From Complexity to Intelligence: Scaling Enterprise AI with SAP Business AI, SAP Databricks, and DXC Technology
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Key Takeaways
⇨ Artificial intelligence is essential for business transformation, requiring integrated and scalable solutions to turn structured data into actionable intelligence for real-world business goals.
⇨ DXC Technology leverages over 30 years of partnership with SAP to guide customers through AI adoption, offering strategic roadmaps, modern data architectures, and operational support to ensure successful implementation.
⇨ SAP's ecosystem, comprising Business AI, Business Data Cloud, and Databricks, provides a comprehensive framework for enterprises to activate AI at scale, while addressing common barriers such as data silos and governance risks.
Artificial Intelligence is rapidly becoming a strategic differentiator for enterprises of all sizes and across all industry sectors. SAP Business AI, SAP Business Data Cloud, and SAP Databricks offer a powerful combination that brings together embedded intelligence, a business-contextualised data platform, and scalable AI development environments. However, without a clear roadmap and strong implementation support, many organisations risk stalling at the experimentation stage. This article explores how DXC Technology draws on over 30 years of partnership with SAP to help customers navigate complexity and deliver scalable, business-aligned AI outcomes with confidence.
Unlocking Business Value from AI in the SAP Ecosystem
To harness the full value of artificial intelligence, organisations need more than isolated tools. They require integrated, governed, and scalable solutions that connect business context with modern data science capabilities. SAP Business AI, SAP Business Data Cloud, and SAP Databricks offer a comprehensive pathway for enterprise AI adoption.
DXC brings more than three decades of experience partnering both locally and globally with SAP to help customers adopt new SAP products and technologies securely, reliably, and at scale.
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The Situation: AI is Now Essential for Business Transformation
Artificial intelligence has moved beyond experimentation. Across industries, organisations are seeking to enhance agility, automate decision-making, and create new value from data. SAP customers already possess rich, structured data within their core systems. The challenge lies in transforming that data into meaningful intelligence that supports real-world business goals.
SAP’s response is a cohesive set of capabilities that includes Business AI, Business Data Cloud, and Databricks. Together, these components provide a modern architecture for activating AI across the enterprise.
The Complication: Disconnected Data, Architectural Complexity, and Governance Risks
Despite this progress, many organisations continue to face common barriers that slow AI adoption:
- Data silos: Business data remains fragmented across systems and departments. Without integration or business context, AI outputs lack relevance and impact.
- Unclear architectural pathways: The growing range of SAP AI offerings, including embedded AI, AI Foundation, AI Core, and Databricks, can overwhelm customers trying to decide where to begin and how to do this at scale.
- Governance and compliance concerns: AI introduces complex regulatory and fiduciary questions around data privacy, residency, transparency, and explainability. Without a strong governance model, organisations risk security breaches and regulatory exposure.
These challenges often result in AI initiatives stalling at the discovery or pilot phase, with little progress towards enterprise-scale deployment.
The Resolution: A Unified Pathway from Embedded Intelligence to Scalable AI
SAP has created a clear, layered framework for AI adoption. Each component plays a role in helping organisations progress from foundational intelligence to advanced AI maturity. DXC Technology brings the strategic insight and delivery experience to guide this journey end to end.
SAP Business AI: Embedded Intelligence Within Core Processes
SAP Business AI brings intelligence directly into the SAP applications that underpin business operations. This enhances performance and efficiency across key business functions, including Finance and Controlling, Procurement and Supplier Management, Supply Chain and Logistics, Sales and Customer Experience, Human Resources, Manufacturing and Production, Sustainability and ESG Management, and IT and Platform Operations. These embedded capabilities can be activated quickly, supporting immediate decision-making without the need for additional infrastructure or complex integration.
SAP Business Data Cloud: A Foundation Built on Business Context
While Business AI delivers immediate productivity gains, scalable AI that meets the unique needs of customers requires a data platform that is accessible, governed, and enriched with business context. SAP Business Data Cloud addresses this requirement. Unlike conventional analytics platforms, Business Data Cloud is deeply integrated with SAP applications. This ensures that data retains its original business meaning, reduces the need for costly data extraction processes, and minimises the risk of misinterpretation.
Key features include:
- Unified access to SAP and non-SAP data
- Prebuilt analytical applications and curated data products
- A business data fabric architecture supporting enterprise-wide data discovery
- Fully managed capabilities for planning, data engineering, BW modernisation, and AI enablement
For existing SAP Datasphere and SAP Analytics Cloud customers, Business Data Cloud provides a seamless transition to a fully managed environment. For SAP Business Warehouse customers, it offers a modernisation pathway that transforms legacy data into AI-ready assets.
SAP Databricks: Scaling AI Within a Lakehouse Architecture
For organisations looking to build more advanced machine learning and generative AI solutions, SAP Databricks provides a robust, cloud-native platform. At its core is a lakehouse architecture, which combines the flexibility of a data lake with the performance and structure of a data warehouse. This model enables organisations to ingest, transform, and analyse both structured and unstructured data within a single environment.
SAP Databricks also delivers:
- Advanced model development and orchestration tools
- Real-time analytics across SAP and non-SAP data
- Unified governance with Unity Catalog, offering secure access, data lineage, and auditability
- Compliance support for data privacy, residency, and sovereignty requirements
By extending the capabilities of Business AI and Business Data Cloud, Databricks enables organisations to tackle complex, cross-functional AI use cases with confidence.
SAP AI Foundation and SAP AI Core: Building Custom AI at Scale
However, not all AI needs can be met through embedded features alone. Some organisations require a more flexible, modular approach to developing and managing their own AI models. This is where SAP AI Core and SAP AI Foundation come into play.
- SAP AI Core provides the technical runtime for executing AI models and workflows. It supports integration with popular frameworks, open-source tools, and hyperscaler environments.
- SAP AI Foundation builds on AI Core, offering model lifecycle management, monitoring, orchestration, and explainability via SAP AI Launchpad.
Together, they enable organisations to develop custom AI solutions while maintaining integration, security, and governance within the SAP ecosystem. When combined with Databricks and Business Data Cloud, these tools offer a flexible, scalable environment for enterprise AI adoption. DXC helps customers architect and operationalise this model, bridging the gap between SAP-native tools and broader data science platforms.
DXC Technology: Your Trusted Partner for AI Adoption
Technology alone does not guarantee success. Organisations need a partner that understands both the business context and the technical execution required to bring AI into production.
DXC helps customers:
- Develop strategic AI roadmaps
- Design modern data and AI architectures
- Operationalise use cases from pilot to scale
- Govern AI responsibly across business and IT
- Foster innovation and cross-functional collaboration
The Global AI Practice at DXC has delivered outcomes for nearly two decades. Our teams work across SAP and partner ecosystems including Microsoft, AWS, Google Cloud, and NVIDIA to provide vendor-neutral, business-focused guidance.
Samuel Atkinson, ANZ Growth Director, DXC Practice for SAP highlights, “DXC helps organisations navigate the array of SAP’s constantly evolving and advancing AI capabilities including SAP Business AI and now the SAP Databricks partnership by combining deep SAP expertise, with architectural leadership and a strong focus on practical business outcomes. We work with our customers across strategy, design and delivery to ensure AI initiatives are grounded in business context, built on scalable platforms and governed effectively. Our role is to simplify complexity in this rapidly evolving AI landscape and enable transformation that delivers tangible business value.”
From Pilots to Scalable Impact: Real AI in Action
Many organisations face challenges progressing from isolated pilots to operational AI at scale. DXC addresses this gap by providing:
- Repeatable delivery models
- Integration of AI into SAP workflows
- Lifecycle support through AI Foundation
- Scalable infrastructure via Databricks
- Industry-specific solutions in manufacturing, healthcare, energy, and logistics
Atkinson emphasizes, “At DXC, we help customers move beyond ideation and the proof-of-concept phases and into operational deployment of AI technologies at scale by applying our proven delivery methodology, which has been developed through years of experience in enterprise AI and SAP environments. Our approach combines strategic roadmapping, scalable architecture and industry-specific delivery models. Using our approach ensures our customer’s AI initiatives are operationalised at scale to deliver real business value across industry sectors like healthcare, manufacturing, utilities and the public sector.”
The Call to Action: Begin Your Enterprise AI Journey with DXC
SAP has now provided the AI platform with an incredible range of capabilities. The opportunity is clear. Now is the time to act with the right strategy, architecture, and delivery capability.
DXC invites businesses to a complimentary AI Discovery Workshop or Roadmap Session to help businesses assess their AI readiness, identify high-value use cases, and establish a pathway for scalable, governed AI adoption. With DXC’s expertise, companies can turn data into intelligence and AI into measurable business impact.
DXC enables businesses to transform raw data into actionable intelligence and harness AI for meaningful business impact.