Sapphire 2026 accelerated SAP’s pivot to AI. Most of the keynote demos were heavy on AI, including introducing new engagement layer experiences to complement the existing application experiences. The magic of the engagement layer is that it allows you to interact with your ERP system in a conversational way, starting with your intent and the system will generate an interface based on the context of your request. While this might represent a more natural way to work, it also represents a major change to how people have been working with SAP applications for the past few decades.
The new engagement layer lets you interact with SAP in a conversational way.
I had the opportunity to see many deep-dive sessions that explained the new UX and how we expect people to work with it. More importantly, I spoke with many customers and partners about their reaction to the way we are moving. Generally, people are excited about the direction we are going and having more automation to free up time for deeper thought and analysis, but they are concerned about trusting AI to do things that might have significant business impact. While Joule Work will certainly be a game changer for many, the big open question is how to get there. As with all IT transformations, it will involve a combination of changes across people, processes, and technology.
Embedded AI meets customers where they are
The first session that I presented was on “Creating better user experiences with AI-powered SAP Fiori apps ASUG.” I started out by talking about overcoming usability challenges with AI and then did a live demo of around 10 cool productivity features. What’s unique about the embedded AI capabilities in SAP Cloud ERP is that it is built into the existing interfaces that people know, so it allows them to go through their work more quickly by using AI to search, summarize, and enter data.
There are many AI-powered features that make people more productive when using SAP Cloud ERP.
The slides from the session (PUX1228) include links where you can see short recorded demos of these features. These capabilities are available for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition. Some of them are coming to private cloud in upcoming releases.
Some questions that customers asked that might be of general interest:
- Does the engagement layer replace SAP Fiori? No – the application experience and engagement layer experience are complementary. They will coexist for the foreseeable future. (Thanks for the question, Tony)
- Does the engagement layer use SAP Fiori elements? The answer here is more nuanced. The engagement layer is independent of the Fiori apps. The engagement layer does not call Fiori apps for the data. But, it uses the same underlying data source, which are the OData services and annotations. (Great question, Kelly)
Fear, optimism, and the AI Skills gap
My other presentation was a “community conversation” in the ASUG Hub. My colleague, Nicole Smythe and I facilitated the session along with Liz Tuckwell and Nadalee Williams from ASUG. The goal was to collect ideas on AI adoption from the attendees and equip them with information so they could create a 90-day plan to turn their thoughts into action and move forward with AI in your organization. After providing an overview of Joule Work, we broke into teams and people discussed barriers to implementing AI in their organizations and how they overcame them.
Top problems that the audience identified included:
- Data. How to get the data clean so any AI agents can work properly and consistently. Most people know they need to fix their business processes and clean their data before they can benefit from AI.
- Governance. People see the need for IT to manage this centrally. Currently, many innovative teams want to get started with AI and are doing things on their own without corporate oversight. We saw this situation a decade ago when some business managers purchased cloud services for sales or HR or other domains if they did not receive sufficient support from their IT teams.
- Cost. How to meter AI consumption and allocate charges to different users.
- AI Expertise. Upskilling teams on AI and its capabilities. Currently, this is a side job for most people, so they are not putting enough focus on this. Once company had a rotation program where top developers could allocate 50% of their time to learning AI topics and then bring those skills back to their teams.
- Talent management. With fewer entry-level workers or people doing repetitive jobs, it is harder to identify the best employees, so you can focus on retention and building a leadership pipeline.
Other interesting sessions on AI, UX, and AI+UX
Most of the other sessions I attended were on AI, UX, or their intersection. Hearing the questions people asked and what they talked about afterwards will be helpful in refining our agenda for our next SAP Connect Day for UX, which is in Palo Alto on June 11. We’ll go deep on our UX strategy and share some new functionality, both released and unreleased. There will be two hands-on exercises, one on building applications and the other building Smart Helpers (currently in beta).
- Katja Zoch and Sebastian Steinhauer had a session on how to extend SAP S/4HANA Cloud while keeping a clean core. They focused on what is clean core, why its important, and how to extend your core ERP system using clean core principles.
- Chris Hoffmann had several sessions on the show floor. They all focused on different dimensions of the AI-powered user experience in the SAP Business Suite. One was a broad survey of functionality, another focused on AI-assisted task automation, and the other talked about roadmap items. All showed how AI adoption is on the path towards human‑supervised autonomous ERP.
- Tom Reiss presented on SAP Fiori in action, highlighting how modern UX helps users get their work done more easily and efficiently. He also had a roadmap session with Christina Salwizek featuring web and mobile innovations that are on the horizon.
- Sophia Levens had some great sessions on the new Joule user experience, focusing on both how it works and the implications for users. She also had a strategy-focused talk with SAP’s chief designer officer, Arin Bhowmick, where they explored where user engagement and enterprise UX are headed.
- Bert Schultz and Esther Vrieze spoke about different ways to migrate to SAP S/4HANA and the relative benefits among the different approaches.
- Maura Hameroff and Rudi Hois talked about SAP Cloud ERP Private and the many innovations that customers can expect to see in upcoming releases.
We held our SAP Fiori Development Roundtable live from the show
To add a little extra energy to our already lively discussions, I joined my co-host Sebastian Werner live from the show floor. We spent lots of time talking about Joule Studio and how it fits with our existing development tools. If you want to join the next monthly call, please register.
AI vibe from across the conference
While the sessions are a great way to learn about hot topics, the best way to hear about how customers are using our solutions and what they are planning is in the hallways, food areas, UXpresso Café (successor to the Fiori Café), happy hours, and demo pods. The questions after sessions are also revealing. This year, the customers I spoke to were concerned about:
- How the new engagement layer (Joule Work) fits with SAP Fiori
- How to get started with AI, especially in private cloud and on-prem environments
- If their existing Fiori apps will continue to work (yes!) and if they should continue to build new Fiori apps (yes!)
- All the topics listed above from the ASUG community conversation (data, governance, cost, AI skills, and talent pipeline)
Next steps
Perhaps you are still digesting all the announcements from Sapphire and figuring out their impact on your business. To help you prepare for the future, consider discussing the following questions with your team.
- What business problems are most pressing and can benefit from automation? How will we meter the costs, set appropriate limits, and measure the return on investment?
- Is our data clean, consistent across different parts of the business, ready to train the AI system, and be part of automated workflows? How much autonomy are we willing to give agents and what is the best way to supervise / manage / audit their activities?
- How will we integrate AI into our SAP landscape? Are we using SAP’s embedded capabilities, Joule, the new engagement layer, or external AI-powered apps running on SAP data (subject to the API policy)?
- How will we address change management with our business users?
- How will we manage AI governance, risk, and security? Using SAP’s AI simplifies the answer to this question as we cover much of this, but you still need robust AI policies in your organization
If we did not meet at Sapphire and you are interested in joining the conversation about SAP Fiori application development and how AI makes it better, faster, and cheaper, please join our monthly SAP Fiori development roundtable group or sign up for our bi-monthly newsletter.
If you are in the Silicon Valley area or can fly there on June 11, please join us for SAP Connect Day for UX. We’ll go deeper into all the UX and related AI topics listed in this post.
https://events.sap.com/us-ux-innovation-day-siliconvalley-2026/en_us/home.html
For the UX Foundation team, Peter Spielvogel.
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