the quarterly contract period.  It also makes it a little bit more complex to understand, but it also gives partners more flexibility. 

What is the price of the TDD AI unit?

In short: minimum purchase is 1 block of 100 units with a cost of 65 euro. There are no further discounts possible.   No maximum limit,

With a quarterly contract period, one can argue that the more appropriate positioning of the offering is:  16.25 euro for 25 AI units which expire after 3 months, with auto renewal.

What was just released and why does it matter?

Demoing AI features to customers and prospects is obviously very important for SAP partners in an “Business Suite & AI first” world of SAP. 

We had a temporary partner licensing offering in which partners could use productive AI units for TDD purposes.  With the new specific TDD AI unit SKU we will mainly see two improvements:

• The TDD AI unit can be ordered by partners in a self-service manner.  No need to reach out to SAP AEs to get a quote.  This simplifies the process and reduces potential delays related to finding an AE, discussing the quote, getting AI units for the right partner account etc
• The price of the TDD AI unit is significantly lower than the productive AI unit. 

Do I order the TDD AI units In the “Manage my services” app as normal for TDD licenses?

No.  TDD AI Units can only be ordered on SAP store.  SAP is leveraging the SAP store more and more for purchases of customers and partners.  The TDD AI unit is a clear example of this.   You order the TDD AI Unit  SKU 8019670 on this page on the SAP store.  Scroll down on the page and choose “Buy as a partner” tab.  Then click on “Configure to see price” and follow the instructions.

On the SAP store it says “Quantity is measured in blocks of 100 capacity units per year. Due to 3-month contract duration, 25% of the annual units are allocated each quarter. Unused units will expire at the end of each 3-month period". This is different than the productive AI units, right?

Correct, this is different.   The way it works for TDD is a little bit different than for productive AI units.  In general, SAP uses 3 months as the standard contract period for TDD subscriptions.  This is mainly to give partners more flexibility to turn on and off systems dependent on what they need to demo in specific sales cycles.  

For the rest, the rules for TDD AI Units follow the rules of the productive AI units:  the “request” capacity per user is the same and the “request” cost per AI feature is the same.  These are all described in the TDD AI Features Guide Price List.   The activation process of the AI features follows similar process as for productive AI units

I want to also run Document Grounding on my TDD instance.  Anything specific I need to consider?

As document grounding is an "add on" to Joule Base, make sure you indicate (when you purchase the TDD AI Units) the Global BTP account where you Joule Base TDD is running.

What happens if I want to cancel?

Let’s say a partner orders 1 block of 100 AI units on 1st January 2026.  Right away, the partner will be charged 16.25 and gets 25 AI units to spend over the next 3 months.     If the partner cancels the contract 30 days before the end of the contract period (which thus is 3 months), nothing else will happen!   Thus, the partner has spent 16.25 euro for having 25 AI units to spend over 3 months.   

If the partner does not cancel the subscription, it will auto-renew, and the partner will be charged 16.25 euro for the next 3 months and again get 25 AI units to spend during those 3 months.

Can I use the new TDD AI Unit SKU for Joule for Consultant?

No.  To run joule for consultant, you need productive AI units.  Read more here.

What can I do with a 1 block of 100 AI units?

Let’s say you already have core ERP Cloud (public) LOB system on TDD.  Then you can use your 100 units to run one Per User Per Month (PUPM) Financial Management AI user for 1 year.  As the cost of the PUPM package is 8 AI units per month, you need 24 AI units per 3 months and 96 AI units per year.

The calculations are similar for ERP Private Cloud, SCM and CX.   For SuccessFactors you can run 16 users with 100 AI units on yearly basis since a HCM AI PUPM package costs 0.5 AI unit per month.  

These calculations are based on the information in  TDD  AI Features Guide Price List.

For Financial Management PUPM: What will happen with the 1 unit I do not use every 3 months? 

In this case It will just be lost / it will expire at the end of the 3 months if you don’t find something else to use it for.  My recommendation: use it to run document grounding!!   You will only need 0.6 AI units per 3 months to run 40 documents which should be more than enough for demo purposes.  Read more in  Document Grounding: A (hidden) gem in SAP Business AI’s portfolio for smaller companies.

As partner, we login to the LOB TDD system with a “role user” and thus not the consultant’s name), to demo the SAP solution as a user in a real business role.  Some SAP demo scripts are even built around this concept.  Does this stay the same?

Yes.  this stays the same. 

If this is the way you work with your TDD system, it is obviously important to allocate the AI PUPM packages to the login user names that your staff uses when login to the LOB solution on the TDD environment. You do this in SAP cloud identity service.

After I have ordered the TDD AI Units, what do I need to do to get AI features up and running on my TDD SAP solution instance?

For details regarding the various LOB SAP Solutions, check out the LOB specific guides on this page. There could be some small variations per LOB solution so check the decks.  However, in general the process is:

• In SAP for me, “request activation” for the TDD PUPM package you want
• In cloud identity services, allocate users to the PUPM Package.
• In SAP for me, request activation of the AI features you want to use & get the entitlements activated into you LOB solution by SAP.  You need to indicate the TDD instance(s) where you want this to happen. 
• In the LOB solution itself, grant users right to the individual AI features

 Is it possible that I as partner overuse my AI capacity?

Some background info: each AI PUPM user get a lot of AI capacity (called “request” capacity) which should easily cover “fair use”.  For example, for the Financial PUPM user, the request capacity is 5200.

While it is theoretically possible to go over the “fair use”, I think it is highly unlikely because:

• For productive usage, SAP has calculated these limits with the purpose of them being more than enough for productive usage.  There is no wish that users should overrun. 
• The request allowance per TDD user is the same as for productive use, and I would expect that partner TDD user will use the features much less than a productive user. A PUPM TDD user will mainly use the AI units to demo (not development or testing, and not high-volume productive use). 
• Even if one user would overuse, the over usage will be compensated by potential underuse of other users. 

Even if it is very unlikely, what happens if we as partner “overuse”?

IF there would be an overuse, the existing AI unit balance will be charged for the extra usage. 

Let’s look at an example: A partner has 5 TDD AI PUPM users in ERP Cloud.  This will cost 26 euro per month (5 users * 8 AI units PUPM * 0.65 euro per unit).  Let’s assume ALL users overuse by 25% in a month (highly unlikely…).  The extra usage will be 13 AI units (at a cost of 8.45 euro).

Here are the details of the calculations if interested, based on information in the TDD AI Feature Guide Price List:

• Total allowed request capacity for 5 users: 5 * 5200 = 26.000
• 25% over usage: 26.000 * 25% = 6.500 request
• Cost of overage is 2 AI units per 1000 requests over the allowance ->  (6.500 / 1000) * 2 AI units * 0.65 AI unit cost = 8.45 Euro.  

In my opinion, this is not an amount to spend too much time worrying about.  

 Even if it is very unlikely and not costly, what can I do to monitor and manage this?

Planned for Q1 2026, SAP will give visibility in SAP-for-me on details related to TDD AI Unit balances and consumption.  Partners could choose to check these overviews on a regular basis to be comfortable with how it all works.

Since PUPM packages consume AI units every month and not for a year in one go, you can manage the activation and deactivation of users per calendar month.  For example, if you know in December that a consultant with an AI PUPM package assigned will not need access to AI features anymore for a while, you can consider deactivating this user’s AI PUPM package in SAP identity cloud services before the end of December.  The person will not consume any AI units anymore as of January 1st.   

At the beginning of each new month, SAP will check in SAP cloud identify services how many named users where assigned to the PUPM packages in the previous month, multiply this number this with the monthly PUPM unit cost and subtract the result from your AI unit balance.  

Since partners activate and deactivate users themselves and know the AI unit cost per users per month upfront, they can control and predict the AI consumption themselves.

What if I have a very important question not answered?

You can consider booking an SAP Business AI Licensing & Pricing Advisory services which is free for Gold and Platinum partners.  Else, feel free to reply to this post with a question

If you are interested to learn more about AI unit cost dynamics related topics also important for TDD AI units, consider to read SAP PUPM Business AI: what does it cost to run ONE AI feature ONE time?.  This article is about productive AI units, but many of the dynamics are the same for TDD units.

For more info about SAP Business AI TDD offerings in general, please check out the Partner TDD landing page.