After Christian Klein’s keynote at SAP Sapphire last week, CIO.com pronounced that SAP is going “all-in on agentic AI.” This message came across loud and clear last week in Orlando and it was also clear that SAP’s business transformation management solutions are a big part of SAP’s AI strategy.
SAP acquired LeanIX (now SAP LeanIX) back in the fall of 2023. Already an established leader in enterprise architecture management, SAP LeanIX had also long featured a close integration with SAP Signavio(acquired by SAP in 2021). The 2023 acquisition thus brought together two solutions that have proven critical for helping companies manage ERP transformations while also helping them develop the capability to successfully and continuously execute on any strategically relevant transformation.
At SAP Sapphire in Orlando, Christian Klein, Muhammad Alam, Philipp Herzig, and others cast a light on the critical role LeanIX can and will play in the emerging, agentic-AI future. Last year, LeanIX introduced a range of AI capabilities, including key AI governance capabilities. LeanIX further added to these capabilities earlier this year when the company introduced its AI-enabled inventory builder, allowing users to create factsheets and other architecture artifacts directly fromn uploaded drawings and diagrams.
Then, at Sapphire, we heard about the AI agent hub in LeanIX.
SAP unveiled a number of new AI agents at Sapphire. These agents can handle a range of tasks and complex operations across customer experience, supply chain management, and spend management. While this was exciting news in itself, it also illustrated the challenges companies will face as they seek to deploy agents, and, more importantly, ensure these agents best serve the company.
Although the widespread adoption of this technology is only just now beginning, estimates say that by 2028 a third of enterprise applications will incorporate agentic AI. As this adoption increases, companies will want to:
In other words, just as with any other software, companies will want visibility into the state of play when it comes to AI agents. At the same time, as this technology evolves and transforms the way organizations work, companies will continuously seek new ways to take use agents to improve productivity and efficiency as well as carve out new paths to competitive advantage.
As a tool built to help companies discover, map, and manage applications and components across the IT landscape, it’s natural and logical for LeanIX to do the same regarding AI agents. With the AI agent hub, due to be released later this year, LeanIX lays the foundation for proactive deployment, management, and governance of agents.
The hub will serve as a system of record where employees can find all available agents, whether provided by SAP, built in-house, or from a third part. Through integration with Signavio, the hub will help recommend agents for deployment in business processes, and through SuccessFactors the hub will help HR and recruiting teams understand the impact of AI agents on the workforce’s changing skill profile.
Finally, company leaders will get clear line of sight into the business impact of agentic AI through the newly announced executive dashboard in LeanIX.
Here’s where the AI agent hub sits in the broader SAP Business AI architecture:
As you can see in this diagram, Joule supports the AI agent experience and access to Business AI in general. This is where the newest addition to SAP’s business transformation management toolset, WalkMe, comes in.
In his keynote, Christian Klein devoted special attention to making AI “omnipresent” across the SAP Business Suite and even third-party applications. WalkMe’s powerful digital adoption technology makes this vision a reality by “studying users’ behavior and the business context within SAP or third-party cloud applications” and letting Joule use this information “to independently—and proactively—provide real-time insights, support, and recommendations.”
Thanks to the insights provided by WalkMe and a newly announced partnership with Perplexity, Joule will not only follow users from one application to another but also consistently provide richer, more detailed, and more accurate responses to user queries.
In other words, the vision for AI laid out at Sapphire starts to cover the whole enterprise, from availability and access to thoughtful, operational deployment. And as employees learn to work more and more closely with AI, WalkMe will serve as an observant, proactive guide.
AI has already begun to disrupt business. The era of agentic AI is just dawning. In order to adapt to these changes, companies need support. They also need options. The business transformation management toolset, including SAP LeanIX, SAP Signavio, and WalkMe, give companies the support they need from the technology level through processes to the end users.
And because these tools are, ultimately, vendor agnostic, they help companies keep their options open while exploring where they can best unlock value, now and into the future.