The fastest path to trusted AI: Turning high-quality data into high-quality intelligence with SAP Business Data Cloud and Collibra

AI is moving fast. And the organizations that win will be the ones that slow down long enough to build the right foundation. It starts with data. High-quality AI requires high-quality data. As SAP CEO Christian Klein noted, every company struggles with bad data quality, and AI offers little value if the underlying data is incomplete, inconsistent, or inaccurate. Before you can trust intelligent agents to act autonomously in the era of agentic AI, you must trust the data they are built upon. SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC) combined with Collibra creates the environment where that becomes possible. By unifying SAP and non-SAP data, preserving business semantics and enforcing governance across every source, these platforms give teams the clarity, traceability and confidence needed to move AI into production safely and at scale.

Unified data + governance = reliable AI

Once a strong foundation is in place, the next challenge is eliminating the fragmentation that undermines most AI initiatives. SAP BDC consolidates data from every SAP and non-SAP system into a single environment where business context stays intact. Instead of losing meaning as data travels across systems, Business Data Cloud preserves core definitions, structures and relationships so data lands in AI-ready form. That semantic consistency is essential. It means your finance data still behaves like finance data. Your supply-chain data still reflects how materials move. And your customer data carries the same meaning everywhere it’s used. Collibra extends this strength by governing what comes next. Collibra operationalizes and enforces governance and quality by providing market-leading data quality and observability. The result is that the data available in Business Data Cloud isn't just discoverable; it’s accurate, reliable and ready for AI.

Collibra creates a unified layer of cataloging, lineage, data quality, access control and AI governance that wraps every data product in shared standards. Teams stop debating definitions and start building. Risk and compliance teams get the visibility they need without slowing development. And business users gain access to governed, well-understood data without relying on manual processes or tribal knowledge.

Together, SAP BDC and Collibra close the gap between data sprawl and AI ambition. They replace fragmented control with a system where every dataset, every policy and every AI use case lives in one coordinated governance fabric.

From data chaos to AI confidence

The truth is that organizations rarely struggle to build AI models. They struggle to build AI responsibly, repeatedly and at scale. That requires a progression—one that the combined SAP and Collibra architecture makes achievable.

It begins with defining the data products that matter most: customer profiles, financial attributes, operational dependencies, supply-chain signals. SAP BDC then turns those products into structured, governed assets enriched with first-class business semantics. Collibra operationalizes the governance behind them—documenting lineage, surfacing quality issues, enforcing access rules and creating “active links” between the data, the policies and the models that depend on them.

With this foundation in place, AI initiatives stop behaving like isolated experiments. Models can be traced back to their training data. Outputs can be validated against quality thresholds. And when regulations shift or datasets change, teams can see the impact instantly and adjust with confidence.

Whether the goal is modernizing SAP Business Warehouse (BW) landscapes, powering AI-driven customer intelligence or blending SAP, IoT and third-party data into new insights, the pattern is the same. The path from raw data to governed data products to trusted AI becomes repeatable, so each use case ships faster than the last.

The fastest path to trusted AI

AI raises the stakes for every organization. Poor data is a direct threat to model accuracy, safety and compliance.

SAP Business Data Cloud and Collibra create the conditions for AI that is scalable, explainable and grounded in business reality. When your data foundation is unified and governed, every AI use case runs faster, with fewer risks.

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  Collibra

  Collibra

  Unified governance for data and AI