How SAP's AI Revolution is Transforming Customer Support Forever

We're witnessing the AI revolution in customer support as it happens.

From decades of customer support defined by reaction to calls, tickets, or queues, to the evolution of proactive support with pre-AI digital platforms, to the current AI-powered ecosystem that is redefining how support teams strategize, operate, and deliver resolutions. AI-enabled support anticipates needs, predicts failures, and delivers instant, seamless resolutions at scale.

And most importantly, this shift is as transformational as it is technological.

Keeping pace with transformation

As customers navigate complex and ambitious transformation projects, whether it's moving to the cloud, scaling AI, or modernizing complex operations, there is always a quiet mandate: systems supporting critical business processes must run smoothly because the costs of downtimes have never been higher.

For businesses, uninterrupted operations are non-negotiable. SAP's AI-driven support can anticipate issues before they arise, helping to ensure critical processes run smoothly, even during high-volume peak events. SAP uses SAP Business AI to help prevent issues proactively, working to ensure a smooth experience by avoiding system outages, platform scalability issues, data overloads, or service overloads. During the peak sales event of Cyber Week 2024, SAP achieved 100% uptime for SAP Commerce Cloud customers. As the Cyber Week 2025 numbers come in, we already have delivered 100% uptime and improved GMV for global sales events like Singles Day (GMV reached €7,108.72M, or +180.2% YoY, with 6,315.99K orders, or +46.4% YoY) and El Buen Fin (GMV hit €12,341.70M, or +13.18% YoY, and 10,385.74K orders, or +32.24% YoY).

Scaling self-service with AI

Structured knowledge and curated content enable SAP to build AI and AI agents with high confidence levels. Today, over 82% of customer issues are addressed via self-service. This allows users to get instant resolution to issues or bridge knowledge gaps they face during the use, implementation, and continuous improvement of SAP's solutions.

AI in instant response and resolution

When it comes to delivering instant response and resolution in customer support, the impact of AI-integrated services is remarkable. When SAP's Auto Response Agent is highly confident of the solution, based on the underlying data and knowledge, it can deliver highly relevant solutions that can save customers significant time and effort. Additionally, the first contact resolution rate for cases answered automatically by the agent is at par with what human-human support interactions achieve.

Supporting SAP Business AI

SAP Business AI supportability is all about making AI real for customers through the right systems that drive successful adoption. As SAP delivers AI capabilities across its portfolio, we enable customers to have the right support when they encounter issues in early deployment.

As customers scale AI across their organizations, we have concrete processes and tools to help support them, so they can deploy new AI with the utmost confidence. For example, the Incident Solution Matching service is integrated with SAP Joule for Consultants, allowing efficient support information retrieval and helping to eliminate the hassle of searching through vast amounts of SAP documentation.

Empowering support engineers with AI

AI is not just transforming customer outcomes, it's also transforming how our engineers and experts deliver precision and speed, freeing them from logistical tasks so they can focus on support requests that need specialized attention. Thanks to SAP's AI-integrated self-service offerings, we're able to instantly resolve customer issues four out of the five times they come to us.

AI-powered solution recommendations in self-service can eliminate the need for at least 10% of the cases being created. This is a big win for human-generated knowledge being delivered by AI-generated tools. Every third case gets submitted with an AI-recommended product component for optimal routing and faster processing.

In SAP's multi-location, multilingual, global setup, standardized communication is key. Around 10% of responses by support engineers take advantage of SAP's AI-assisted language optimization services.

There's more. We have agentic case resolution, AI-assisted creation of SAP Knowledge Base Articles, and automatic error categorization, covering use cases that help our engineers deliver their best work with greater accuracy and higher quality.

And, of course, SAP runs its own products and solutions, serving as a first reference for our customers. As Dr. Benjamin Blau, SAP's Chief Process and Information Officer, puts it: "This is 'SAP runs SAP' in action. As customer zero, we validate every AI innovation in real-world complexity before it reaches you. We've architected this multi-agent AI on our own SAP Business Technology Platform, including the SAP AI Core foundation, and our service and support data lake. Agentic case resolution is a blueprint for enterprise-grade, responsible AI, proving the power and maturity of the SAP Business AI portfolio, empowering customers with faster resolutions for an elevated experience."

Will AI replace support teams?

Short answer: No.

To elaborate, let's take the example of an AI agent that automatically responds to customers. SAP's instant response and resolution are only activated when the system is very confident with its response. Our commitment to the relevant, reliable, and responsible use of AI helps ensure that there's no experimentation with customer cases that deserve hands-on attention from engineers and experts. The legacy of trust that SAP has earned over 50 years of industry leadership, which is also trusted by 90% of Fortune 500 companies, drives this rigor applied to AI.

What does this mean for our engineers? Any move to augment our work with AI is not about replacing people. It's about freeing time, energy, and creative space to focus on high-impact tasks that need critical thinking and human insight. AI amplifies human expertise. Customers benefit from this blend of machine intelligence and human insight, ensuring every solution is relevant and responsible.

It's also important to highlight that SAP is a growth company. The use of technology helps us deliver what customers expect from support teams and build ongoing knowledge that feeds AI systems for intelligent decision-making, also meeting the future demands of AI-augmented support.

Yes, the world is witnessing role reductions across the industry with the adoption of AI in business workflows, but we also see the emergence of critical new roles that help us navigate the current reality. How many of us had heard of AI trainers or carbon accountants 15 years ago?

These are exciting times for innovation. SAP's partnerships, such as our collaboration with Databricks and Snowflake, empower developers to turn business data and AI into real business outcomes.

We're truly at the crossroads of innovation and transformative tools that can turn imagination into impact. SAP's Chief Technology Officer, Philipp Herzig, summarizes it perfectly: "AI is transforming business at every level, but it's people who turn transformation into progress. With SAP Business AI, we're combining the best of human ingenuity and machine intelligence to deliver impact that matters."

Stefan Steinle is executive vice president and head of Customer Support & Cloud Lifecycle Management at SAP.