CFOs across the Middle East are under pressure to enhance financial processes through intelligent automation while addressing concerns about data quality, transparency, and responsible governance.
Marwan Zeineddine, Managing Director for SAP UAE, says trust is one of the biggest hurdles. “AI is only about data. If you have good data, then you’ll get good results.” He explains that SAP helps address this by keeping data within the system and embedding ethics, transparency, and security. “It is reliable, and at the same time, it’s responsible,” he said.
In a live product demo, Zeineddine walked through a real customer scenario: an invoice flagged due to a five-day delay in service. “The AI agent will analyse the situation, read the customer email, do the full analysis, and show different resolution options,” he explained. The user can instruct the agent to cancel the invoice, issue credit, or both. “The AI agent took all the actions on my behalf,” he said, adding that it also triggered a dispute with the company’s logistics partner to close the loop.
Zeineddine described the broader platform architecture behind this capability. SAP is combining its embedded AI features with a new semantic data layer called Business Data Cloud, developed with Databricks. This integration enables seamless connection between SAP and non-SAP systems, without requiring data movement, and supports both standard use cases and custom-built AI agents.
“So far, we delivered more than 200 use cases,” he said. “By the end of the year, we’ll have more than 400 delivered to our customers.” The goal is to enable “better automation, better decision-making, and [to] take actions on behalf of users and the C-level as well.”
