The economic potential of Generative AI is estimated at $2.6 to 4.4 trillion annually—nearly equal to the GDP of countries like Germany and Japan. Both large and small companies have rushed in to cash in on this opportunity. With 87% of global commerce being generated by SAP customers, it is the primary focus for leveraging the benefits of Generative AI and realizing its value.

Intelligent or AI-powered ERP holds the key to vast and unexplored value that can transform the way businesses are run. This digital transformation and technology modernization can open new doors for organizations to use their data like never before, to drive an intelligent, end-to-end enterprise overhaul.

The cornerstones of the intelligent ERP systems include a marked shift towards uncovering and delivering value across the value chain. With its well-defined approach to systems, applications, and processes, SAP is positioned to explore such value and enable smart transformation in areas like spend management, procurement, supply chain management, strategic planning, and financial management, to name a few.

Intelligent ERP does—or can do—all this by uncovering deep insights, facilitating data-driven decisions, automating tedious tasks, personalizing customer experiences, and a lot more. Thanks to AI, all of this is possible:

• Automagically generate high-quality images, videos, presentations, articles, emails, and other content.
• Hyper-personalize customer experience by analyzing massive amounts of information.
• Access virtual assistants or “copilots” who can perform specific tasks and processes.
• Optimize logistics and supply chain operations, resource planning, budgeting and financial allocation.

Enterprises that are able not only to adopt Generative AI but actually realize its potential can be assured of a strong competitive edge and ensure that they deliver more meaningful customer experiences.

“The mature, structured business processes and system insights from SAP present exciting possibilities for generative AI-enabled transformation.”
– Bjørnar Jensen, Senior Partner, McKinsey

The inherent structure of SAP makes its applications highly conducive to AI enablement. They can empower business processes, adding intuitive and flexible features. By deriving insights from customers’ unique data ecosystems, SAP with AI drives smarter decision-making, process optimization, and efficiency at scale. The legacy of trust is another key factor that SAP brings to its AI offerings, ensuring a high level of confidentiality and regulatory compliance.

The AI-enablement of SAP offers multiple opportunities for deriving value by enhancing functionalities, automating code generation, cloud transformation, and other possibilities that stretch far beyond individual applications.

SAP Business AI enables organizations to maximize their benefits from Generative AI models for several reasons.

• Inbuilt Agentic AI Capabilities
• Historically, SAP is truly unrivalled in its depth of understanding of every business process across industry domains and its meticulous attention to process details. With the transfusion of AI into its repertoire, SAP Business AI has helped organizations save millions of dollars, solve business problems, and drive efficiencies across the enterprise due to its ability to ground AI agency within realistic and contextual business understanding.
• With Joule, its agentic component, SAP Business AI translates its rich information bank into intelligent and precise workflows. Joule understands every business’ unique data architecture, systems, and processes to execute complex tasks reliably and at speed and scale.

• SAP Joule AI agents have expertise in 1,300+ skillsets, which add up to 90% faster execution of navigational and transactional tasks.

• Choice of Multiple Business Scenarios
• SAP Business AI currently offers more than 130 AI scenarios, and according to SAP SE, the number is slated to increase to 400 this year. This makes it the largest AI portfolio for businesses and spans nearly every business function.
• Support from Strong AI Partners
• SAP Business AI relies on partnerships with the leading AI providers around the world. This ensures user access to the latest innovations and advancements in LLMs natively within SAP.

SAP Business AI enables organizations to extract significantly greater business value from your supply chain, finance, procurement, HR, sales, marketing, and every department.

Let’s look at some of the tangible benefits it delivers in a few domains.

With SAP Business AI, organizations can ensure greater customer-centricity with greater agility and resilience across the supply chain. Downstream gains translate into better top lines through process optimization and efficiency.

It helps businesses avoid defects early on in the process, increases quality and productivity, reduces inspection costs by 25% and delivery costs by 50%, and speeds up processing.

Companies can achieve financial growth, optimize expenses, reduce financial risks, and achieve greater regulatory compliance. Greater cashflows and higher net profits enable them to drive up bottom lines. By using SAP Business AI for payments and receivables, businesses can reduce efforts by over 70%, detect revenue losses, prevent fraud, and increase automatic cash processing by up to 80%.

SAP Business AI enables organizations to increase overall supplier performance and efficiency at lower costs, by optimizing spends and minimizing risks. It enables them to analyze suppliers 90% faster using AI-powered insights, perform searches 95% faster using Natural Language Processing capabilities, define job descriptions in multiple languages, and select suppliers 85% faster using intelligent screening.

At SAP TechEd 2024, the company revealed key innovations around Generative AI to enrich its ecosystem with powerful AI capabilities focused on process simplification, customization, and integration.

• SAP HANA Cloud now ships with an AI toolkit to analyze large amounts of business information and perform advanced machine learning tasks through Joule.
• SAP Integration Suite is equipped with AI-powered optimization to reduce manual efforts, increase reliability of integration, and smoothen the process of integration.
• Joule Studio within SAP Build now enables users with little coding experience to create custom AI applications.
• SAP Generative AI Hub now integrates SAP with the latest open-source and proprietary AI models.
• SAP Knowledge Graph offers 7+ million fields and other properties to drive AI-powered insights, bridging the gap between its structured data foundation and AI’s Natural Language Processing.

In the near future, we are likely to see even more innovative applications of AI in ERP, enabling businesses to adapt in real time, become more responsive to market changes and customer demands, deliver greater hyper-personalization, and evolve into highly robust and proactive ecosystems.

Here’s a glimpse of what we can expect:

• Many more autonomous agents will be incorporated into Joule enabling organizations to extract significant business value across the enterprise with custom skills, sharper analytics, and other expanded capabilities.
• The Generative AI Hub will enable developers to build and deploy customized AI-powered solutions more efficiently.
• SAP Knowledge Graph will continue to provide rich context to AI models and also become more accessible and increase its focus beyond S/4HANA data models.
• The SAP Foundation Model will support more use cases that broaden its scope beyond narrow AI scenarios and enable more accurate predictions.
• SAP Green Token will streamline sustainability initiatives and ensure greater compliance through AI-assisted declaration image analysis and powerful search and validation capabilities.
• With greater AI integration, supply chains will become more autonomous and intelligent with SAP Integrated Business Planning for goods and inventory planning, SAP Digital Manufacturing to assist production process analysis, and SAP Asset Performance Management to enable proactive maintenance.
• More AI models will be available through strategic partnerships, empowering users to select the most relevant ones and quickly identify ready-to-use models with SAP Signavio solutions.

Many organizations struggle with their SAP migration, modernization, and transformation initiatives on their journey to becoming intelligent enterprises. With its strategic SAP partnership, Tricentis is a key player in this space, safeguarding enterprises’ AI-enablement efforts and ensuring they meet business objectives.

Tricentis solutions can tightly integrate with SAP Solutions Manager and SAP Cloud Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) to deliver out-of-the-box, intelligent automation and quality engineering solutions.

Some of the key metrics that the Tricentis-SAP partnership has achieved in AI-driven quality engineering for ERP systems include:

• 10x faster testing to accelerate innovation and achieve uncompromising quality at an unmatched pace.
• 90% risk reduction through AI-powered analysis and coverage that enable zero-defect releases.
• 50% lower costs to drive efficiencies and achieve a quality-first mindset that powers future innovation.

Tricentis ensures that organizations looking to modernize their SAP enterprise applications avoid major pitfalls along the way and achieve high quality outcomes with best-in-class engineering practices and AI-powered test automation. This translates into successful digital transformations that meet both time and cost imperatives.

The synergy between SAP and Tricentis adds up to several benefits to customers:

• Customers are able to cope with the faster pace of SAP update cycles, from annual to more frequent support packs, with automated SAP testing that enables reliable and seamless application of updates and incorporation of new features.
• Migrations like S/4HANA can be achieved faster and at much lower risks by AI-powered impact assessments and reusability of testing components.
• SAP Cloud testing is effortless with Tricentis’ automation solutions for on-premise, cloud-based, and hybrid environments.

Intelligent ERP systems such as SAP Business AI are rapidly enabling enterprises to scale productivity and performance levels by uncovering hidden value and leveraging unexplored efficiencies. To realize the fruits of AI enablement, organizations need to set up strong data foundations, leverage proven AI expertise, and ensure smart quality engineering guardrails.

Zuci Systems is a certified Tricentis partner with a focus on helping organizations achieve AI-powered ERP transformations such as S/4HANA migrations seamlessly. Read more about our partnership or get in touch with us to know how we can help you achieve your business goals.

References: 

1. McKinsey. (2024, January 15). McKinsey expands alliance with SAP to accelerate generative AI-enabled transformation.  
2. SAP. (2025). SAP business AI.  
3. SAP. (2025). Upcoming generative AI innovations.