AP’s Roadmap Atlas — Front page

SAP's Sapphire announcements on 12 May bring together three things that used to be sold and discussed separately. The SAP Business AI Platform unites BTP, Business Data Cloud and SAP Business AI around the SAP Knowledge Graph. The SAP Autonomous Suite puts more than 50 Joule Assistants, each aimed at a business domain, in charge of more than 200 specialised agents. And Joule Work is a new front end where users describe the outcome they want instead of navigating transactions.

SAP also launched seven Industry AI solutions, citing RWE's use of one to reduce unplanned downtime on offshore wind turbines. It says agent-led tooling cuts ERP migration effort by more than 35%, a vendor figure customers should test on their own landscapes.

Access depends on the contract. RISE with SAP customers get three assistants activated within their first year; GROW customers get the full portfolio at onboarding. On-premise S/4HANA and ECC customers can use select AI scenarios only if they commit to moving most of their landscape to SAP Cloud ERP.

SAP named Anthropic, AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft, Mistral AI, Cohere and NVIDIA among its platform partners, with Palantir and Accenture on implementation, and set aside €100 million to help partners deploy assistants and agents.

SAP's AI strategy depends on clean, connected data, and in 2026 it chose to buy rather than partner to get it. In March it agreed to acquire Reltio, which merges records from SAP and non-SAP systems into a single trusted view of customers, products, suppliers and employees. The deal closed on 7 May for US$1,259 million, and Reltio remains available as a standalone product.

On 4 May SAP announced two more deals: Dremio, an open data lakehouse that lets customers run analytics and AI on SAP and non-SAP data without moving it, and Prior Labs, a specialist in foundation models for tabular business data. Dremio closed on 6 July and Prior Labs in mid-July. SAP says it will invest more than €1 billion over four years to scale Prior Labs, which keeps operating independently.

The deals come at a cost. SAP lowered its 2026 non-IFRS operating profit outlook to €11.8–12.2 billion at constant currencies, citing dilution of more than €100 million from Dremio and Prior Labs.

For years, Dynamics 365 customers have planned testing and change around two release waves a year. Microsoft said on 25 August that it is retiring that model for Dynamics 365, Power Platform and Dataverse in favour of continuous publishing on its AI at Work roadmap.

New capabilities started appearing there in September, tracked through three stages: In Development, Rolling Out and Launched. Existing items with a preview or general-availability date from 1 June 2026 move across between September and November.

Microsoft confirmed there will be no 2026 release wave 2 plan. New release plans stopped being published on Microsoft Learn from September, and the Release Planner retires by 15 November.

For IT teams, the change is one of cadence: regression testing and user readiness built around April and October waves will need to become a rolling process.

Microsoft's 23 September ERP update made the Dynamics 365 ERP MCP server generally available, giving Microsoft's agents, partners' agents and customers' own agents a standard way to work with Dynamics finance and operations data. An ERP plugin for Copilot Cowork is also generally available.

In supply chain, demand-planning insights and external signals such as inflation, pricing and weather have been generally available since August, while procurement agent impact analysis and Supplier Engagement are in public preview. Field Service gained a Scheduling Operations Agent in public preview, and Commerce an MCP server in preview. Enhancements to the Account Reconciliation Agent and AI invoice capture were described without dates.

Microsoft says its AI at Work roadmap now carries ERP highlights through March 2027.

Oracle introduced Fusion Claw on 29 September as a governed execution runtime for its Fusion Agentic Applications. It combines AI reasoning with deterministic enterprise calculations, so agents can take on larger, longer-running pieces of work.

Control comes in three parts. An 'enterprise operating envelope' holds the organisation's objectives, procedures, policies, risk thresholds, approvals and escalation limits. An 'outcome trust harness' enforces that envelope on every run, and an 'outcome receipt' records the authority, evidence, decisions and actions behind each result. Customers choose the level of automation, from quick assistance up to full automation within delegated authority.

Oracle released 25 Claw-powered applications at launch, including Ledger, Workforce Staffing, Shipping Consolidation and Account Territory Growth Plan, taking its agentic application portfolio to 75. Fusion Claw runs on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and uses models including Google's Gemini and OpenAI's. The announcement does not mention pricing.

Oracle's first quarter of fiscal 2027, reported on 10 September, showed revenue up 30% to US$19.3 billion. Cloud infrastructure revenue more than doubled, up 121% to US$7.4 billion, while cloud applications revenue rose 10% to US$4.2 billion. Remaining performance obligations reached US$664 billion, up US$209 billion in a year, after Oracle booked more than US$30 billion of new AI cloud contracts in the quarter.

The build-out is expensive. Free cash flow was negative US$5.4 billion for the quarter after US$28.5 billion of capital spending. In fiscal 2026 Oracle raised US$43 billion in debt and US$5 billion in equity; it expects to raise about US$40 billion more through debt and equity in fiscal 2027, and said it does not expect to issue additional debt in calendar 2026. It expects fiscal 2027 revenue of at least US$90 billion.

On the applications side, Oracle reported Fusion Cloud ERP revenue of US$1.1 billion, up 17%, and NetSuite revenue of US$1.1 billion, up 14%, for the quarter to February.

Infor used Inforum in Orlando on 6 October to unveil its Industry AI architecture and the next version of Velocity Suite. The pitch rests on four pillars: precise outcomes, an open and connected design, ease of use, and governance.

At its centre is Infor IQ, a semantic layer that gives agents a consistent view of a customer's business and ships with more than 350 use cases. Adaptive UX assembles a role-aware view of the information a decision needs from several applications. Governance adds human-approval workflows, agent permissions, audit trails and immutable logs of agent actions. The GenAI Knowledge Hub, used to build custom agents, is now generally available.

Infor's second Enterprise AI Adoption Impact Index, run by YouGov in August, surveyed 2,111 decision-makers in seven markets, including 263 in Australia, 260 in Singapore and 266 in Japan. Overall, 68% said off-the-shelf AI does not adequately meet their industry's needs.

Salesforce's Dreamforce announcements, summarised on 28 September, centre on AIforce: a way to bring Salesforce data, workflows and permissions to wherever people already work. Claudeforce runs inside Anthropic's Claude and is in beta; Slackforce runs inside Slack and becomes generally available in October; Agentforce Coworker, an AI teammate inside Salesforce itself, is generally available now.

Koa, Salesforce's first CRM reasoning model, is built on NVIDIA Nemotron and runs on Salesforce's own infrastructure. It is in pilot, with general availability expected in Winter 2026. Long-horizon agents that pursue goals over days, weeks or months are also in pilot, due for general availability in November, and Agent Optimizer, an agent that builds and refines other agents, reaches general availability in October.

Salesforce says most of its 'job-ready' agents, including Piper for inbound sales and Fin for customer service, are generally available now; Hunter follows in November.

Zoho launched Zia Chat on 23 September as a single AI interface across its business applications. From one conversation, users can find information, work leads, resolve support issues and analyse data across sales, marketing, support, HR and finance, as well as summarise records, turn data into reports and presentations, draft emails and hand multi-step work to Zia Agents. Role-based 'Profiles' switch the context.

Zia Chat is model-agnostic and connects to outside systems through MCP integrations, and Zoho says it does not use the data it accesses to train Zoho's AI models. Early access was due about a month after launch, in English first. Co-founder Sridhar Vembu framed the goal as making intelligence cheap enough that customers are not hit with high token costs.

Zoho also moved into vertical software with seven industry applications: RetailIQ for physical retail, AutoDMS for car dealerships, a loan origination system for lenders, MedScribe for clinical documentation, Zoho Campus for education, a real-estate sales platform and Zoho POS for Restaurants.