What UiPath’s AI & Compliance Milestones Mean for SAP Users

SAP professionals are often caught between the business, which demands cutting-edge AI, and the IT risk council, which demands bulletproof compliance. However, two recent announcements from UiPath illustrate how this gap is finally closing. In the same window of time that the UiPath Platform was named one of TIME’s Best Inventions of 2025 for Agentic Automation and Orchestration, the company launched its Automation Cloud in the UAE to meet strict data sovereignty laws.

Taken together, these two key announcements tell a single, key story for the SAP ecosystem: World-class AI is also about prioritizing customers’ security, compliance, and adaptation to regional standards.

Agentic AI Entering the Mainstream

The recognition by TIME is significant for the accolade and for what was recognized. This award for agentic automation recognized UiPath for taking the leap from robots that follow the rules to AI agents that make decisions.

For UiPath customers using SAP Center of Excellence (CoE), the distinction is vital. This is illustrated by how RPA and Agentic AI have a different approach to the Price Block Exception, which is a classic Order-to-Cash (O2C) scenario:

• The RPA Approach: A traditional bot reads a purchase order (PO) from a PDF and enters it into SAP S/4HANA. If the $100 price on the customer’s PDF doesn’t match the $105 master data in SAP, the bot hits a hard stop. It flags the order as an exception and emails a human to fix it, thus breaking the process.
• The Agentic Automation Approach: An AI Agent encounters the same price block. Instead of stopping, it thinks. It logs into the email server to check the original quote sent to the customer. It sees that the Sales VP approved a 5% discount in the previous week. The Agent autonomously updates the pricing condition in the sales order, attaches the email approval to the SAP object for audit purposes, and releases the block.

The above example shows that with agentic automation, you not only get the value of agents but also the tools, like UiPath’s Maestro, to orchestrate your agents, bots and humans across different systems.

Trust as the Architect’s Blueprint

However, while Agentic AI offers the capability to innovate, compliance gives it the license to operate. For SAP professionals, the nightmare scenario consists of Shadow AI that will leak sensitive PII or intellectual property into a public model. This is where the UiPath AI Trust Layer becomes a critical enabler. The AI Trust Layer is part of UiPath’s AI governance and security framework, which includes agent guardrails, data sovereignty, and the latest ISO42001 certification.

Functioning as a governance gateway between SAP data and generative AI models, the AI Trust Layer allows organizations to adopt AI including GenAI without compromising their risk posture. It solves the compliance standoff through three specific mechanisms:

• Zero Data Retention: UiPath guarantees that customer data is never used to train third-party models. Therefore, when an SAP Sales Order is processed by an agent, the data is used for inference only and then discarded by the model provider.
• PII Masking: Before data ever leaves the UiPath boundary, the Trust Layer scans for Personally Identifiable Information (PII) or Protected Health Information (PHI). It masks this sensitive data before sending the prompt to the LLM, ensuring that even if an agent thinks about a customer’s order, it never exposes the customer’s identity.
• Auditability: Every interaction is logged. For the SAP Center of Excellence (CoE), this means full visibility into exactly what data was processed, by whom, and which model was used.

This is why UiPath’s simultaneous launch of the Automation Cloud in the UAE is significant. The UAE has some of the world’s most stringent data sovereignty requirements. By establishing the Automation Cloud locally within Microsoft Azure data centers in the region, UiPath—which already governs 100s of thousands of autonomous actions done by robots and agents every month—has provided the physical infrastructure to keep regulated data within national borders. When paired with the AI Trust Layer, this creates a complete compliance architecture as it ensures the data is logically protected during every AI interaction.

What This Means for SAPinsiders

Protect your clean core. Agentic AI allows organizations to handle complex, messy edge cases like the price discrepancy example illustrated in this article, outside of SAP custom code. This enables organizations to keep their SAP S/4HANA core clean while still handling bespoke business logic via external AI agents.

End exception fatigue. Traditional RPA often created more work for humans by generating piles of exception emails. However, Agentic AI solves these exceptions autonomously, allowing SAP teams to focus on architecture rather than error handling.

Sovereignty is solved. Organizations no longer need to build on-premise, debt-heavy infrastructure just to meet data residency laws. UiPath’s expansion of compliant cloud regions means teams can deploy advanced AI globally without triggering a compliance audit failure.