Marketing today is about understanding the customer in the full context of the business. AI is making that possible, bringing together customer data, operational signals, and business priorities to help marketers make smarter decisions and deliver more relevant experiences at scale.
That’s why I’m especially proud to share that SAP has been recognized as a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Agentic Marketing for B2C Enterprises 2026 Vendor Assessment (doc # US54113426, September 2026). We believe this recognition reflects our commitment to helping organizations combine customer engagement with trusted business context, empowering AI to orchestrate and execute experiences that are more connected, relevant, and impactful.
As organizations embrace agentic AI, marketers have an opportunity to move beyond isolated customer interactions and engage with customers in the full context of their relationship with the brand. Purchase history, inventory availability, fulfillment performance, service interactions, loyalty behaviors, and business priorities can all work together to inform more intelligent decisions and more relevant experiences.
This is the vision of the Autonomous Enterprise: bringing together people, data, and AI to help organizations operate with greater agility, deliver more meaningful customer experiences, and drive stronger business outcomes. bringing together people, data, and AI to help organizations operate with greater agility, deliver more meaningful customer experiences, and drive stronger business outcomes.
Marketing needs AI that deeply understands business context and can be trusted to act on it.
To do that effectively, AI requires context, and customers need to trust how that context is used. AI must understand not only what a customer has done, but the business signals, priorities, and guardrails that should shape what happens next. That means ensuring AI operates with the right data, governance, and transparency to make decisions that are relevant, responsible, and aligned with both the customer and the business.
Most marketing systems primarily understand customer interactions: clicks, opens, views, purchases, and browsing behavior. Those signals are important, but they only tell part of the story. The most valuable signals often live elsewhere across the enterprise:
- Inventory availability
- Order status
- Fulfillment performance
- Product profitability
- Return behavior
- Subscription and replenishment cycles
As we explore in our recent research on customer loyalty, marketing often sees customer behavior, while ERP systems see business reality. The greatest opportunity for AI emerges when those worlds come together.
And this is where SAP’s approach fundamentally differs.
Because SAP sits at the heart of how many of the world’s leading enterprises operate, marketers can access the operational intelligence that lives within the systems running the business. That means AI can make decisions based not only on what customers are doing, but also on what the business can actually deliver. And in an age of agentic marketing, that distinction matters.
Why we believe SAP was recognized as a Leader
At SAP, our approach to agentic marketing is built around a simple principle: AI should help organizations turn insights into action. We believe the IDC MarketScape recognition reflects several important strengths across our portfolio.
Here at SAP, we have more than 50 domain-specific SAP Joule Assistants across finance, supply chain, procurement, human capital management, and customer experience. There are more than 245 specialized agents to execute precise tasks, and 2,400+ Joule agent skills across the Autonomous Suite. Together, these capabilities can work across business workflows (not just individual tasks) to help organizations move from insight to action with greater speed, context, and consistency.
Agentic AI grounded in trusted enterprise data
SAP Joule’s agentic layer brings together assistants and agents that can understand context, reason across business processes, and execute tasks on behalf of users. These capabilities are grounded in SAP Business Data Cloud, which harmonizes SAP and non-SAP data to create a trusted foundation for intelligent action.
This matters because AI is only as effective as the data that informs it. When AI can understand customer behavior alongside operational realities such as inventory, fulfillment, product availability, and business priorities, marketing becomes more relevant, more efficient, and more impactful.
"I like how SAP Engagement Cloud natively integrates with SAP Sales Cloud and SAP ERP, which means contact, product, and transactional data flow without the need for middleware. This integration saves time by eliminating the export-clean-upload cycle because segments are built on live commercial data rather than static lists. I also appreciate the flexibility around contact identification, allowing us to define a composite key instead of forcing email as the unique identifier."
AI that moves beyond recommendations to execution
Many AI solutions stop at insights. We believe the future belongs to systems that can help execute. Through SAP Joule Agents, organizations can automate complex workflows, retrieve information from enterprise systems, coordinate actions across teams, and accelerate decision-making. Marketers can move from identifying opportunities to acting on them without adding complexity to already stretched teams.
Omnichannel personalization at enterprise scale
Customers no longer distinguish between channels. They expect consistent experiences across email, mobile, web, advertising, commerce, sales, and service interactions.
As part of the Autonomous CX suite, SAP Engagement Cloud helps organizations orchestrate those experiences from a unified platform while leveraging AI-powered recommendations, predictive segmentation, real-time personalization, and intelligent automation. The result is a more connected approach to engagement that enables marketers to deliver relevance at scale while improving operational efficiency.
“Developing our engagement strategy has been a continuous process. We didn't start everything at once. We worked closely with SAP Engagement Cloud to build everything up over time, and today we’ve reached a place where our personalization and campaigns have become much more sophisticated. And using the insights into our data and engagement, we’re still continuously optimizing.”
Empowering teams to build their own AI advantage
Innovation should not be limited to technical specialists. With SAP Joule Studio, marketers and developers can design and deploy custom agents using a low-code approach, connecting enterprise knowledge, customer context, and business processes into workflows tailored to their organization. This flexibility allows businesses to move quickly while maintaining governance, trust, and alignment with enterprise objectives.
Advancing toward the Autonomous Enterprise
While we’re incredibly proud of this recognition, we believe it represents just one milestone in a much larger transformation. Our long-term vision is the Autonomous Enterprise.
In this future, AI assistants and agents work across the organization to orchestrate and execute processes end-to-end. And most importantly, humans stay in control. Customer-facing teams are empowered by systems that continuously learn, adapt, and act while remaining guided by human strategy, creativity, and oversight.
For marketers, this creates a fundamentally different operating model. Instead of spending time manually coordinating campaigns, integrating fragmented data sources, or reacting to disconnected signals, teams can focus on what humans do best:
- Defining strategy
- Driving innovation
- Building brand differentiation
- Coordinating across teams
- Creating customer value and business value
Meanwhile, AI works across the enterprise to continuously optimize the work required to keep the business running. Personally, I feel energized by the stories I hear every day about how our customers are connecting customer understanding with business reality and combining human creativity with AI-driven execution.
If you’re evaluating agentic marketing platforms, exploring your AI strategy, or looking for ways to connect customer engagement with enterprise-wide business context, I encourage you to download IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Agentic Marketing for B2C Enterprises 2026 Vendor Assessment excerpt.
About the author
Sara has more than 15 years of experience in senior global marketing roles at high-growth martech organizations including Clicktale, IBM Tealeaf, Acquia, & Unica. Her passion is for building marketing teams that act as a trusted partner to the sales organization. Sara excels in strategy and communications which deliver measurable pipeline and revenue. Sara holds a BA from the University of California in Los Angeles.
