What is SAP AI Core - and why you need it

SAP AI Core is the runtime engine at the heart of SAP's AI Foundation on the Business Technology Platform (BTP). If SAP AI Foundation is the enterprise AI platform, AI Core is the engine room: the place where AI and machine-learning workloads actually run, scale and get managed.

What SAP AI Core actually is

SAP AI Core is a service on SAP BTP that provides an engine to run AI workflows and model-serving workloads in a standardized, scalable and hyperscaler-agnostic way. In plain terms: it takes a trained model - SAP's own foundation models, a third-party LLM, or a custom model your team built - and handles deployment, scaling and lifecycle management for it.

Together with the Generative AI Hub, AI Core forms SAP AI Foundation - the unified infrastructure through which AI capabilities are built, deployed, governed and consumed across the SAP estate.

Why it exists - the problem it solves

Running AI in an enterprise is not the same as calling an API from a laptop. You need to:

• Serve models reliably, with GPUs, autoscaling and scale-to-zero so you are not paying for idle capacity.
• Manage the full lifecycle of an AI scenario - train, deploy, version, retire.
• Stay hyperscaler-agnostic, so you are not locked into one cloud's ML stack.
• Keep everything governed and auditable, because it runs against real business data.

AI Core is SAP's answer to all four in one managed runtime.

What you can run on it

• Foundation models - access to multiple LLMs (GPT-family, Claude, Gemini and others) behind a unified API.
• Orchestration - chain capabilities together into a workflow (grounding, filtering, templating, model calls).
• Document grounding / RAG - ground answers in your enterprise documents.
• Custom ML models - train and deploy your own, not just consume LLMs.

Why you need it

If your AI stays in a proof-of-concept notebook, you don't. The moment you need AI to run in production, against SAP data, at enterprise scale and under governance, AI Core is what turns a model into a dependable, observable service instead of a fragile script.

AI Core is where an AI idea stops being a demo and starts being infrastructure.

Where Boidra fits

We build custom agents that call models through AI Core and the Generative AI Hub - so your agents inherit the same scaling, governance and model choice, and stay portable over open protocols like A2A and MCP. The runtime is SAP's; the agents on top are yours.