If you’re still looking for best-in-class or best-in-class products when it comes to enterprise management systems, it might be time to up your expectations.
According to Stephane de Valls, president of global business suites at SAP, a new gold standard has emerged: a top-of-the-line model he calls “best of suite.”
In De Valls’ view, the competitive playing field for running a company now exists within an integrated framework of AI, data, and core applications. This elevates it from a narrower testing ground where being the “best” provider only checks one or two criteria.
And while being “best of suite” isn’t what AI is all about, the rapid acceleration of AI-centric workflows meant SAP needed to think differently about the role of AI in enterprise management. This achievement—clear paths and proximity for AI to move easily between departments and functions—is one of the ways SAP Business Suite deserves its new designation.
“Many companies treat AI like a separate layer somewhere in their technology stack,” de Valls said. “That way, AI is decoupled from end-to-end business processes and decoupled from data strategy. The moment AI is no longer brought back into the context of end-to-end business processes, it becomes very difficult to drive value.”
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AI with sweep across suite
According to McKinsey’s ongoing Tracking of Enterprise AI from the C-suite’s Perspective (as documented in our regular AI report releases), the percentage of organizations that report using AI in three or more functions more than doubled between 2021 and 2025. During this period, the use of AI across four or more corporate departments tripled. Companies using AI in five or more departments are expected to grow four times as much in 2021, starting small at 4% of the departments surveyed, with the use of AI becoming nearly ubiquitous across the enterprise.
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This direction for AI-native companies is important. While discussions about the ROI of AI used to revolve around general productivity leveraging LLM, de Valls has seen AI reach significant improvements in both the P&L (such as improving top-line revenue) and the balance sheet (such as improving working capital).
He gave the example of an AI agent on the commercial side of a company predicting which deals are likely to close. This will send a signal to manufacturers to increase capacity and procurement to stock raw materials.
“When you think about the entire value chain, from sourcing components to getting the product into the customer’s hands, it needs to be coordinated by a series of agents that help organizations make better decisions and improve business performance,” de Valls said. “Customers understand that this needs to span their entire business process, and they want to work with us to get there.”
The best suite and best orchestration come together
SAP’s proprietary AI interface is known as Joule, which de Valls described as a “super-orchestrator.” It’s a single, accessible entry point to all your business applications that collectively determine how your company operates, how your employees work, and the customer experience.
With Jules, “you don’t just ask questions, you give instructions,” de Valls said. “You don’t have to log into five different applications to do something; everything is orchestrated by Joule. It changes the way you think about interacting with software.”
For manufacturers, this can mean prompts for simple conversations to anticipate potential supply chain disruptions and arrive at solutions. In a financial context, it means instant visibility into the working capital to cash conversion cycle.
“At the corporate level, this is happening at an unprecedented pace,” he said.
In de Barse’s view, these capabilities also require cultural changes within organizations. This means moving away from optimizing current processes and rethinking how entire functions are performed to ensure that what is automated and imposed on agents is operating at its “optimal” state.
“It’s very exciting. this“It’s an opportunity,” he said.
