India drives SAP’s integrated AI strategy, says CTO Herzig

“2026 will be the year of agentic AI adoption for enterprises,” Herzig said. (© Sylviane Brauer)

SAP is leaning heavily on its India teams to power its next phase of business AI, with its conversational interface Joule and the company’s integrated AI approach being built largely out of the country, chief technology officer and chief AI officer Philipp Herzig told Moneycontrol.

Joule, described by Herzig as the “new UI in the age of AI,” is being developed in India. “That is exactly where India really shines, because out of India we can build this integrated approach that otherwise would have been much harder to achieve,” Herzig said.

Both user experience layer and engine underneath Joule are driven from the country, making India a core hub in SAP’s global AI roadmap.

Joule is SAP’s AI copilot that serves as a conversational layer across its applications, helping users complete tasks, retrieve information, and automate processes through natural language. It can be integrated across the SAP ecosystem, including the popular application SAP S/4HANA.

SAP Labs India has about 15,000 employees, the largest number of engineers for the German company worldwide, and the second-highest overall headcount.

Herzig, who has been with the company for over 15 year in various capacities, said India’s role goes beyond a single product.

SAP has teams building all major applications in the country, including enterprise resource planning (ERP), human resources (HR), customer experience (CX), and supply chain.

Having these product groups in one country enables SAP to execute its integrated AI strategy, where intelligence is embedded consistently across applications.

Herzig added that Joule sits on top of SAP’s harmonised data model and works with the company’s broader “data plus AI flywheel”. Thereby, allowing customers to use AI models to make predictions on enterprise data and then query those insights directly through Joule.

SAP’s broad product footprint in India also allows the company to coordinate the development of end-to-end AI capabilities, which Herzig said is a key differentiator in a market where many vendors still struggle with harmonised data and aligned Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).

APIs are sets of rules and protocols that allow different software applications to communicate with each other.

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Herzig said SAP accelerated its work on Agentic AI through 2025, already shipping agents in core ERP areas such as cash management, accounts receivable, and production supervision.

The Dresden University computer science doctorate holder added that early agentic hype in the industry came before the technology and customer data environments were ready but that foundation work is now in place.

With customers improving data quality and aligning APIs over the last year, he expects real-world adoption to take off. “2026 will be the year of agentic AI adoption for enterprises,” he said.