SAP closed 2025 with more than two-thirds of its Q4 cloud orders including business AI, up over 20 percentage points from the previous quarter.
Among the 50 largest deals signed in the quarter, 90% included either AI or SAP Business Data Cloud.
The numbers suggest SAP's messaging around embedded AI is starting to land with enterprise buyers.
Indeed, CEO Christian Klein spent much of the earnings call drawing a line between what SAP offers and the flood of generic AI tools hitting the market:
“Customers are facing geopolitical uncertainty, macroeconomic volatility, and they would like to leverage AI to make their companies more resilient and more productive, driving growth as well as cost efficiencies.”
He was also quick to add that customers are realizing “they don't gain value by developing a number of custom AI agents or by applying commodity large language models on top of transactional business applications.”
Where LLMs Fall Short
Klein walked through a few examples of customers who tried building AI solutions with large language models alone and hit a wall.
A German customer attempted to create a cash flow agent using an LLM. Klein said it delivered “no value” because the model couldn't access inventory data, financial bank statements, or other business context needed to understand why a customer wasn't paying.
After bringing in SAP's AI foundation and Knowledge Graph, the customer scrapped over 200 predictive models they'd built themselves.
H&M got a similar treatment. SAP built a prototype for personalized shopping that combined an LLM with its AI foundation to pull in purchase history and browsing behavior.
The deal also covered returns claims management, an area where SAP is “reimagining” old industry capabilities with AI.
Klein said SAP won that deal because of what it could do with last mile delivery, not just because of cloud migration.
“We are winning deals because of AI. We are not losing deals because of AI,” he added.
Joule Grows Ninefold
Away from Klein’s thoughts on LLMs, the CEO also discussed Joule, SAP's copilot tool, which saw adoption grow ninefold over 2025.
The tool works across SAP's application suite and has access to business data that sits outside the reach of general-purpose LLMs.