SAP NOW AI Tour 2025 Korea: one thing I confirmed on-site
A firsthand account of SAP NOW AI Tour 2025 Korea in July 2025 — from the keynote to the case-study sessions, in front of a crowd of 2,500, down to the one question a practitioner walked away with.
Hi, this is Rabbit! 🐰
On July 15, SAP NOW AI Tour 2025 Korea was held at the Grand InterContinental Seoul Parnas. Pre-registration alone topped 2,500 people, and the Grand Ballroom where the keynote was held filled up early. I ended up watching the keynote from a separate overflow room on a large screen — and that room had no empty seats either. Just trying to find a seat gave me an early sense of how much interest the industry has in SAP and business AI right now.
Figure 1. A packed venue with no empty seats. The interest in SAP and business AI was something I felt in the density of the room, not just the numbers.
- The keynote at SAP NOW AI Tour 2025 Korea centered on the AI assistant Joule.
- Joule was introduced not as a chatbot but as AI that actually processes transactions, with the framing centered on “what work does it change” rather than “how smart is it.”
- The catch: session after session across the tracks kept circling back to the same prerequisite — Joule doesn’t work without Clean Core in place first.
The question the keynote raised
The morning keynote’s theme was “Unleash Your Future with Business AI.” SAP’s global Chief People Officer and the President of Data & Analytics took the stage themselves to talk about how AI moves beyond a technical demo and delivers results inside real business processes. Partner booths from AWS, Microsoft, and others pointed in the same direction. The whole venue felt aligned around a single question: “how do you actually put AI to work in the business?”
What SAP calls AI: Joule
The word that came up most in the keynote was Joule. It’s the AI assistant SAP has built into S/4HANA, and when you give it a plain-language instruction — “clean up this quarter’s open orders” — it works across systems to produce a result. SAP positioned it not as a simple chatbot, but as AI that actually processes transactions within business workflows.
What stood out was how they framed it. The emphasis wasn’t on “how smart is it,” but on “what work does it actually change.” Automated recommendations for journal entries, optimizing the purchase approval process, sharper demand forecasting — this was a session built on concrete business cases rather than flashy demos.
What I confirmed in Track 3
In the afternoon, I focused on Track 3, “Business Suite with AI,” out of the four available tracks. Session after session converged on the same point: for Joule to actually work, it needs a Clean Core foundation, and getting to Clean Core means cleaning up the custom code that’s piled up in the system first. It was an afternoon where the appeal of the new feature and the weight of the prerequisite needed to adopt it were both equally present.
⚠️ Note: Clean Core isn’t a new topic that showed up just at this event — it’s a prerequisite SAP keeps re-emphasizing every time a new AI feature gets layered on. The more features get added, the heavier this homework gets.
The keynote and session recordings from SAP NOW AI Tour 2025 Korea are available on the official SAP NOW AI Tour 2025 Korea on-demand page.
Rabbit’s Takeaway
What stuck with me walking out wasn’t the name of some new feature — it was a single question. I want to use Joule — but is our system actually ready to receive it?
The weight of that reality, sitting behind the flashy demo, was heavier than I expected. New features get flashier every year, but what’s ready to receive them is only ever as much as the system has actually been cleaned up to handle 😎
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