How do you connect AI to the right data? How can you make that data reliable, governed, and available for new use cases? Those will always be important questions, but as we move into a phase where agentic AI is becoming more capable, new questions arise. Can an agent understand the business context behind a request? Can it find the right data without explicit instruction? Can it retrieve what is needed, support a prediction, and help move a workflow forward?

The answers to these questions will have an impact on the ability of agents to deliver timely and effective action.

As the AI database powering SAP Business Data Cloud and SAP Business AI Platform, SAP HANA Cloud helps bring together the foundation of business data, context, and intelligence to enable AI agents and applications to reason over trusted business context and take meaningful action. Let’s see how SAP HANA Cloud can support agentic AI with capabilities such as multi-model processing, vector search, and retrieval- augmented generation (RAG) using knowledge graphs. Together, these capabilities can help AI applications and agents understand different types of data and how they relate to each other.

The database becomes a place to act

Consider the scenario of a business user interacting with SAP HANA Cloud agents through natural language. The user could ask for sales conversion probability across customers. The agent could then discover the right database objects, retrieve the relevant data, execute the request, and return the result.

It sounds like an intuitive experience, and it is. But it challenges our notion of the role of the database. Instead of requiring users to know where data sits, how objects are structured, or how to write the right query, SAP HANA Cloud can help reduce the distance between intent and outcome. A business question can more easily become a data action.

For developers, administrators, data scientists, and business users, that opens the door to more accessible ways of working with data and AI. Complex database capabilities become easier to use. AI-driven workflows become easier to initiate. Agents can begin to act with a clearer understanding of the business environment around them.

Intelligence moves closer to the data

In many AI workflows, data is moved, extracted, or transformed before analysis or intelligence can be applied. This adds complexity to the task and can also create a disconnect between the AI use case and the business data that supports it.

SAP HANA Cloud brings AI capabilities closer to the data through embedded machine learning and predictive capabilities, including libraries of predictive and machine learning models, AutoML to automate machine learning tasks, and SDK support for SQL and Python.

SAP’s planned integration with the SAP RPT-1 AI model adds another dimension. For some use cases, teams may be able to call SAP’s tabular AI model through SAP AI Core and receive predictions directly through SAP HANA Cloud. That gives organizations another path to prediction, especially when they do not have the data science resources or historical training data needed to build custom models from scratch. The result is more flexibility in how intelligence is applied. Teams can train custom models where it makes sense or use foundation-powered predictions where needed.

Memory could make agents more useful over time

Today, most AI interactions are session-based. A user asks a question, receives an answer, and moves on. But enterprise work rarely happens in a single interaction. It builds across conversations, decisions, workflows, exceptions, and follow-ups. An agent’s usefulness may be limited if it cannot carry that context forward to the next interaction.

SAP HANA Cloud is built to support long-term memory for AI agents, helping retain conversation context, past inputs, decisions, and interactions across sessions. This is an important step for enterprise AI, giving agents access to more relevant business context so they can maintain continuity and carry tasks to completion.

The next phase starts with action

Connecting AI to business data is just the first step on the way to a future of enterprise AI defined by what it can do once it reaches that data. Can it understand business context? Can it find what matters? Can it support prediction? Can it trigger the next step? Can it carry memory forward across work?

SAP HANA Cloud is well positioned for the move from data management to agentic action. As part of SAP Business Data Cloud and the SAP Business AI Platform, it helps provide the data, context, and intelligence needed to support the future of AI.

To learn more and see a demonstration, watch the on-demand webinar, Amplify your agents and applications with the AI database: Introduction to SAP HANA Cloud.