SAP NOW AI Tour Mumbai 2025: Business AI at Scale, with India at the Helm

The SAP NOW AI Tour 2025 held in Mumbai brought India’s digital ambition into sharp focus as SAP reaffirmed its commitment to accelerating transformation through Business AI. Hosted at the Jio World Convention Centre, the event brought together over 2,500 business leaders, SAP executives, partners, and technology experts to explore the evolving role of AI in enterprise innovation.
Positioned at the intersection of resilience, intelligence, and scale, the event marked India not just as a fast-growing market but as a co-innovation hub shaping SAP’s global roadmap.

From ERP Foundations to AI-First Future: India’s Evolution with SAP

In his keynote, Manish Prasad, President and MD of SAP Indian Subcontinent, highlighted the country’s three-decade journey with SAP — from the early adoption of ERP to today’s cloud-first, AI-enabled operations.
“98% of India’s large enterprises run on SAP. We've now crossed 200 public cloud go-lives in India — a milestone of trust, agility, and digital readiness,” Prasad shared.

He contextualised India’s growth story as a blend of democratic resilience and frugal innovation, citing successes like UPI and Aadhaar as proof of India’s scalable digital backbone.

Prasad described SAP’s evolution in three stages:

1. Automation: Emphasis on core ERP adoption.
2. Agility: Rise with SAP and Grow with SAP for digital transformation-as-a-service.
3. Augmentation: Embedding intelligence into every business process, enabled by Business AI.

Business AI: From Embedded Intelligence to Agentic Systems

A core highlight of this year’s event was SAP’s strategic shift from automation to agentic AI — a framework where AI is seamlessly embedded across applications, data, and platforms to unlock autonomous, outcome-driven business processes.
Sindhu Gangadharan, MD, SAP Labs India, Head, Customer Innovation Services, SAP, emphasised the country’s central role in this journey:

• 40% of SAP’s global R&D is driven from India.
• 25% of all SAP global patents originate here.
• Over 80% of the innovation on Joule, SAP’s enterprise AI copilot, is built in India.
• 41% of work on the new SAP Business Data Cloud comes from SAP Labs India.

Gangadharan noted that while SAP has delivered over 180 embedded AI use cases, only 25% of customers are leveraging them. SAP is bridging this adoption gap through tailored co-innovation workshops, embedded AI rollout strategies, and a custom AI adoption program led globally from India.

Panel Insights: Building Resilient, Future-Ready Businesses

In a panel conversation, Simon Davies, President of SAP APAC, addressed how enterprises across the region, including India’s mid-market, are shifting from reactive strategies to proactive, data-driven planning.

“Asia-Pacific is leapfrogging legacy tech. SAP is enabling organisations to not just survive volatility but build intelligent, resilient operations. India is a key driver of that strategy,” Davies noted.

He emphasised that 76% of SAP customers in India are in the mid-market segment, underscoring SAP’s focus on democratizing AI tools for businesses of all sizes.

Gangadharan added that “sweet-to-suite” convergence is enabling agentic AI — where disruptions in one business area (like supply chain) automatically trigger intelligent adjustments in finance, operations, or customer service.

From POC to Scale: AI That Drives Real Business Value

SAP shared examples of how customers are already benefitting from generative AI and embedded intelligence:

•    A supply chain client reduced planning time using NVIDIA QOP solvers within SAP IBP.
•    An automotive firm transformed its purchase order requisition process using SAP’s generative AI, delivering efficiency and zero-error execution.

These innovations are being offered in a SaaS model — fully managed and scalable — with commercial flexibility and partner-led execution where needed.

Gangadharan stressed the importance of discovery workshops to help clients identify off-the-shelf AI solutions and custom opportunities aligned with business KPIs.

Last Year to This Year: What Has Changed?

In comparison, the SAP NOW India 2024 edition had centred on cloud transformation, sustainability, and support for the startup ecosystem. Notable initiatives included:

•    Grow with SAP for Scaleups, offering six-month free trials of SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud to Indian startups.
•    A SAP-NielsenIQ sustainability report showing that 86% of Indian companies link sustainability with profitability.

While the 2024 focus was foundational, the 2025 edition signals a move toward embedding intelligence and seeking ROI from innovation. However, this shift also brings with it complexity — requiring not just technology, but change management, AI literacy, and more agile operations.

SAP’s Strategy Aligns with India’s $30 Trillion Aspiration

SAP’s renewed focus on Business AI, localisation, and agility directly aligns with India's vision to become a $30 trillion economy by 2047. The company’s investments in SAP Labs India, AI-driven R&D, and cloud-first products underscore its dual role as a technology provider and economic growth partner.

Key strategic moves include:

• AI-first and Suite-first approach for scalable, industry-specific solutions.
• Driving adoption through education, discovery, and co-innovation.
• Supporting India’s demographic dividend by collaborating with academia on AI skills.
• Ensuring responsible AI, aligning with global standards like UNESCO’s ethics framework.

SAP’s mission: to shift businesses from being data-rich to insight-smart — and to do so with speed, sustainability, and scale.

Promising Direction, Conditional Outcomes

SAP’s direction is in step with broader enterprise trends — focusing on intelligence-driven operations, platform unification, and business outcome alignment. But the company’s success will likely depend on:

• Simplifying AI deployment: More businesses need plug-and-play options, not just toolkits.
• Strengthening AI literacy: Without internal champions, AI projects risk stagnation.
• Demonstrating ROI: AI must shift from cost-center perception to revenue-impact proof.
• Navigating ethics and compliance: Responsible AI, especially in heavily regulated industries, remains underdeveloped in execution.

SAP has the platform and scale to lead, but leadership in AI will depend less on announcements and more on how consistently customers can translate these innovations into operational value.

A Direction Worth Watching

The SAP NOW AI Tour Mumbai 2025 provided a candid view into SAP’s roadmap — a mix of technical optimism, platform maturity, and strategic realism. India’s central role as both a customer base and an innovation centre is clear, but expectations are high.

As AI moves from buzzword to baseline, SAP will need to demonstrate not only what is possible but what is practical, repeatable, and aligned to business priorities.

For now, the direction is promising — but the distance between vision and value remains one of execution.

By Minu Sirsalewala