SAP finance chief says AI must move beyond chatbots for real returns

SAP’s current cloud backlog reached €22.9 billion, up 27% from a year earlier and 26% at constant currencies, as the software maker used its latest results to push a harder line on artificial intelligence. Finance chief Dominik Asam said enterprise AI has to move beyond chatbots and coding tools into more complex business processes if it is going to deliver real returns.

SAP’s second-quarter figures underscored why the message landed with investors. Cloud revenue rose 22% year on year, total revenue increased 9%, cloud ERP Suite revenue climbed 25%, and non-IFRS operating profit rose 7%. Those gains came as SAP tried to persuade customers that AI should be measured by what it changes inside a company, not by how polished it looks on a screen.

Asam put that test in blunt terms, saying the “lion’s share” of AI token consumption today is spent on “low-hanging fruit.” He also said companies do not always need the most expensive AI model and sometimes do not need one at all. The implication is clear: a chatbot may be easy to deploy, but the better payoffs are likely to come from AI embedded in procurement, finance, supply chains, customer workflows and decision-making systems, where it can cut manual work and reduce costly errors.

SAP has been building that argument into its product roadmap for months. In November 2025, the company said it expected to have 400 SAP Business AI use cases delivered in its solutions by the end of 2025, including 40 Joule Agents, built on 2,100 Joule Skills. Earlier this year, SAP said momentum in Business AI supported a 25% increase in current cloud backlog at constant currencies in its first quarter results, showing that AI has become part of the company’s wider cloud strategy rather than a standalone feature.

The pressure is financial as well as strategic. SAP trimmed its 2026 profit goal on July 23, citing acquisition costs and the AI push, a reminder that the company is spending heavily while trying to prove the payoff will come later. For customers, the bar is shifting from experimentation to measurable business outcomes, and for SAP the next phase will be judged less by chatbot demos than by whether AI can change the way core enterprise systems run.