SAP SAPPHIRE 2026: What I Expect and Hope to Hear
SAP SAPPHIRE 2026 runs May 11–13 in Orlando. With Joule adoption up ninefold in 2025 and 40%+ of SAP customers still on ECC, here are 5 predictions and 5 bolder hopes.
SAP SAPPHIRE is the marquee event of the SAP calendar — the moment SAP sets its narrative for the year ahead. Every demo, every keynote, every partner announcement is a deliberate signal. After years of watching these conferences, you start to develop a reliable sense of what's coming. But there's a difference between what SAP will say and what practitioners actually need to hear.
Here's my breakdown: five things I'm confident will dominate the agenda, and five things I'm genuinely hoping SAP steps up to address.
Key Takeaways
- SAP SAPPHIRE 2026 will center on AI, S/4 migration urgency, and RISE momentum — the expected storylines are predictable.
- The more important questions — agent adoption, BDC's real value, and AI partnership depth — may get less stage time but matter more for customers.
- Practitioners should watch what SAP doesn't say as much as what it does.
5 Things I Expect to Hear
1. More AI Embedded Directly in SAP Workflows
Joule adoption grew ninefold in 2025, and 67% of SAP's Q4 cloud orders included Business AI (SAP Q4 2025 Earnings, 2026). The message at SAPPHIRE will almost certainly be: AI is no longer a feature — it's built in. Expect announcements around new Joule skills baked into S/4HANA, SuccessFactors, Ariba, and ServiceNow-adjacent use cases.
What this looks like in practice is a string of demos showing Joule handling exception management, summarizing POs, and surfacing procurement anomalies. Polished. Rehearsed. Genuinely useful — but often optimized for demo conditions rather than messy enterprise reality.
Our take: The gap between Joule demos and production deployments is where most SAP customers actually live. Watch for any acknowledgment of that delta — or its conspicuous absence. We cover what deploying Joule agents against real SAP data looks like in a separate post.
2. Urgency Around the Final Push to S/4HANA
Only 39% of SAP's 35,000 ECC customers had fully migrated to S/4HANA by the end of 2024, and analysts project more than 40% will still be on legacy ERP beyond 2027 (Gartner via CIO, 2025). The window is genuinely closing. SAPPHIRE will include a clear push to get the remaining ECC customers moving — migration case studies, streamlined RISE packages, and probably some new commercial incentives dressed up as limited-time offers.
The framing will be optimistic — "customers who've moved are seeing X% faster close cycles" — with less visibility into the customers who attempted migration and found the complexity and cost underestimated.
3. RISE with SAP: New Chapters
RISE with SAP has evolved significantly since its 2021 launch, and SAP will use SAPPHIRE to announce the next iteration. Whether that's tighter hyperscaler integration, updated SLAs, or new industry cloud bundles, expect RISE to remain the primary vehicle for SAP's cloud transformation story.
4. Business Data Cloud as the Data Foundation
BDC appeared in 90% of SAP's 50 largest deals in Q4 2025 and hit roughly €2.0B in total contract value within a year of launch (SAP Q4 2025 Earnings, 2026). The pitch at SAPPHIRE: a unified data layer connecting SAP and non-SAP data, powering analytics and AI across the enterprise. Databricks is the key partnership here, and you'll likely see joint demos showing SAP operational data flowing into lakehouse architectures.
5. Customer Stories Front and Center
SAPPHIRE always leads with customers, and 2026 will be no different. Expect a lineup of global brands sharing transformation stories — ideally ones that mix S/4 migration and AI outcomes, since that narrative serves SAP's dual agenda for the year.
5 Things I Hope to Hear
1. A Real Plan for Getting Customers to Actually Adopt Agents
This is the question that keeps getting deferred. SAP CEO Christian Klein acknowledged in early 2026 that large-scale enterprise AI adoption is still in its early stages — even as SAP's own metrics show strong deal momentum (SAP News, 2026). SAP can announce agent capabilities — and they will — but the harder conversation is adoption.
Most SAP customers I work with aren't blocked by capability. They're blocked by readiness: no AI literacy program, no governance framework, no change management muscle for deploying autonomous agents against their ERP. I hope SAP comes with specifics — enablement programs, guardrail frameworks, adoption playbooks co-developed with partners. Not just "Joule can now do X" — but "here's how your organization actually gets there." For context on what the agent architecture looks like in practice, see our breakdown of how agents identify and call each other across platforms.
2. An Honest "Why" for BDC Beyond the Data Tax Critique
Business Data Cloud has faced a pointed criticism: that it's primarily a monetization mechanism — a toll booth on SAP customer data. The fact that 94% of companies are already aware of BDC but only 54% see it as a key part of their future data strategy (Crave Infotech, 2026) tells you the awareness-to-conviction gap is real.
What I want to see: concrete evidence that BDC produces better AI outcomes than alternative data architectures. What's the actual lift in model accuracy when using BDC-sourced SAP data versus a customer-built integration? If the answer is compelling, SAP should be leading with it.
3. Specifics on Where SAP Is Investing Next
SAP's R&D roadmap is usually telegraphed vaguely — "we're investing in AI, sustainability, and supply chain resilience." I'd rather hear SAP name the specific bets they're making over the next 18 months. Are they doubling down on industry clouds? Vertical AI models for manufacturing and finance? Agent orchestration infrastructure?
Vague investment language is a proxy for "we haven't fully committed yet." Specificity signals conviction.
4. What Net-New Innovation Actually Looks Like
There's a meaningful difference between embedding AI into existing SAP workflows and building genuinely new capabilities. Most "AI innovation" announcements at enterprise conferences are efficiency plays dressed as transformation — net-new surface area is rarer and more valuable. I hope SAPPHIRE includes at least one announcement that surprises the audience: something that isn't just Joule doing a task slightly faster, but a capability that changes what SAP customers can do entirely.
5. Deep Partnership Announcements Across the AI Ecosystem
SAP has relationships with Google Cloud, Microsoft, AWS, and Databricks. But depth matters more than breadth. I hope SAPPHIRE includes concrete technical integrations — not just co-sell agreements — with the AI leaders building the infrastructure layer: Anthropic, OpenAI, or the hyperscaler AI platforms.
Specifically: what model is powering Joule's reasoning? What's SAP's stance on model choice for customers who want to bring their own LLM? The enterprise AI ecosystem is moving fast, and SAP needs to show it's building for the open ecosystem, not just the SAP-walled one. The agentic handshake between SAP and Google Cloud's A2A protocol is one concrete example of what deep partnership looks like in practice.
The Bottom Line
SAP SAPPHIRE 2026 will be a strong event. The AI story is real, the S/4 urgency is real, and RISE has matured. But the most important signals will be in the margins: how specifically SAP addresses adoption, what they say about BDC's value case, and whether any announcement genuinely surprises.
Watch for what's on the keynote stage, but also for what's in the breakout sessions — that's usually where the practitioners are having the more honest conversations.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is SAP SAPPHIRE?
SAP SAPPHIRE is SAP's annual flagship customer and partner conference, held May 11–13, 2026 in Orlando, Florida. It's the primary venue for SAP's major product announcements, roadmap updates, and customer transformation stories across its global enterprise software portfolio.
What is RISE with SAP?
RISE with SAP is SAP's cloud transformation offering, launched in 2021, designed to help customers migrate to S/4HANA Cloud. It bundles cloud infrastructure, SAP Business Process Intelligence, and partner services into a subscription model aimed at simplifying the path to the intelligent enterprise.
What is SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC)?
SAP Business Data Cloud is SAP's unified data product layer, built in partnership with Databricks, designed to consolidate SAP and non-SAP data for analytics and AI use cases. It appeared in 90% of SAP's 50 largest Q4 2025 deals, though questions about its value versus cost remain an active conversation in the market.
What is SAP Joule?
SAP Joule is SAP's generative AI copilot, embedded across SAP's cloud portfolio including S/4HANA, SuccessFactors, and Ariba. Joule adoption grew ninefold in 2025 and the platform now covers 2,500+ pre-built skills and 40 Joule Agents across finance, HR, procurement, and supply chain.