Critical revelation is being formed in boardrooms around the world. Granting sustainability data means more decision-making power and more strategic decisions.
By embedding sustainability into core business applications, integrating fragmented data across the enterprise, and amplifying human expertise through AI, SAP is changing the way organizations turn their sustainability commitments into competitive advantages.
Throughout C-Suite, leaders face pressure to successfully implement their organization’s sustainability commitments, ensuring that these initiatives create tangible value for the operations of specific business units and departments.
Coos is committed to maintaining a resilient supply chain while embedding sustainability metrics to improve risk forecasting. CFOs struggle to manage reporting and gain the visibility into the integrated financial and non-financial data needed to drive sustainable growth. The CPO makes the transparency of the supplier’s sustainability footprint transparent from sources to the entire payment process, and Chros works to attract talent to authentic sustainability performance. Meanwhile, CROS requires validated sustainability data to build brand trusts and enable green premium pricing, and CIOs face the complex challenges of integrating sustainability data while managing governance, cost and AI-driven innovation.
What’s missing is not recognition, but practical, decision-making-grade sustainability data that is worthy of sitting alongside financial and operational metrics. This is why we build sustainability directly in our applications and generate new usable data in the source of business activity.
Organizations find themselves constrained by financial systems, inconsistent data, and business processes that are not designed to address the multifaceted nature of sustainability. This sustainability data will become part of the customer’s larger data story and overcome these constraints by driving the core process.
This is not a problem with the surroundings. Sustainability now intersects all important business functions with the thoughtful organisation of sustainability data. Rather than being siloed with sustainability-only solutions, the application to business processes prepares the organization for the future of agent AI that contributes to a broader business intelligence tool, such as margin optimization agents.
In this environment, SAP appears as a strategic partner that combines sustainability data with business processes to drive real change. By leveraging the power of SAP Business AI and the SAP Business Data Cloud, we transform complex sustainability challenges into clear and viable strategies.
This week we introduced a new evolutionary step in sustainability solutions that go beyond traditional software updates. These solutions are designed to bridge the important gap between an organization’s ambition and tangible outcomes. We help businesses manage risk, ensure compliance and unlock meaningful company-wide value.
This is more than a technical upgrade. This is a strategic framework for sustainable business innovation. And now we are translating that strategy into action through expanding AI-driven innovations.
AI for AI Sucleisivality’s Sustainability: New Innovations for EHS and Product Compliance
Starting in August 2025, new SAP Business AI features will be available in beta and will be incorporated into major sustainability applications to enable customers to automate data preparation, processes and amplify their expertise. These AI-driven innovations streamline the operation of the entire environment, health and safety (EHS) and product compliance workflow, driving measurable and scalable impact.
Let’s see what this brings:
SAP S/4HANA’s AI-assisted authorization management for EHS environment management simplifies and automates the handling of authorization by capturing and extracting critical data from authorization documents and automatically suggesting relevant follow-up tasks to ensure compliance. AI-assisted Safety Observation Report with SAP AI Co-pilot Joule is an EHS S/4HANA for workplace safety, allowing seamless and intuitive incident reporting through a conversational interface, reducing barriers to floor safety documentation. Generation of SAP S/4HANA AI-assisted Safety Guidance for EHS Workplace Safety proposes appropriate safety instructions based on risk assessments and job hazard analysis, supporting proactive and preventive measures. Product Compliance SAP S/4HANA AI-assisted Compliance Information Processing automates the extraction and mapping of critical data from declarations, certificates and safety data sheets, improving accuracy and freedom to free your team from boring manual work.
These features are available in beta and will become part of the new SCM Premium Package and reflect SAP’s commitment to delivering embedded and business-ready AI that drives real results.
AI that already offers value
SAP customers are already using business AI to enhance their sustainability efforts, including:
With SAP Sustainability Control Tower, AI accelerates environments with editable templates, generated text, visualizations, social and governance (ESG) report generation, freeing your team to focus on ESG execution rather than formatting. In SAP Sustainability Footprint Management, AI automates emission factor mapping by intelligently matching intelligent products with confident scores to thousands of lifecycle assessment database entries. With SAP Green Token, AI automatically validates and extracts data from international sustainability and carbon certification (ISCC) and supplier declarations, minimizing errors and increasing speed.
These intelligent features help customers reduce costs, reduce risk and drive business performance across reporting, carbon management, circularity and regulatory compliance.
What’s next: Unleashing sustainability insights across the enterprise
In the second half of 2025, SAP will make SAP Sustainability Control Tower available as an intelligent application within SAP Business Data Cloud. This unifies sustainability data and business operations on a single platform, allowing for consistent reporting, deeper insights and smarter decisions across the enterprise.
Technology previews for these solutions will be made available to selected customers prior to general availability.
One sustainability data model: from complexity to clarity
SAP is introducing new sustainability data products in 2025 as part of its strategy to provide hundreds of curated and governed datasets across SAP Business Suite. These data products will be accessible via the SAP Business Data Cloud.
SAP EHS Management and SAP Sustainability Footprint Management from SAP S/4HANA SAP EHS Management and SAP S/4HANA SAP EHS Management and SAP S/4HANA SAP S/4HANA SAP S/4HANA
This unified sustainability data model will enable customers to enhance compliance, simplify analytics, and expand their sustainability programs with confidence and clarity.
Process intelligence meets sustainability intelligence
True progress comes from better data, not just better processes. Therefore, SAP has embed sustainability impact metrics in its SAP Signavio process transformation suite starting from fall 2025. These new features include:
SAP Signavio Value Accelerators: Pre-built process models and industry best practices tailored to regulations-specific use cases SAP Signavio Process Intelligence: Analytics tools that optimize business processes and identify opportunities to embed sustainability at scale
These additions allow customers to coordinate their process transformation efforts with environmental goals and bridge the gap between strategy and execution.
Your best, authentic
With SAP, sustainability will be transformed from a compliance checklist to a lever for innovation, resilience and growth. Embedding sustainability into applications, consolidating data across the enterprise, and enabling intelligent automation through AI, enabling organizations to be sustainable while accelerating performance.
From frontline safety to carbon reports, from real-time data to boardroom insights, this is what makes it seem like “Your best, authentic.”
Welcome to a new era of sustainable enterprise management powered by SAP.
Sofia Mendelsohn is SAP’s top sustainability and commercial director.
Gunther Rothermel is the Chief Product Officer of SAP Sustainability.
