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SAP previews AI-native systems for retailers
SAP makes AI the focus of retail vertical updates.
SAP plans to release AI tools for customers in the retail vertical intended to unify data from sales, inventory, customers and suppliers -- and derive new insights for operational efficiency in the process.
The company previewed Retail Intelligence, which uses AI to forecast merchandise demand and inventory by analyzing data from a retailer's own applications and those of its partners up the supply chain. Retail Intelligence could potentially automate processes that are currently manually performed across disparate applications and data sources.
SAP also plans to release tools for its S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition for retail, fashion and vertical business for assortment planning. Planners who create product assortments can use natural language queries with a Joule generative AI agent and receive recommendations for items to include and pricing, without engaging expert users as they might currently do.
Another retailer tool to come is the Storefront MCP Server in SAP Commerce Cloud. Model Context Protocol (MCP) is a standard that makes data available to generative AI tools while maintaining security. In the case of Storefront MCP Server, an e-commerce operation can make its inventory and prices discoverable to search engines -- and available for AI summaries such as Google's, which have increasingly replaced traditional search results.
Retrofitting retail IT for agentic AI
Generative AI tools, including those SAP is developing, are tightening the ways suppliers and retailers work together, said Ananda Chakravarty, research vice president for retail merchandising and marketing analytics strategies at IDC. He predicts that generative AI's predictive powers will reverberate further up the supply chain than the technologies that preceded it, creating new efficiencies.
"Things that were never [technically possible] in the past -- but people knew could make things more efficient -- are now going to become reality, because now you're able to capture the data, you're able to put the data into one place," Chakravarty said. "It's forcing the whole retail industry to start thinking in terms of one data set now, or one common goal in terms of their overall objective of building a business … It allows for that single point of engagement to solve a problem."
SAP is positioned to deploy agentic AI across a strong retail customer base, many of whom use 40 to 50 applications in their operations, Chakravarty said. SAP has long deployed its expertise in integrating its own applications with others, recognizing that many retailers adopt a best-of-breed approach to their IT stack. That laid the foundation for interoperability and made it more straightforward for AI tech such as Joule agents to automate workflows across apps from many vendors.
AI shopping agents still nascent
Between consumers getting more accustomed to the capabilities of AI agents and recent economic complications, retailers need a solid data foundation from which AI tools can be launched, said Balaji Balasubramanian, president and chief product officer of SAP Customer Experience and Consumer Industries.
"Retailers have a lot that is going on in a complex world of tariffs, in a complex world of customer expectations increasing on a day-to-day basis," Balasubramanian said.
Balasubramanian added that, despite the hype surrounding generative AI shopping agents, SAP retail customers have not yet seen many of them performing autonomous transactions. The company, however, is preparing for their potential emergence. In the generative AI realm, customers are, for now, concentrating on making their storefronts discoverable to LLM search tools such as Google Gemini.
Regardless, back-end retail technology will likely be agnostic as to whether a shopping interaction is performed by a human or an agent.
"The way we are thinking and building the stack is it should serve the [purchaser's] needs, irrespective of whether it's shopping agents that are doing it or users coming from different channels," Balasubramanian said. "It should not really matter because the stack should serve this at a scalable infrastructure level."
SAP previewed its generative AI tools for retail at the National Retail Federation's NRF 2026: Retail's Big Show.
Don Fluckinger is a senior news writer for Informa TechTarget. He covers customer experience, digital experience management and end-user computing. Got a tip? Email him.
