SAP has deepened its collaboration with French startup Mistral AI to scale sovereign, locally hosted artificial intelligence across European enterprises. Announced at the Franco-German EU Summit on Digital Sovereignty in Berlin, the partnership focuses on AI models that run on SAP operated infrastructure and meet strict European data rules. The expanded alliance combines SAP’s enterprise reach with Mistral AI’s frontier models to bring secure, multilingual AI into day to day business operations.
Background of the SAP Mistral AI Partnership
The partnership builds on SAP’s locally hosted AI capabilities, introduced in 2024 to give customers access to leading models within SAP infrastructure. The next phase will make Mistral AI’s frontier models and products available through a sovereign AI foundation on SAP Business Technology Platform. This setup allows enterprises to build and deploy AI agents using tools like Mistral AI Studio and Le Chat, while keeping data, infrastructure, and compliance fully under their own control.
Addressing European Enterprise Challenges
Modern enterprises face recurring pain points that cut across sectors, including repetitive support queries, fragmented knowledge, and manual workflows that drain expert resources. These issues become more acute during major transformations such as ERP or software migrations, particularly in multilingual environments that span German, French, and Italian. For regulated industries such as public sector and finance, strict data localization and sovereignty rules add another layer of complexity that generic cloud AI offerings often fail to address.
Use Cases in Software Migration and Support
SAP’s deployment at Swiss Federal Railways illustrates how the partnership translates into operational impact. During a multi year software migration for 30,000 employees, SAP implemented a multilingual chatbot using Mistral Large, fully hosted on SAP operated infrastructure in Europe. The system uses retrieval augmented generation across FAQs, training materials, and unstructured content, combined with prompt engineering and glossary based rewriting so domain specific abbreviations like SO are reliably interpreted as sales order.
Advancing Autonomous Business Processes
Beyond support, SAP is using Mistral AI to push into agentic automation of core business processes. An upcoming Accounting Accruals agent for SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud, now heading into beta, is designed to run autonomously on a schedule, search for relevant data, perform calculations, and prepare draft journal entries. By reading directly from SAP systems and interpreting accounting policies with Mistral’s language models, the agent targets a process that every company performs at month and quarter end, promising significant efficiency gains at scale.
Sovereign AI and European Digital Strategy
A central theme of the collaboration is European digital sovereignty, with a focus on 100 percent European, locally hosted AI that aligns with regional regulation. SAP and Mistral AI are creating a sovereignty pillar for European public services and regulated sectors, beginning in Germany and intended to extend to other industries. As part of this, the partners will co design industry specific AI applications and co sell joint solutions, aiming to give European organizations cutting edge AI without sacrificing control over data, infrastructure, or long term strategic direction.
The SAP and Mistral AI partnership shows how sovereign AI can move beyond theory into concrete deployments that cut support volumes, accelerate migrations, and automate finance workflows. With results such as an estimated 80 percent reduction in repetitive support queries at Swiss Federal Railways, and a reusable framework already expanding into telecommunications and public sector use cases, the model is built for scale. As SAP’s Chief Technology Officer Philipp Herzig notes, the collaboration is positioned as a step toward greater European sovereignty, combining responsible generative AI with strict control over data and intellectual property.