Sapphire 2026 – What SAP actually did for CX
SAP Sapphire 2026 was a major platform announcement, a competitive shot at ServiceNow, a coherent acquisition story across Reltio, Dremio and Prior Labs. It featured an Anthropic partnership that puts Claude at the center of the SAP Business AI Platform. For anyone who cares about customer experience, it was also a missed opportunity dressed up as ambition. If you watched only the keynote, you concluded SAP barely talks about CX. Klein did finance with JP Morgan. Herzig demoed pharma pricing. Industry AI showcased RWE wind turbines. The named flagship was the Autonomous Close Assistant. CX got line items. That reading is incomplete. Here is what actually happened for CX at Sapphire 2026, what it means competitively, and what SAP and SAP CX customers should do about it. What SAP actually shipped for CX On the same day as the keynote, Balaji Balasubramanian, SAP’s CX President and Chief Product Officer, published a substantive announcement listing ten named Joule Assistants for CX. Marketing gets Content and Campaign Assistants. Commerce gets Merchandising, Shopping and Order Management Assistants. Sales gets Sales, Deal Qualification and Deal Closing Assistants. Service gets Case Management and Service Management Assistants. The supporting announcements are the part most analyst coverage missed. A Google partnership brings Gemini into SAP CX, plus adoption of the open Universal Commerce Protocol. Vercel handles storefront development. SAP Unified Payment runs on Adyen, with Checkout.com and PayPal configurable. Expanded Parloa and Amazon partnerships cover voice and digital service. A new SAP Commerce Cloud, cloud ERP edition targets mid-market. Two Industry AI scenarios for CX: Autonomous Revenue Growth Management and Unified Commerce. All of it planned...
The AI Ferrari: Why Your CX Strategy is Stuck on Concrete Blocks
We have reached a point in the hype cycle where “AI” is being sprinkled on enterprise software like a seasoning on a cheap steak: it masks the poor quality of the underlying meat but doesn’t make it more nutritious. In the latest CRMKonvo, Bhawani Shankar and the CRMKonvo team tore into the reality of what it actually takes to make “Agentic AI” work in a Customer Experience (CX) environment. The analysis? Most enterprises are trying to drive a Ferrari without wheels. Bhawani used this metaphor that I find particularly apt: the AI model is the shiny red car that gets the CEO excited; but the data is the wheels, the engine, and the fuel; and they come as options. If you buy the car without ensuring the wheels are attached and the tank is full of high-octane, verified data, you aren’t going anywhere. You are just sitting in an expensive garage making engine noises. TL;DR If you want to watch the full CRMKonvo, please go ahead here (optimized for smartphones) or here (optimized for tablets/computers). Else, be my guest and continue to read. Or do both … The Death of the “System of Record” For decades, we have worshipped at the altar of the “System of Record.” The goal was simple: get the data into the CRM. It didn’t matter if the data was messy, duplicated, or six months out of date; as long as it was “in the system”, leadership was happy. But as Bhawani correctly pointed out, we need to be moving from a system of record to a system of context. In the old world, a...
SAP Draws a Perimeter around Agentic AI and What That Means for the Rest of US
The most consequential enterprise AI governance document published this year arrived in late April with surprisingly little fanfare. SAP’s updated API Policy, version 4/2026, is a short document in plain English. The clause that is most interesting is Section 2.2.2. It restricts how autonomous and generative AI systems are permitted to interact with SAP APIs. Read literally, it has the potential to change the architecture of agentic AI projects across every SAP customer landscape. Read carefully, it is also more interesting than the lock-in headlines suggest. The policy targets a specific category of AI behavior, not AI as such. It connects to commercial mechanics that go well beyond API stability. And the literal text, in its current form, will probably not survive the next two policy revisions intact. There is a lot to unpack. I will walk through what the policy actually says, how the SAP-watching community is reading it, what the rest of the major enterprise vendors are doing in comparison, what counts as an “endorsed architecture”, and what customers and partners should be doing about it now. I’ll close with a view on whether the policy can stand the test of time. What Section 2.2.2 actually says The operative sentence is direct. “Except through and within the limits of SAP-endorsed architectures, data services, or service-specific pathways expressly identified and intended for such purposes, SAP prohibits API use for interaction or integration with semi-autonomous or generative AI systems that plan, select, or execute sequences of API calls”. The same paragraph also prohibits scraping, harvesting, or systematic large-scale data extraction. Three things flow from that. First, only Published APIs,...