SAP Connect – Big 5 for Retail: AI, Engagement, and Orchestration Unleashed

By Jerry Sheldon Oct 10, 2025 3 Min Read

I just returned from SAP Connect 2025 in Las Vegas. This was essentially a new event as a unification of five prior events (CX, Spend, Success, Finance, and Supply Chain Connect) to showcase transformation across all lines of business, with a huge focus on business AI and role-based automation.

1. The Shift to Role-Aware AI Agents Is Real—and Retailers Must Respond

Market pressure: Retailers struggle with labor shortages, channel fragmentation, and legacy tech that hinders agility. SAP’s Connect 2025 introduced over 30 new “Joule Agents” designed to automate high-friction processes across finance, supply chain, and customer experience. These are not generic chatbots—they’re context-specific assistants that sense, reason, and act to streamline daily retail operations.

SAP reports up to 25% cost and time reduction in AI-assisted order creation and 50% productivity gains for associates supported by embedded AI.
Joule Agents now operate in 11 languages and cover 80% of retailers’ top-used workflows.
Bottom line: The future of retail operations is agentic and automated. Retailers who integrate role-specific agents can expect measurable gains in labor productivity and task accuracy, not just incremental tweaks.

2. Supply Chain Orchestration and Zero-Copy Data Create Greater Flexibility

What’s changing: Network and supply chain disruptions remain chronic risks. SAP’s new Supply Chain Orchestration and Business Data Cloud Connect help remove data silos and enable scenario planning across multi-tier supplier networks.

“Zero-copy” data sharing drastically reduces redundant ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) work, delivering a single source of truth for real-time analytics and AI decision-making.
AI-native orchestration flags at-risk orders or delays several tiers back, before they hit stores, reducing unplanned downtime and improving on-shelf availability.
Implication: Retailers can prioritize supplier onboarding, automate change management, and address disruptions faster. Early adopters reported 70% productivity improvement on remote work requests and up to 30% reduction in time to award RFPs in pilot projects.

3. Engagement Cloud and Unified Loyalty: A New Foundation for Retail CX (Customer Experience)

Problem: Disparate CX and loyalty systems create fragmented journeys, missed sales, and lost brand equity. SAP Engagement Cloud and new loyalty management tools unify customer and operational data, enabling omni-channel personalization rooted in business logic, not just marketing tags.

With Engagement Cloud, retail teams orchestrate personal offers, track loyalty liabilities, and execute campaigns from a single cockpit.
Joule Agents automate customer support, delivering context-aware, multi-lingual responses and quick escalations.
Expected outcomes: Retailers gain true 360-degree customer views and can run personalized, scalable loyalty programs. KPIs to watch include conversion rate, average ticket size, and loyalty repeat frequency.

4. SAP Business Suite Is Becoming the Orchestrator—Not Just a System of Record

Approach: SAP’s event and summit made it clear—ERP is evolving from passive record-keeping to active enterprise orchestration. Joule’s new “orchestrator” function lets agents coordinate cross-domain workflows (e.g., connecting supply chain, store ops, and finance) based on live business context.

33,000 customers live on SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP); over 178 embedded AI use cases are production ready.
The ROI estimator and quick-win tools help retailers target deployments with the highest return, accelerating time-to-value by up to 30%.
Takeaway: My personal belief is that we are migrating from best-of-breed to a suite focus with AI and Agents as the glue. I’ve felt this way for over a year and the more I hear from vendors with developed suite offerings further reinforces my belief. Vendors that can best articulate this vision with demonstrated capabilities are best positioned to capitalize on this. I have felt that best of breed born in the cloud vendors had a built-in advantage in that they were nimbler, not having the weight of legacy on-premise solutions, multiple acquisitions and constrained development resources to focus where needed. When we combine AI with a suite offering, and can articulate the value of AI within the end-to-end suite, I believe it neutralizes that facilitates a decided advantage.

5. Retail Success Is Tied to Operationalizing AI and Data—Not Just “Innovation”

Evidence: SAP’s focus on practical, measurable results was clear throughout Connect. Product claims were grounded in pilot outcomes and quantified benchmarks (e.g., 75% reduction in manual reconciliation time, 10%+ online conversion lifts).

SAP Connect 2025 was not about incremental features. It was about resetting what’s possible for retailers who operationalize AI and orchestration at scale. Tech investment must now quantify direct KPI impact, not just future potential. Those who bridge the data-to-action gap will outperform in margin and resilience over the next three years.