AI Innovations for Finance | SAP Connect

Finance professionals have proven their resilience through volatility, from shifting interest rates to evolving regulatory landscapes, putting intense pressure on leaders to make faster and smarter decisions.

However, the pace of change has made traditional approaches, like best-of-breed point solutions, no longer sufficient to help finance teams keep up.

That is why the future of finance technology should act as an orchestra, not disjointed soloists.

Finance teams require a unified experience where applications, data, and AI work seamlessly together. With SAP Business Suite, these elements come together as one orchestra, enabling finance to operate in harmony and deliver outcomes that point solutions alone cannot achieve. This means not only faster close and stronger liquidity, but also tighter compliance and credible plans that hold up under change.

To strengthen collaboration across finance and bring innovation to the CFO’s office, SAP unveiled Joule’s next stage as the AI force at the center of SAP Business Suite’s value creation. A new generation of role-aware assistants in Joule are designed to partner with people in their specific business roles by tapping into the right agents behind the scenes for the job. For finance professionals, SAP introduced the next round of automation support using agentic AI.

SAP is embedding AI-powered reasoning directly into finance processes to automate routine work and elevate the strategic role of finance with the following new agents:

• The Accruals Agent will calculate accruals and deferrals based on system data and present the accountant with a proposal for review, along with a detailed explanation of the calculation logic.
• The Cash Management Agent will automate daily bank statement reconciliation tasks and recommend opportunities for optimization.
• The International Trade Classification Agent will reason over product characteristics and trade regulations and act to classify goods for international shipping, recommending customs tariff numbers and commodity codes

By bringing automation to critical but repetitive finance processes, these agents underscore SAP’s commitment to equipping the office of the CFO with AI-driven innovation that strengthens resilience in an increasingly complex business environment.

Finance as the conductor of the enterprise

The role of the CFO has expanded far beyond closing the books or reporting quarterly earnings. Today, finance teams are expected to bring together data, processes, and people from the entire business to enable seamless collaboration.

With SAP’s AI-first, suite-first approach, applications and data flow seamlessly, allowing finance leaders to coordinate business operations with confidence. This unified foundation ensures that insights are not siloed, but instead shared across the enterprise, enabling faster and smarter decisions.

Take working capital management, one of the biggest pressure points for finance leaders: A recent Economist Impact survey of 480 CFOs found confidence levels were strong in almost all areas, including revenue, profit, and customer retention, but only 36 percent felt confident in their ability to achieve working capital targets. SAP Business Suite can help organizations meet their targets by automating manual work and enabling actionable decisions — all by leveraging dynamic, autonomous, and action-oriented solutions in SAP Business Suite.

When an organization manages incoming receivables, outgoing payables, as well as cash and inventory within SAP, that connected experience creates data that provides real-time visibility into liquidity through SAP Business Data Cloud.  That data fuels SAP Business AI to analyze situations, recommend actions, and even resolve issues like disputed invoices automatically, which would otherwise slow the cash collection process. And with the integration of Joule and intelligent agents, SAP Business AI not only automates, it senses, reasons, orchestrates, and acts — turning insights into outcomes that free capacity and accelerate the business.

As AI agents take on more of the behind-the-scenes work, finance professionals can step fully into their role as the conductor of the enterprise. They can guide strategy with foresight, aligning every function in harmony and shaping outcomes that extend far beyond revenue or cost goals.

CFOs and their teams can then move beyond reactive decision-making toward shaping strategy in real time. This will position their office as a driver of growth, resilience, and innovation.

Looking ahead

SAP is laying the foundation for a new era of autonomous finance, where routine processes are automated, insights are delivered in real time, and finance teams are empowered to focus on strategy and growth.

These innovations mark just the beginning of SAP’s commitment to helping businesses navigate an increasingly complex financial landscape with agility, intelligence, and confidence.

Lawrence Martin is chief product officer and head of Public Cloud Engineering at SAP.
David Imbert is head of Finance Product Marketing at SAP.