Presented by SAP
For decades, business planning has followed a linear path: gather inputs, create forecasts, devise strategies, and execute against them for a period of time. That was fine for a world where big disruptions were rare. But that world has vanished.
Today, volatility and uncertainty have become features of the business environment, no longer bugs. And if that wasn’t enough, too many businesses today are starting to break under the weight of growing complexity brought on by an ever-increasing number of isolated apps that promise to solve an individual business problem but fall short of making sure they optimize for the enterprise and not a local silo.
For example, today a $10 billion company runs more than 600 business applications on average. This is a fivefold increase over the past 25 years.
But this is also a moment of technological maturity. The power of clean, meaningful operational data in the cloud has created a foundation for more relevant business AI and set the stage to unleash new productivity gains at scale. But only for those businesses that know how to use them in the right way.
In a volatile business environment where tariffs and currency values shift overnight, the ability to continuously orchestrate and optimize processes across your apps, data, and AI is the new competitive advantage.
Why continuous orchestration?
Continuous orchestration is the ability to constantly sense, predict, and align your processes in real-time across all functions including finance, sales, supply chain, HR, and more. But for too many businesses, fragmented systems still stand in the way.
IBM’s 2025 CEO Survey found 85% of leaders expect positive ROI from scaling AI with 61% actively adopting AI agents and planning to implement them at scale. But the same study found disconnected business functions and fragmented data environments are hindering its impact.
This is where an integrated suite of applications and associated AI agents can make a massive difference.
At our annual Sapphire conference last month, SAP unveiled innovations and partnerships to reimagine how enterprises run using business AI and drive productivity gains of up to 30%. This includes tools like SAP Joule, giving them answers to anything at any time, the SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC), which serves as a trusted and harmonized data foundation connecting all SAP data with third-party data, and the SAP Business Suite, which is one unified platform bringing together our Cloud ERP with our Line of Business solutions.
Think of these tools together as a digital conductor, helping to ensure that every part of your business plays in perfect harmony, even as the music changes.
With automation, you see immediate benefits which are far from trivial. But with automation and orchestration, from apps, data, and AI working together, you get embedded intelligence that multiplies the value of every tool, every minute.
Imagine a scenario where your predictive AI agents flag a tariff risk in one country and work with your supply chain agents to scale production at another location before it hits your bottom line. Or being able to link all your processes and equip every team with unified, adaptable business tools.
It’s already happening
Businesses are already starting to do this and seeing real results:
For example, HP, Inc. has been leveraging the power of the cloud through RISE with SAP for more than two years. As a result, they’ve been able to leverage our suite of Integrated Business Planning capabilities, SAP Ariba’s spend management software, and are planning to deploy Joule for customer service, managing unstructured supplier data, and managing purchase orders as needs change.
Or take Accenture who is taking their business transformation to the next level with an AI-first and Suite-First strategy. They’ve already been able to create financial narratives 60% faster with gen AI and save 57,000 hours for their finance teams with AI-infused solutions. Today, they are working to orchestrate an even fuller suite of capabilities including SAP’s BDC and more business AI use cases.
Orchestration requires a leadership shift
But technology is only one part of the equation. True orchestration can only come from a shift in your business mindsets:
- CFOs who measure value in outcomes, not just line items
- CIOs who act as architects of agility
- COOs who champion real-time, cross-functional collaboration
- And sales and service leaders who use data and AI to deliver personalization at scale
And as global uncertainty continues to roil markets and force businesses to rebuild their landscapes to give them the agility and resilience they need, the organizations that will win are those who can orchestrate by predicting, aligning, and acting continuously.
This is the new playbook for business productivity and it’s one that SAP is helping our customers write more and more every day.
Jan Gilg is Chief Revenue Officer & President, SAP Americas and Global Business Suite.
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