Amidst ongoing debates about the role and need for development teams in an AI era, SAP's TechEd 2025 is an unabashed champion for the human developer - but they will be extensively AI-enabled, if SAP has anything to do with it.
At the conference, taking place in Berlin this November 4-6, SAP has made a number of announcements and followed up on updates and enhancements first shared at the company's premiere flagship conference - SAP Sapphire - held in various cities in May of this year.
With the slogan 'Where ideas get real' the presentations at this year's TechEd featured the myriad ways in which SAP is bringing AI deep into the development process to level up how developers build, including extending support and learning opportunties for all levels of development.
"The best developers are lazy developers"
Muhammad Alam, member of the Executive Board of SAP and Product & Engineering Lead, spoke directly to developers at the event opening: "I think of one of the sayings we've all heard: the best developers are the lazy developers. What we're trying to do is effectively make you even lazier. You're going to hear a lot more announcements about how we're bringing the power of AI to you as an assistant, as a teammate - helping with what you do on a daily basis from a development perspective, where you develop, how you develop, how you extend the application."
Josh Bentley, Senior Director Community Advocacy, SAP Ecosystem & Community, also spoke at the welcome address for TechEd: "Let's get real, developers aren't going anywhere, because the world doesn't need fewer developers, it needs more empowered ones. [...] This is the time to know how to use AI as a collaborator, and it's the time to turn automation and data into a real business impact."
In addition to the advancements in AI for automation, SAP further emphasised its commitment to creating an open ecosystem that enables developers to move freely between their AI providers and solutions of choice.
Alam said, "You'll hear a lot on the theme of openness. Openness in where you develop; openness in terms of our data strategy, data platform and who we work with; and openness in terms of how our AI works with AI that may exist in the customer's landscape as well."
New MCP servers and agent building
SAP Build, the company's flagship solution for enterprise application development and automation, is an excellent example of SAP's commitment to creating an open ecosystem. At TechEd, the solutions provider announced new support for popular frameworks and code assistants.
With local Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, SAP now provides support for code assistants that power developers' preferred agentic development solutions, including Cursor, Windsurf, Claude Code and Cline, while maintaining enterprise-grade governance and clean core alignment. In the near future, a new ABAP-based MCP server will expose ABAP Cloud development capabilities and ABAP AI capabilities to coding agents, with general availability planned for H1 2026.
In addition, a new SAP Build extension will allow Visual Studio Code users to access SAP Build capabilities directly in their development environment. This extension will also be made available at a later date on Open VSX Registry for other development environments. SAP and n8n also announced plans for an integration so Joule Studio agents and n8n agents can work together.
Agent building in Joule Studio has also received a notable update. Now developers can extend SAP Build with their own models, data and logic while keeping them grounded in enterprise context and security. According to SAP, this enables smarter, more adaptive applications that learn from business processes, automate routine tasks, and deliver real-time insights - within the low-code environment developers are already familiar with.
Extending AI autonomy for developers
A big theme at SAP TechEd is how to help developers take AI from insight to action and developer greater autonomy. This includes an expansion of the SAP AI portfolio to give developers greater intelligence and orchestration power.
Aligned with this focus, SAP has introduced its first enterprise relational foundation model, a new class of AI that predicts business outcomes rather than the next word in a sentence. SAP-RPT-1, or the first-generation Relational Pre-trained Transformer, can make fast and accurate predictions for common business scenarios - for instance, delivery delays, payment risk or sales order completion.
Unlike other foundation models such as large language models (LLMs), the SAP-RPT-1 AI model is natively designed for relational and structured business data. SAP has launched a free playground environment so developers can experience the model first hand. It will be generally available in Q4 2025 on the generative AI hub in SAP's AI Foundation, with additional SAP-RPT models rolling out on an ongoing basis.
At SAP TechEd Alam shared, "Our relational, pre-trained transformer delivers enterprise grade accuracy and scale, outperforming both large language models and auto ML for tabular data, which is critical for building high value agentic cases on business applications. This allows you to solve classical prediction problems like sales order completion, as an example."
Meanwhile, new AI assistants in Joule coordinate multiple agents across workflows, departments and applications, bringing automation and AI autonomy to life. These assistants plan, initiate and complete complex tasks spanning finance, supply chain, HR and beyond. Updated capabilities also include ABAP AI-assisted development within SAP Cloud ERP Private and AI-driven custom code migration capabilities within SAP BTP for the ABAP environment. These innovations are designed to help developers modernise legacy systems, meet enterprise-grade governance and security requirements, boost productivity, improve code quality, and deliver on their cloud transformation goals.
Leaning into change with SAP
In an official statement from SAP, Alam commented, "SAP's announcements today give developers the tools they need to deliver at the speed of AI. Innovations across SAP's unique flywheel of applications, data and AI put developers in the driver's seat - where they belong."
At SAP TechEd, he said, "We are definitely in very interesting times where the profession that we're in, the profession that you're in, is going through a significant step change - so lean in. We're making history here with you in terms of how work gets done and how development gets done, now and in the future."
