SAP has committed €100 million to help its customers put Business AI to work, through the SAP Business AI adoption incentive for partners. SimpleFi is participating as an SAP Gold Partner, which means we can now bring this to you.
When you and our team design an approved use case together, SAP funds the work, up to €100,000 per engagement. You get a working agent running in your own SAP landscape, with the testing, sign-off and enablement around it. What you do not get is another line item competing for room in next year’s budget.
We have been building our own AI expertise, training programs and tools for a while now, well before the current wave of attention. What this program changes is timing. Our customers no longer have to wait for next year’s budget to find out whether an agent actually helps them.
Jonathan Essig, CEO, SimpleFi Solutions
Where the value actually is
Most AI spending so far has gone to efficiency. Fewer hands on the same work, lower cost to serve. That is real value, and it is the easier half to measure, which is part of why it got funded first.
The harder half is effectiveness. Whether your forecast is right matters more than whether it was cheap to produce. Finance sits on both sides of that line, because you run your own processes and you also run the planning and reporting layer that operations, sales and supply chain depend on. Applied there, AI does not stop at a department boundary.
Most AI spending so far has chased efficiency, and efficiency is the smaller prize. The larger one is effectiveness: better decisions, made earlier, with more of the business in view when they are made. So this belongs with the CFO rather than arriving from somewhere else. The next two years will separate the finance organizations that treated AI as a cost exercise from the ones that treated it as an operating model decision.
Henner Schliebs, EVP of Growth, SimpleFi Solutions
The first agent is already running
This is not theory for us. A close and consolidation agent is in beta right now with a global industrial group running around 1,100 SAP Analytics Cloud users. Their month end still works off a summarised BW file view, and consolidation was the part their own team raised first.
It orchestrates the close, drafts variance commentary, flags anomalies and intercompany mismatches, and routes what it finds through an entity close checklist with approval and sign-off. Joule Studio and SAP Build, running in their landscape. The funding turns a working beta into a productised deployment, which is a very different proposition from starting from nothing.
A second conversation is open with a manufacturer that commits production capacity months before it knows real demand. There the forecast belongs to finance and the decision belongs to operations, and the value shows up as revenue that was not lost and expediting nobody had to pay for. Neither appears on a finance efficiency scorecard.
We are also not limited to data that already sits inside SAP. We plan to use SAP Business Data Cloud Connect so a Joule agent can work with data held in Snowflake or Databricks without copying it anywhere first.
The teams that will get the most out of this are not the ones with an AI roadmap. They are the ones who can name the one thing in their month end that everybody quietly works around. Bring me that, and we will work out together whether it fits.
Jason Reid, Sr. Director, Customer Success, SimpleFi Solutions
How it works
Three steps, and you are only really in the first one.
You tell us what is slowing you down. Thirty minutes, no deck. Together we work out which use case has a real business payoff and a strong chance of approval, because those two are not always the same thing.
We design it with you, then take it to SAP. Sizing, the statement of work, and the nomination itself, submitted alongside your SAP account team. That part is ours to carry, not yours.
SAP reviews and decides. An internal steering group approves the nomination and the funding. We would rather say plainly that the decision sits with SAP than let it surprise you halfway through.
The window is the real constraint
The program runs through 31 December 2026, and the work has to be scoped, approved and delivered inside it. So August and September are considerably better months to start this than November. There are four funding levels, from €15,000 to €100,000, and you and our team define the scope together before anything is submitted.
If there is a step in your close that everyone on your team works around, that is the conversation worth having. It costs you nothing to find out whether it fits.
Both land with Jason Reid, who is leading customer nomination and intake. If you would rather just write to him, he is at jason.reid@simplefisolutions.com.
Funding amounts are program maximums, not guarantees. All nominations, scope decisions and funding approvals are made by SAP at its sole discretion. Public sector and government entities are not eligible.