Just over a year since SAP CEO Christian Klein, SAP CEO declared his ambition to make SAP “the no. 1 Business AI company,” SAP has announced a series of high-profile data and AI announcements, with potentially major implications for its customer base. Most recently, SAP announced SAP Business Data Cloud, a new solution intended to unify all enterprise data, as part of an expanded partnership with Databricks.
Through both the solution and this partnership, SAP and Databricks are teaming up to help customers unify SAP and non-SAP data, regardless of format or location, and empower them to build the type of strong data foundation that will be critical for enterprises looking to get the most value out of AI applications. An evolution of SAP Datasphere, SAP Business Data Cloud helps users build an integrated data layer, easing the burden often associated with preparing organizational data to be utilized by the large language models (LLMs) that power AI solutions. SAP also showed off new agent builder capabilities for Joule Studio in SAP Build, enabling users to build custom AI agents.
“Today, enterprises spend up to 50% of their total IT budget on data and analytics,” Klein said during its recent SAP Data Unleashed event. “Why? Because companies face large data silos between SAP and non-SAP data, unstructured and structured data, with entire data-scientist departments focusing on trying to bring different data sources together.”
As many SAP utility customers leverage RISE with SAP to migrate to the cloud and adopt SAP S/4HANA, this announcement is of particular interest; the future of SAP—including its business AI offerings—lies in the cloud. As utilities complete their digital transformation projects, SAP Business Data Cloud aims to help them ensure data quality and governance ahead of leveraging AI.
SAP customers will have questions about how they can most effectively leverage this new offering. In the coming weeks, ASUG is committed to answering those questions and digging into the value of SAP’s latest AI-focused play. In the immediate future, look out for a new episode of ASUG Talks featuring ASUG CEO & Chief Community Champion Geoff Scott and Irfan Khan, President and Chief Product Officer, SAP Data & Analytics at SAP, about the new offering and announcement. We’ll continue to cover this exciting announcement and its value for SAP utilities customers throughout 2025—and beyond.