SAP CX president shares three principles that guide its AI strategy
Not long before SAP began hosting this week’s SAPPHIRE 2026 event, Balaji Balasubramanian had a call with some of the software giant’s key customers who would be appearing on stage. He asked them about their progress in shifting towards agentic artificial intelligence (AI). What he heard represented the full spectrum of the customer journey.
According to the president and chief product officer for SAP CX, some customers said they had already set up business processes that AI could handle in an autonomous fashion. Others said their tech stack is so large and complex that they weren’t fully ready to run agentic AI at this stage. A few admitted they just weren’t sure yet.
For Balasubramanian, these varied states of AI readiness are not only to be expected, but are precisely where SAP CX sees an opportunity to help.
“Not everyone is in the same spot,” he told 360 Magazine in a pre-briefing ahead of SAPPHIRE 2026 in Orlando. “Some are willing to (run AI) more autonomously than others, but in every case we give them plenty of guardrails and controls. That’s super critical as agents and humans begin to work side by side.”
Along with introducing the SAP Business AI Platform this week, for example, the company also launched SAP Autonomous Suite. The latter includes more than 50 domain-specific Joule assistants that can orchestrate a set of more than 200 specialized AI agents to execute tasks to enhance customer engagement and many other areas.
In sales, for instance, Balasubramanian described how SAP customers could set up a Joule assistant to draw upon enriched prospect data to trigger personalized outreach and then route the prospect to the best-fit seller to close a deal. Other Joule assistants could quality and route sales leads based on internal data and external signals to ensure only the most promising opportunities are pursued.
Rather than explore autonomous AI possibilities at random, Balasubramanian said SAP CX is increasingly acting in response to what it hears from those already deploying the technology on the frontlines.
“Customers now come to us and tell us what their use cases are and to build it out,” he said. “We’re working with them hand in hand in order to see value very quickly.”
Customer co-creation was one of three principals that Balasubramanian said underpin SAP’s approach to developing AI assistants. The others include thinking about use cases in a process context, breaking down customer journeys such as “market to lead” or “lead to order” to better understand the ideal outcome.
SAP also focuses on looking minutely at how customers handle these processes today so that any AI agents or Joule assistants can be mapped accordingly.
“What we’ve noticed if you don’t have your systems in a proper place, especially unified data, AI is only as good as the context you provide,” he said. “We really believe in customer experience is a reflection of that. Customers don’t experience the systems, they experience how broken the promises can potentially be.”
Brands including Levi Strauss, Lockheed Martin and ExxonMobil all appeared at SAPPHIRE 2026, which wraps up later this week, with some virtual sessions available on demand to registered attendees.
