SAP is making 100 million euros available to help existing customers deploy AI agents in production. Up to 100,000 euros is available per project. The message to companies is to move AI out of the pilot phase and utilize it across various departments. For now, there are no Dutch AI requests at SAP whatsoever, making the country a good pointer to just how much room AI adoption has to grow, if we want to phrase it politely.
The most basic forms of AI are indeed in use at Dutch companies, but they are inherently not very exciting or impactful. Having AI write emails or summarize meetings may have sounded like somewhat intriguing ideas around 2023, but they are already outdated and limiting if those are your most ambitious AI applications. According to SAP, the next step lies in AI agents that actively participate in business processes. To accelerate this transition, the company is launching a 100-million-euro innovation program for existing customers.
Alex Timlin, Chief Expert for Customer Experience and CRM Solutions, states that the lack of advanced AI adoption in production in the Netherlands proves that organizations are still very much in the exploratory phase. This is despite the fact that AI agents can make processes more valuable by taking over repetitive tasks. It’s a well-known concept that this is where the added value lies, but truly leveraging AI must go beyond experimentation and the mere recognition that the technology can be useful.
Agents instead of isolated tasks
In customer service, for example, an agent can analyze customer inquiries, summarize them, and forward them to the appropriate employee. In sales, an agent records information from conversations and suggests a next step. And in commerce, AI assists with pricing proposals, promotions, and inventory decisions.
SAP hopes to make AI adoption easier by building in ready-to-use tools. At Sapphire 2026 , the company presented the Autonomous Enterprise, featuring more than 50 Joule assistants that manage over 200 specialized agents. There is still a world to be gained down this path if the focus is on SAP usage, as only 3 percent of SAP customers use Joule in production.
Silos remain the bottleneck
Many organizations lack context, SAP explains. Companies have invested for years in CRM, ERP, commerce, and data platforms, but those systems often still don’t work together effectively. “Customer experience isn’t just about sales,” says Mark Niemiec, Global Chief Revenue Officer of Customer Experience. “It’s about helping customers solve their problems.”
The program isn’t limited to SAP technology. Customers can combine SAP data with models from Databricks, Snowflake, OpenAI, Anthropic, and AWS. According to Timlin, transparency is crucial for building trust. In any case, the shift toward more autonomous agents should sound increasingly familiar, particularly within enterprise applications themselves. Gartner expects that by the end of 2026, about 40 percent of enterprise applications will include task-specific AI agents. That will require significant growth in a short period of time.