In boardrooms worldwide, a critical revelation is taking shape: granting sustainability data more decision-making power is the most strategic decision you can make today.
By embedding sustainability into core business applications, unifying fragmented data across the enterprise, and amplifying human expertise through AI, SAP is transforming how organizations turn sustainability commitments into competitive advantage.
Across the C-suite, leaders face pressure to make good on their organizations’ sustainability commitments while ensuring these initiatives create tangible value for their specific business units and departmental operations.
COOs grapple with maintaining resilient supply chains while embedding sustainability metrics for better risk prediction. CFOs struggle to gain visibility into integrated financial and non-financial data needed to manage reporting and drive sustainable growth. CPOs seek transparency of suppliers’ sustainability footprints across the source-to-pay process, while CHROs work to engage talent with authentic sustainability performance. Meanwhile, CROs need verified sustainability data to build brand trust and enable green premium pricing, and CIOs face the complex challenge of integrating sustainability data while managing governance, cost, and AI-driven innovation.
What’s missing is not awareness, but actionable, decision-grade sustainability data worthy of sitting alongside financial and operational metrics. This is why we build sustainability directly into our applications, generating new, usable data at the source of business activity.
Organizations find themselves constrained by financial systems, inconsistent data, and business processes that were not designed to address sustainability’s multifaceted nature. By ensuring this sustainability data becomes part of customers’ larger data story and drives core processes, we overcome these constraints.
This isn’t a peripheral issue; sustainability now intersects every critical business function, and the thoughtful organization of sustainability data. Its application to business processes prepares organizations for their agentic AI future, where sustainability metrics contribute to broader business intelligence tools like margin optimization agents rather than being siloed in sustainability-only solutions.
In this environment, SAP emerges as a strategic partner that combines sustainability data with business processes to drive real change. By harnessing the power of SAP Business AI and SAP Business Data Cloud, we translate intricate sustainability challenges into clear, executable strategies.
This week, we introduced a new evolutionary step of sustainability solutions that go beyond traditional software updates. These solutions are designed to bridge the critical gap between organizational ambition and tangible outcomes. We help businesses manage risk, ensure compliance, and unlock meaningful enterprise-wide value.
This is more than a technological upgrade; it’s a strategic framework for sustainable business innovation. And now, we’re translating that strategy into action, through AI-powered innovations that scale.
AI for sustainability at scale: New innovations for EHS and product compliance
Beginning in August 2025, new SAP Business AI capabilities will be available in beta, embedded within key sustainability applications to help customers ready their data, automate processes, and amplify their expertise. These AI-driven innovations streamline operations across environmental, health and safety (EHS) and product compliance workflows, driving measurable and scalable impact.
Here’s a look at what’s coming:
- AI-assisted permit management in SAP S/4HANA for EHS environment management simplifies and automates permit handling by capturing and extracting key data from permit documents and automatically proposing relevant follow-up tasks to ensure compliance.
- AI-assisted safety observation reporting with Joule, SAP’s AI copilot, in SAP S/4HANA for EHS workplace safety, enables seamless, intuitive incident reporting through a conversational interface, reducing barriers to shop floor safety documentation.
- AI-assisted safety instruction generation in SAP S/4HANA for EHS workplace safety suggests appropriate safety instructions based on risk assessments and job hazard analyses, supporting proactive and preventive measures.
- AI-assisted compliance information processing in SAP S/4HANA for product compliance automates the extraction and mapping of critical data from declarations, certificates, and safety data sheets, improving accuracy and freeing teams from tedious manual work.
These features will be available in beta and will be part of the new SCM premium package, reflecting SAP’s commitment to delivering embedded, business-ready AI that drives real outcomes.
AI that’s already delivering value
SAP customers are already leveraging Business AI to supercharge their sustainability efforts, including:
- In SAP Sustainability Control Tower, AI accelerates environmental, social, and governance (ESG) report generation with editable templates, generative text, and visualizations, freeing teams to focus on ESG execution, not formatting.
- In SAP Sustainability Footprint Management, AI automates emission factor mapping by intelligently matching products to thousands of lifecycle assessment database entries, complete with confidence scores.
- In SAP Green Token, AI automatically validating and extracting data from International Sustainability and Carbon Certification (ISCC) PLUS supplier declarations, minimizing errors and increasing speed.
These intelligent capabilities help customers reduce costs, mitigate risk, and drive business performance across reporting, carbon management, circularity, and regulatory compliance.
What’s next: unlocking enterprise-wide sustainability insights
In the second half of 2025, SAP will make SAP Sustainability Control Tower available as an Intelligent Application within SAP Business Data Cloud. This will unify sustainability data and business operations on a single platform, enabling consistent reporting, deeper insight, and smarter decision-making across the enterprise.
A technology preview of these solutions will be made available to selected customers before general availability.
One sustainability data model: From complexity to clarity
SAP is also introducing new sustainability data products throughout 2025 as part of our strategy to deliver hundreds of curated and governed datasets across SAP Business Suite. These data products, accessible via SAP Business Data Cloud, will include:
- Structured emissions data (air, water, wastewater) from SAP EHS Management and SAP S/4HANA for product compliance
- Additional datasets from SAP Sustainability Footprint Management
This unified sustainability data model will empower customers to strengthen compliance, simplify analytics, and scale sustainability programs with confidence and clarity.
Process intelligence meets sustainability intelligence
True progress does not just come from better data, it comes from better processes. That is why SAP is embedding sustainability impact metrics into the SAP Signavio Process Transformation Suite starting in autumn 2025. These new capabilities will include:
- SAP Signavio Value Accelerators: Pre-built process models and industry best practices tailored for regulatory-specific use cases
- SAP Signavio Process Intelligence: Analytics tools that identify opportunities to optimize business processes and embed sustainability at scale
With these additions, customers can align process transformation efforts with environmental goals, helping close the gap between strategy and execution.
Your best, made real
With SAP, sustainability transforms from a compliance checklist into a lever for innovation, resilience, and growth. By embedding sustainability into applications, unifying data across the enterprise, and enabling intelligent automation through AI, we empower organizations to be sustainable while accelerating performance.
From frontline safety to carbon reporting, from real-time data to boardroom insights, this is what “your best, made real” looks like.
Welcome to a new era of sustainable enterprise management, powered by SAP.
Sophia Mendelsohn is chief sustainability and commercial officer at SAP.
Gunther Rothermel is chief product officer for SAP Sustainability.
