SAP And AI Sovereignty

InnovationTransportationSAP And AI SovereigntyBySteve Banker,Contributor.Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I cover logistics and supply chain management.Follow AuthorJun 11, 2026, 11:31am EDTSAP's Christian Klein, CEO, Phillip Herzig, Chief Technology Officer, and Sebastian Steinhaeuser, COO, address questions from media and analysts at Sapphire Madrid.SAPI watched the SAP (NYSE: SAP) keynote presentations from Sapphire Orlando to prepare for my visit to Sapphire Madrid. I should have realized that the keynotes in Madrid would be the same. And they were, except for ONE thing. SAP highlighted its European AI partners in Madrid and discussed AI sovereignty. In Orlando, Anthropic was presented as a key partner and was given a speaking slot. At the Madrid event, Mistral and n8n were given time on stage to tout their capabilities.In Phillip Herzig’s keynote, SAP’s chief technology officer said before introducing their European AI partners: “We are taking a look at sovereignty end-to-end with different levels of control and resilience.” Last year, SAP introduced the EU AI Cloud, which has “frontier models being served end-to-end out of European data centers.” The full Mistral platform is now generally available with sovereign model access and visual AI workflow orchestration inside Joule Studio.Joule Studio is the software giant’s low-code/pro-code development environment for building, deploying, and managing custom AI agents and skills for Joule, SAP's enterprise AI copilot.Journalists and analysts were given the opportunity to talk to SAP’s key executives in a question-and-answer forum. I asked about these sovereignty issues. What was driving this?Christian Klein, chief executive officer, mentioned that many of their European customers are in the public sector or regulated industries. “They are concerned about the geopolitical situation in the world.” You never know what might happen tomorrow. “What if there are sanctions an...