SAP’s AI Acquisitions Point to a Post-LLM Enterprise Future

SAP’s planned acquisitions of Prior Labs and Dremio suggest the company is pursuing a different vision for enterprise AI than the large language model (LLM)-centric systems that have dominated the market since ChatGPT’s release.

In May, SAP announced plans to acquire German AI startup Prior Labs and invest more than €1 billion over four years to expand the company into a frontier AI research lab focused on structured enterprise data. Around the same time, SAP also announced plans to acquire Dremio, a data lakehouse company focused on interoperability and AI-ready enterprise data infrastructure.

SAP CTO Philipp Herzig framed the company’s strategy around structured business data rather than general-purpose language models “The greatest untapped opportunity in enterprise AI wasn’t large language models; it was AI built for the structured data that runs the world’s businesses,” Herzig said in SAP’s announcement.

The acquisitions point to a broader shift in enterprise AI architecture. SAP appears to be betting that enterprise systems will increasingly rely on specialized foundation models optimized for ERP tables, financial records, supply chain systems, procurement workflows, and operational forecasting.