Unlocking SAP Data for the AI Era: Insights from Boomi at SAPinsider 2026

Industry leaders recently gathered to explore the future of enterprise data management at the SAPinsider 2026 conference in Las Vegas. During a session titled Elevate Your Data Management: Integrating SAP with Boomi for Seamless Connectivity and AI Empowerment, Yana Steinbruck, COE of Boomi’s AI and Platform, tackled one of the most pressing challenges for modern enterprises: successfully integrating highly guarded SAP data with modern artificial intelligence to drive unprecedented business productivity.

The Dawn of Agentic Transformation

According to Steinbruck, organizations are rapidly moving beyond standard digital transformation into the age of agentic transformation. She illustrated this with recent industry statistics showing a significant shift: 85% of enterprises are expected to implement AI agents by the end of 2025 to accelerate innovation, simplify operations, and save money. However, as businesses rush to deploy these tools, they quickly realize that achieving AI success is far from simple.

Steinbruck noted that the average modern enterprise suffers from severe digital fragmentation, juggling more than 360 applications, over 600 unique APIs, and thousands of disconnected data sources. As companies deploy AI agents across platforms such as Salesforce or Snowflake, they encounter what Steinbruck termed “unmanageable agent sprawl.” Without a centralized, federated view to govern these agents and orchestrate their tasks, AI initiatives often become disjointed and fail to deliver meaningful ROI.

Solving the Data Readiness Dilemma

Perhaps the most critical reason AI initiatives fail is a fundamental lack of data readiness. Steinbruck highlighted that only 4% of SAP customers run SAP wall-to-wall; the rest rely on a vast ecosystem of third-party applications to conduct their daily business.

As a result, if an AI model or Large Language Model (LLM) is fed untrusted, siloed, or unsynchronized data from these disparate systems, it inevitably suffers from the garbage-in, garbage-out syndrome, rendering its outputs highly unreliable. Therefore, establishing a foundation of clean, trusted, and unified enterprise data is an absolute prerequisite before any AI agent can be effective.

Breaking Down SAP Silos with Boomi

For many global organizations, SAP holds the most critical business data, yet its proprietary guardrails make it notoriously difficult to integrate with outside systems. This is where Boomi for SAP changes the game. As an SAP-certified, native integration solution operating at the application layer, Boomi seamlessly extracts essential SAP data and exposes it via standard RESTful APIs.

Steinbruck noted that this allows businesses to connect SAP to everything non-SAP, moving SAP ECC, SAP S/4HANA, and SAP BW data to cloud data warehouses for bulk analytics. Moreover, by utilizing hundreds of pre-built recipes and a low-code integration approach, businesses can reduce their integration time and effort by up to 40%.

Orchestrating AI for Hyper-Productivity and Security

Once a foundation of synchronized data is established, businesses can fully leverage the Boomi Enterprise Platform to supercharge their workflows. According to Steinbruck, developers and business users can, through Boomi AI and Boomi AgentStudio, design, govern, and orchestrate custom AI agents with built-in ethical guardrails. Rather than acting as basic chatbots, these agents are embedded directly into business processes to drive true hyper-productivity. Steinbruck noted that AI agents can automate highly complex tasks such as three-way invoice reconciliation, dynamic pricing, and employee onboarding. Boomi already boasts over 50,000 deployed agents, which it uses internally for tasks such as financial closures and expense reporting.

Steinbruck concluded that Boomi ensures AI implementations do not compromise enterprise security. The platform centrally registers all AI agents, proactively monitors them to block security threats, and maintains complete activity logs to ensure compliance with over 15 strict audit standards, including FedRAMP and SOC 1/2/3.

What This Means for SAPinsiders

Unlock data with native connectivity. SAPinsiders can overcome SAP’s proprietary barriers by leveraging Boomi’s SAP-certified integration to seamlessly expose critical data via RESTful APIs for transactional operations and bulk analytics.

Prioritize data readiness for AI. Organizations must avoid the garbage-in, garbage-out trap; successful AI agent deployments absolutely require a synchronized foundation of trusted, clean enterprise data.

Govern AI at scale. SAPinsiders can maximize their AI ROI by using centralized tools like Boomi AgentStudio to build, govern, and monitor AI agents directly within their workflows, ensuring strict security and compliance.