Transform data into insight with KPMG and SAP Business Data Cloud
Leverage KPMG and SAP Business Data Cloud to unify data, scale AI, and turn your IT function into an engine for transformation.
Technology isn’t just infrastructure — it is a catalyst for competitive advantage. Organizations need a trusted, unified data foundation, rapid insights and scalable AI to drive value. By leveraging KPMG professionals’ deep functional and sector experience with SAP Business Data Cloud, the IT function can become a strategic engine for transformation, establishing a resilient framework that helps accelerate outcomes and positions your organization for sustained success.
The role of IT and the CIO has fundamentally changed. Today, CIOs are no longer just responsible for keeping systems running smoothly. They are strategic drivers of business value, enabling agility, insight and innovation across the enterprise. With fast-moving and volatile markets, this shift is critical for building resilience and sustaining growth. As a result, 31 percent of tech executives surveyed in KPMG’s Global tech report 2026 say they plan to increase investment in centers of excellence over the next year, while 79 percent of organizations aim to improve their technology maturity level.
Business leaders expect faster reporting, real-time analytics and immediate access to insights that support rapid, data-driven decisions. Long development cycles and delayed reporting no longer meet the pace of modern business. To remain competitive, CIOs must accelerate efficiency and dramatically improve time-to-insight.
At the same time, CIOs are tasked with bringing data and AI together to generate tangible business value, not only improving internal operations but enabling new products, services and business models. This responsibility is heightened by the growing use of AI tools by individual business units outside central oversight, which can increase risk and create fragmentation if left unmanaged. Central to this challenge is the need to build a trusted data foundation — a clean house of data that AI can reliably use. Without trusted data, analytics lose credibility, AI outcomes become unpredictable and decision-making suffers.
31%
of tech executives surveyed in KPMG’s Global tech report 2026 say they plan to increase investment in centers of excellence over the next year.
Expectations from end users are also rising. Business functions increasingly expect the same intuitive, AI-enabled capabilities at work that they experience in their personal lives. CIOs must empower teams with self-service analytics and AI-driven insight, while ensuring robust governance, data security and regulatory compliance.
CIOs must also help their organizations navigate an evolving landscape of global regulations and data sovereignty requirements. Balancing innovation with compliance across regions adds further complexity to the role of the modern CIO.
So, what stands in the way? Fragmented data landscapes, siloed AI initiatives, limited self-service capabilities and rising operational complexity. But KPMG firms can help.
A KPMG-led SAP Business Data Cloud implementation can help provide clients with a structured, business-led response creating a unified, trusted data foundation that enables agility, embeds AI responsibly and turns data into a true strategic asset.
Early adopters of new tech invest less but gain more, achieving 2.2x ROI compared with 1.4x ROI for late adopters
CIOs have a need for agility — the desire to stay ahead in times of rapid change. Data and AI present tremendous opportunities for organizations that are ready to execute at scale.
Michael Golz
CTO, SAP Alliance, KPMG LLP
Roadblocks to an agile, AI-enabled enterprise
Modern enterprises face five key interconnected challenges that hinder their ability to turn data into strategic value.
Data is often scattered across multiple systems, departments and legacy platforms, creating silos that prevent a consistent view of the business. Long-standing on-premises Data warehouses contribute to technical debt, slow innovation and delayed insights, limiting organizations’ ability to operationalize AI at scale.
AI initiatives frequently remain isolated from core business processes. Without embedding AI in reporting, analytics and planning, organizations miss opportunities to automate decisions, improve forecasting and accelerate innovation.
Fragmented systems and manual reconciliation result in delayed reporting and analysis, forcing decision-makers to act on outdated or inconsistent information. Rapid, insight-driven decisions are increasingly critical in competitive, fast-moving markets.
Complex regulatory requirements, including GDPR and CSDR, combined with cross-border operations, raise compliance concerns. Inadequate controls increase risk and reduce trust in enterprise data.
Managing multiple platforms and redundant systems is labor-intensive, error-prone and costly. Fragmented landscapes complicate upgrades hinder standardization and slow the scaling of AI-driven insights.
Addressing these challenges requires a unified data platform and an open architecture that connects once-fragmented systems. This is the foundation of KPMG’s approach with SAP Business Data Cloud, enabling organizations to move from fragmented and siloed data to trusted, actionable insight. But first, organizations must set a path for success.
SAP Business Data Cloud is designed for openness, offering CIOs flexibility to integrate diverse features and partners and enabling future growth and strategic expansion.
Ahmet Atli
Partner, Consulting, Technology Transformation, KPMG in Germany
Spotlight on SAP technology
At the core of the target vision sits SAP Business Data Cloud, the central platform that brings together enterprise data, analytics and AI on a single, trusted foundation. SAP Business Data Cloud connects data across SAP and non-SAP systems, enabling consistent insight and AI readiness across the enterprise. Prebuilt data products provide ready-to-use business content that accelerates deployment, reduces build effort and delivers faster value from day one.
SAP Datasphere enables seamless data integration and harmonization across complex landscapes. It accelerates time to value by semantic definitions and associations from SAP applications and enriches and simplifies the data landscape.
SAP Analytics Cloud builds on this foundation to deliver real-time reporting, advanced analytics and planning capabilities. By providing a single access point for insight, SAP Analytics Cloud can accelerate time-to-insight, simplify complex tasks and support faster, more confident decision-making.
Embedded AI capabilities are delivered through Joule, an AI solution that runs across SAP applications. Joule enables contextual, business-relevant AI use cases, supporting both operational efficiency and innovation across functions.
For organizations with existing data warehouse investments, SAP Business Warehouse continues to play a critical role by enabling data integration and supporting the transition from on-premise warehouses to a cloud-based architecture.
As part of SAP Business Data Cloud, SAP Databricks unifies semantically rich, business-ready data with industry-leading AI/ML, data science and data engineering, enabling organizations to operationalize complex data at scale.
How KPMG gets you there
KPMG approaches SAP Business Data Cloud implementations with a clear focus on business outcomes, scalability and long-term value. At the core of this approach is KPMG Powered Enterprise, a standardized, AI-enabled transformation methodology that connects technology initiatives to strategic objectives.
Rather than treating SAP Business Data Cloud as a standalone data platform, KPMG positions it as a foundation for insight-led decision-making, operational efficiency, AI-driven innovation and, ultimately, business growth.
Powered Enterprise guides SAP Business Data Cloud transformations through five phases, from defining the target vision to designing the operating model, building and deploying standardized capabilities, and continuously enhancing value post–go-live.
The five-phase KPMG Powered Enterprise methodology
How KPMG helps get you there
Throughout all five phases, KPMG firms’ approach emphasizes business value over technology implementation. The objective is not only successful deployment, but high adoption and measurable value creation across multiple dimensions, including revenue growth, cost reduction, improved quality, efficiency gains and clear operational improvements.
With a ‘think globally, act local’ mindset, KPMG professionals combine a global network of SAP and data specialists with deep local regulatory expertise. This enables organizations to navigate complex requirements such as GDPR, CSRD, and the AI Act with confidence. And they deliver end-to-end, from early strategic discussions through to operational delivery. This includes embedding AI into business processes, products and services, enabling advanced analytics and supporting decision-making through scenario modeling and real-time insight.
Close CIO and C-suite engagement ensure alignment between strategy and execution, while strong collaboration with SAP enables early adoption of new capabilities, proof-of-concepts and reference architectures. KPMG professionals follow a standard principle to ‘never move the data but move the analytics to the data’. This helps minimize duplication, retains context and semantics. They use Delta sharing as a key enabler of zero-copy paradigms.
By starting with standard content and selectively tailoring solutions to industry and client-specific needs, the KPMG approach helps organizations accelerate value while maintaining global best practices.
KPMG and SAP
Business and technology transformation. KPMG speaks SAP.
Why KPMG?
Innovative. Scalable. Business-led.
KPMG professionals bring together deep SAP expertise, a business-led transformation approach and established delivery capabilities to help organizations unlock the full value of SAP Business Data Cloud.
- End-to-end transformation: KPMG professionals act as strategic, long-term advisors focused on ongoing value realization for clients, not only technology implementers. From data strategy and governance to analytics, AI enablement and optimization, KPMG can help support the full transformation lifecycle.
- A proven methodology: Implemented through the KPMG Powered Enterprise methodology, SAP Business Data Cloud deployments can help reduce risk and accelerate delivery for clients.
- Trusted organization with a strong SAP track record: As an SAP Global Strategic Service Partner, KPMG is a trusted advisor with a proven history of delivering complex SAP programs on a scale.
- KPMG has a global alliance with SAP, which provides KPMG professionals early insight into SAP Business Technology Platform as well as SAP Business Data Cloud and SAP AI roadmaps. This enables KPMG consultants to ensure solutions are aligned to the design and capabilities of the future. As a result, clients can accelerate time to value, minimize transformation risk, and future‑proof their investments.
- KPMG’s multi-disciplinary expertise across AI-ready data architectures, real-time analytics, cloud ecosystems, regulatory compliance, and data sovereignty helps clients accelerate value, reduce risk, and scale transformation outcomes. By integrating these capabilities end to end, KPMG can design and implement “AI-ready” foundations that help improve data quality and governance, deploy real-time insights for faster decision-making, modernize workloads on secure and cost-optimized clouds, and ensure compliance with evolving regulations all while protecting sensitive data across borders.
- By integrating KPMG and SAP prebuilt data products and business content, clients can significantly reduce the build effort and accelerate transformation to rapidly turn fragmented data into trusted, actionable insight.
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