Databricks expands SAP partnership with Genie, Lakeflow and Lakebase – Unite.AI

Databricks announced on October 30, 2026 that it is expanding its partnership with SAP, bringing Genie, Lakeflow, Unity Gateway and Lakebase capabilities to SAP Databricks within SAP Business Data Cloud and introducing a new SAP Application Data Foundation for accessing SAP application data.

Databricks framed the expansion around business context, saying that today’s AI models don’t yet have the context to understand how a business actually works, and that for most businesses it lives in SAP systems. According to Databricks, more than 90% of Fortune 500 companies use SAP solutions.

SAP published its expansion report on October 29, 2026 at SAP TechEd in Berlin, in a post by Irfan Khan, president and chief product officer of SAP Data & Analytics. SAP described the expanded scope with Lakeflow, Agent Bricks, Unity Gateway and Lakebase coming to SAP Databricks in SAP Business Data Cloud, as part of a larger series of Lakehouse and Business Data Fabric announcements.

Databricks and SAP launched SAP Databricks on February 13, 2025, a strategic product and go-to-market partnership that natively integrated the Databricks Data + AI platform within the new SAP Business Data Cloud. The offering, sold by SAP as part of SAP Business Data Cloud, was announced with a phased rollout across AWS, Azure and Google Cloud, and Databricks said it will allocate $250 million to help customers and system integrator partners succeed with SAP Databricks deployments and migrations.

Since general availability, according to Databricks, customers including Adidas, Zalando, Mondi and CAF have used SAP Databricks and SAP Business Data Cloud Connect for Databricks to analyze, govern and create AI on live SAP data products via bi-directional OpenSharing and zero copies.

SAP application database

SAP Application Data Foundation makes SAP application data available for use in your preferred SAP Business Data Cloud engine, including SAP Databricks. SAP describes it as a cloud-native way to access SAP application data, saying it helps reduce total cost of ownership and shorten time to value.

Databricks said accessing SAP application data typically means building and maintaining custom extraction pipelines that copy data, lose business context and fragment governance. With the foundation, SAP data products can be shared with SAP BDC Connect for zero-copy access, avoiding additional pipelines, data copies and silos, while data engineers can build models on SAP’s semantically rich business foundation so that analytics and AI reflect how the business actually works.

Databricks gave the example of a manufacturer managing finance and supply chain on SAP ECC on-premise: As it plans its move to the cloud, it can use SAP Application Data Foundation to bring years of order history into SAP Databricks, where data engineers can enrich the history with third-party data and build demand forecasting models on SAP’s business semantics, maintaining that work during the migration.

Features coming to SAP Databricks

According to Databricks, the expanded partnership plans to bring the full range of its enterprise data and AI capabilities to SAP Databricks, integrated into SAP Business Data Cloud. Genie is described as an AI collaborator that gives every team immediate access to governed data and AI with integrated business context, providing context in core SAP data to every team and agent. A planned bidirectional integration between SAP’s Genie and Joule is intended to bring such responses and actions into SAP experiences.

Lakeflow is a unified data engineering solution for ingesting, transforming, and orchestrating data, so teams can create pipelines combining SAP data with IoT, CRM, and third-party sources. Unity Gateway provides multi-AI governance and cost control across agents, tools, models, and MCPs. Databricks describes Lakebase as the first serverless, mission-critical Postgres database built for AI apps and agents, targeting operational data apps across SAP and enterprise data.

Governance and go-to-market expansion

Databricks said that Unity Catalog and Unity Gateway govern data, models and agents across SAP and non-SAP data, and that customers can use SAP data within the SAP Business Data Cloud with SAP Databricks or bring governed SAP data products into an existing Databricks estate, with any model on any cloud. The companies are also expanding their go-to-market partnership with joint teams in the field to help mutual customers accelerate their AI transformation, Databricks said.

“Data is the foundation of enterprise artificial intelligence,” Philipp Herzig, SAP’s chief technology officer, said in the announcement. Herzig said introducing Databricks’ latest reach into SAP Business Data Cloud combines SAP’s understanding of business processes and mission-critical applications with Databricks’ data platform, helping customers transform business data into a foundation for what SAP calls the Autonomous Enterprise.

Michael Kiermaier, senior vice president of business strategy and operations at Databricks, said companies can bring all their SAP data together on the Databricks platform and combine Genie with Joule to provide business context to every team and agent.

Distribution and availability of SAF-Netherlands

SAF-Holland, a global manufacturer of chassis components for trailers, trucks and buses, uses SAP Business Data Cloud and SAP Databricks to unify more than 100 million customer, delivery and material data records and applies machine learning to predict the reliability of customer delivery schedules. According to Databricks, SAF-Holland now generates analytics 5x faster than traditional reporting approaches and transforms complex SAP data into planning and supply chain insights in minutes rather than weeks.

“Opening the SAP data ecosystem to Databricks has enabled better analytics for our internal teams and ultimately helps us deliver better outcomes for our customers,” said David Gund, senior manager of global digital intelligence at SAF-Holland.

SAP Databricks and SAP Business Data Cloud Connect for Databricks are now available. Databricks refers customers to the SAP or Databricks account teams to learn about the new SAP Application Data Foundation and the expanded capabilities of SAP Databricks.