SAP TechEd 2025. Developers Step into the Agentic AI Era

By Jorge Garcia

 

SAP TechEd 2025 (Credit: SAP/Rücker)

SAP’s 2025 TechEd event in Berlin served SAP as a platform to deliver a message that landed with unusual clarity: developers are now the architects of intelligent systems, and enterprise AI is shifting decisively from insights to agentic action.

Although, SAP isn’t alone in this direction, its announcements carve out a distinct role in the emerging AI landscape, one where business applications, data, and autonomous agents converge.

 

SAP’s Big Bet: Developers + Agentic AI

So, during the event, SAP framed the future of enterprise software around agentic AI, AI that doesn’t just answer questions but performs tasks, makes decisions, and automates workflows with context, yet this is somehow not a new message in the industry.

Yet, what’s new is SAP’s insistence that developers, not data scientists alone, will be the ones shaping how this works inside organizations. So, to put SAP’s message in context, let’s explore SAP’s key announcements during the event, which include:

  • Joule Agents and a new agent-builder experience in SAP Build, giving both low-code developers and seasoned engineers tools to design and orchestrate AI-driven processes.
  • SAP’s first relational foundation model, RPT-1, is optimized specifically for structured business data, things like delivery estimates, payment risk, and procurement forecasting.
  • Expanded SAP Business Data Cloud, including integrations with Snowflake and improvements to SAP HANA Cloud’s knowledge-graph automation.
  • A long-term commitment to train 12 million people in AI-ready skills by 2030.

Together, these moves aim to reinforce SAP’s message: enterprise AI isn’t just about embedding chatbots; it’s about building intelligent, trustworthy, operational systems.

 

Why This Matters: Three Big Shifts

Considering these new announcements from the German tech giant, we need to think about how all this comes into play and its impact on the industry, for which we can think of the following immediate aspects:

 

From Tools to Teammates

SAP’s framing of AI as a “trusted teammate” reflects a deeper industry turn. Agentic AI is about autonomous workflows, not dashboards. Developers will now design the behavioral rules, guardrails, and execution patterns of AI agents, blurring the line between software engineering and process design.

If SAP executes this vision efficiently, developers won’t just build apps; they’ll be able to engineer business-grade digital teammates.

 

Enterprise AI Needs Context

The launch of RPT-1 signals an important philosophical shift. SAP is admitting what many enterprises have discovered the hard way: generic LLMs struggle with structured business data.

By grounding AI in business semantics, tabular data, and knowledge-graph context, SAP aims to deliver predictions and automations that align with real operational workflows, not just conversational output.

This could give SAP an edge in industries where precision and compliance matter more than creativity.


Developers Become Strategic Assets

SAP’s focus on developer enablement is strategic.

With agentic AI, the role of the developer changes from coding screens to architecting autonomous decision systems. The pledge to upskill millions reflects a clear recognition: the AI revolution will stall unless organizations can build and maintain intelligent workflows.

This skill shift can potentially reshape IT roles, team structures, and hiring priorities across SAP ecosystems.

 

Industry Impact, and What to Watch

SAP’s announcements could accelerate several trends, including:

  • More agent-based enterprise platforms as competitors respond.
  • Demand for unified data fabrics, especially as SAP links Snowflake and HANA Cloud more deeply.
  • Rising emphasis on governance, since agentic AI creates new responsibilities—traceability, safety, and consistency.
  • New tensions around openness vs. lock-in, as SAP tightly couple agents, models, and business systems.

But of course, caution is warranted. Many enterprises still struggle with data quality and process fragmentation. Agentic AI will hit hard limits unless the underlying data fabric is healthy.

SAP’s vision is bold, but execution, on both SAP’s side and the customer’s, is the real test.

 

My Take

This year’s TechEd wasn’t just another AI-flavored keynote.

SAP is pushing for a redefinition of enterprise software, shifting from applications that report what happened to systems that act intelligently in context.

If SAP delivers, and if enterprises prepare, developers could become the core drivers of business transformation through agentic AI.

But, in my view, the message for leaders is clear:
Get your data house in order, empower your developers, and start designing for intelligent action, not just insight.

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