The AI Revolution Runs on SAP Data. Is Yours Ready?

An SAP system is the heart of an organisation’s operations. It’s a fortress of critical data, holding transactions that account for 87% of the world’s GDP. Yet, this fortress feels impenetrable for many SAP professionals fueling modern AI initiatives. The traditional process that requires skilled ABAP developers, navigating complex functional specs, and waiting on slow batch extracts creates a frustrating bottleneck that stifles innovation.

What if SAP teams could be empowered to pipe real-time, relevant data from SAP directly into robust AI solutions in minutes? This is the promise of integrating SAP with AI through a modern, no-code platform like Boomi. As highlighted in a recent webinar, the combination of the Boomi platform and its certified Boomi for SAP solution is changing the data extraction paradigm.

Moving on from ABAP Dependencies

The core challenge of incorporating AI into SAP has always been the dependency on specialised ABAP resources for even the simplest data extracts. It creates delays and pulls highly skilled developers away from strategic work like SAP S/4HANA migrations to write repetitive extract programs.

However, Boomi for SAP turns this model on its head. It provides a visual, drag-and-drop interface called a Table Service where a functional user, with the proper SAP permissions, can:

1. Visually drag required tables like VBAK for sales document headers or VBAP for item data onto the canvas.
2. Save time and reduce data transfer by selecting the specific fields users need before the extract instead of pulling entire tables across the cloud only to discard most of the data.
3. Create inner, outer, left, or right joins between tables with a few clicks, guided by the UI to ensure logical connections.

This model is built without writing a single line of ABAP code. According to data shared by Boomi during the webinar, the necessary code is already in the tool, freeing ABAP developers and resulting in efficiency gains of over 41%.

Accelerating AI Initiatives

This integration also has significant real-world implications for deploying AI solutions. The speakers shared two examples:

• Cirrus for Supply Chain Risk: This AI agent analyses over six billion data points daily, from geopolitical events to weather patterns, to predict supply chain disruptions. Integrating a customer’s SAP purchase order data, which used to take a team three weeks, was slashed to five minutes after using a pre-built Boomi for SAP Table Service. This has enabled supply chain managers to get an up-to-date risk profile on open purchase orders almost instantly.
• Boomi FinTalk for Generative AI in Finance: This tool allows finance professionals, from the CFO to a junior bookkeeper, to ask complex questions about their financial data in plain English. The initial data integration from SAP, a project typically taking four weeks, can now be completed in about 20 minutes.

What This Means for Mastering SAP Insiders

Democratise data access without displacing governance. Boomi’s core offering for SAP is a certified application-layer connector that empowers business-savvy users to access SAP data. Functional analysts can use low-code tools like the visual Table Service to define and extract the precise data they need for reporting, analytics, or AI without writing ABAP code. This approach frees up scarce developer resources for high-value tasks while still inheriting all existing SAP roles and authorisations, ensuring that users can only see the data they are permitted to visit.

Modern integration is a hybrid game. The market has moved beyond simple, monolithic landscapes. Recent SAPinsider research highlights this trend, showing that 82% of organisations need to support SAP-to-non-SAP integration, and 78% manage hybrid cloud-to-on-premise scenarios. This complex reality is where a flexible platform becomes critical. For Mastering SAP Insiders, tools that can seamlessly connect SAP S/4HANA or SAP ECC core to a diverse ecosystem of cloud applications, data warehouses, and AI platforms are necessary for a cohesive enterprise data strategy.

The value of rapid integration is proven in real-world use cases. Retailers have used Boomi to connect their SAP systems with Shopify, slashing order processing times from three days to a single day. Beyond transactional efficiency, Boomi enables advanced AI-driven outcomes directly on top of SAP data. For example, the Ceres SAP Supply Chain Agent leverages purchase order data to forecast disruptions months in advance. At the same time, the SAP Sales Order Summary Agent uses generative AI to create executive summaries from complex sales data. These examples show a clear progression from saving time to creating entirely new business value.