Sapphire 2025: SAP mints business AI flywheel with Palantir on board
SAP CEO Christian Klein put economic and geopolitical uncertainty at the centre of the opening keynote at the supplier’s global Sapphire event in Orlando
Christian Klein, SAP’s chief executive officer, put economic and geopolitical uncertainty at the heart of the opening keynote at the supplier’s global Sapphire event in Orlando.
The European version of the event will be held in Madrid next week and is likely to repeat the same themes.
Like other enterprise software suppliers, such as Oracle and Salesforce, SAP is invoking a trinity of capabilities for the artificial intelligence (AI) age, in its case applications, data and AI. Klein said SAP has the “broadest suite of applications in the [IT] industry”, the “semantically richest business data”, and AI that already makes SAP itself 30% more productive.
Klein said the concept of a “flywheel”, making this troika go round, is driving SAP’s thinking and its offer to customers.
British readers attuned to the increasing involvement of the controversial supplier Palantir in the NHS will have taken note of SAP’s announcement of a partnership with the firm, which the main Sapphire 2025 press release said would “facilitate joint customers’ cloud migration journey and modernisation programmes”.
“Seamless connectivity between Palantir and SAP Business Data Cloud will enable customers to build a harmonised data foundation across their enterprise landscape. Together, the companies will responsibly deliver essential outcomes and support customers, including the US government, to quickly adapt to changes and disruptions,” it said.
In the keynote, Klein hailed the Palantir partnership as building out the Business Data Cloud (BDC) platform that SAP announced in February 2025. “BDC is the crystal ball we need for these times of uncertainty.
“Palantir is the maker of powerful data analysis software, and with SAP Business Cloud, our shared customers now benefit from real-time data integration and joint AI use cases.”
Palantir chief executive Alex Karp said, in a video during the keynote: “We use Ontology [a Palantir product] to manage large language models and Foundry to reconcile data. The combination of those products and SAP’s will, we believe, be extremely valuable for our collective clients and partners.”
Foundry is Palantir’s data integration platform and Ontology is an element of it for building digital twins.
Klein said, in the press statement: “With the expansion of Joule, our partnerships with leading AI pioneers, and advancements in SAP Business Data Cloud, we’re delivering on the promise of Business AI as we drive digital transformations that help customers thrive in an increasingly unpredictable world.”
Joule is SAP’s generative AI assistant technology, which it says can “accompany business users throughout their day, in and out of the SAP application universe, to find data, surface real-time insights and streamline workflows. Joule’s new ubiquity includes an action bar powered by WalkMe that studies user behaviour across applications, turning the assistant into an always-available, proactive AI that can anticipate users’ needs before they arise – always adhering to SAP’s strict ethical AI guidelines”.
The supplier also announced a collaboration with Perplexity, described as “an AI-powered answer engine company”. This is said to enhance Joule’s ability to draw on structured and unstructured data to solve complex business problems.
Alongside SAP’s knowledge graph technology, SAP said Joule could now instantly answer questions with “structured, visual answers – such as charts and graphs – grounded in real-time business data within SAP workflows. For example, a user could ask the tool how recent external events might impact their business and get a forecast based on both current events and the company’s own business data”.
SAP also announced more Joule Agents spanning customer experience, supply chain management, spend management, finance and human capital management.
The supplier also introduced an “operating system for AI development”. Called AI Foundation, it is said to give developers a single entry point for building, extending and running custom AI systems.
The supplier will, no doubt, endeavour to say what these and other announcements will mean for SAP customers in Europe next week in Madrid, from 26-28 May.
