The event, held at the firm’s Graphisoft Park office, coincided with the Budapest stop of the SAP AI Code Camp, a three-day internal development workshop focused on using artificial intelligence to solve real business problems. The format combined executive presentations, live demonstrations, a look at the Code Camp, and an office tour that showed SAP Hungary’s role as both a sales and support operation and a development hub.
Globally, SAP positions itself as a leading company in enterprise applications and business AI. The company says 99 of the world’s 100 largest companies use SAP solutions, while SAP customers account for 84% of global commerce and around 77% of global transaction revenue.
Globally, SAP employs more than 110,000 people and operates more than 100 development locations, including its Budapest hub. In 2025, it invested EUR 7.8 billion in research and development in Hungary, with AI as a central focus.
Péter Hidvégi, managing director of SAP Hungary, said artificial intelligence should not be seen as a separate technology trend, but as a capability embedded in business processes. SAP’s AI copilot Joule already offers more than 2,400 capabilities in SAP cloud solutions, alongside more than 350 generative AI use cases. The company’s aim, he said, is to make AI scalable, secure and measurable in enterprise operations, rather than leaving it at the level of isolated experiments.
“In Hungary, we have a special advantage because SAP is present not only as a sales and customer support organization, but also with significant development capacity that grows year by year,” he notes.
“We are deliberately strengthening Field and Labs synergies: we organize customer meetings where Hungarian companies can meet directly with the local experts working on the solutions they use. The experiences, needs and real business use cases of Hungarian customers can even contribute to fine-tuning development directions,” Hidvégi adds.
The local strategy for 2026 has four main areas. SAP Hungary is focusing on large enterprise transformations (built around Private Cloud S/4HANA and RISE with SAP), public sector digitalization with a focus on data sovereignty and data hygiene, midmarket cloud adoption (through GROW with SAP and Public Cloud S/4HANA), and the development of its partner ecosystem.
The midmarket opportunity is significant: SAP Hungary already has more than 150 midmarket customers and sees more than 1,500 additional potential customers in the segment.
Hungary’s role in SAP’s global structure goes beyond commercial activity. The company has been present in the country for 28 years. It now employs more than 2,200 people, including the Budapest team for SAP Engagement Cloud, its customer engagement and marketing automation platform formerly known as Emarsys.
SAP says its Hungarian operation is home to the second-largest SAP Labs development center in Europe after Germany, with more than 140 consultants based in Budapest, and that SAP solutions are used by about 80% of Hungary’s top 100 companies.
Markus Hilken, managing director of SAP Labs Hungary and SAP Labs CEE, presented Budapest’s position in the regional and global network. SAP Labs Hungary began in 2005 with 50 employees and has grown into a professional community of more than 2,000 people, he says.
“With our talented team, including more than 1,000 developers, 500 technical support specialists and 400 cloud and DevOps engineers, SAP Labs Hungary is one of SAP’s most diverse and competent innovation centers. Across all roles, fields and career levels, from local to regional and global responsibilities, our colleagues are united by a single purpose: to deliver SAP solutions that enable our customers to get the most out of their business,” Hilken says.
The Budapest teams work on globally relevant areas, including supply chain management, customer experience, finance and spend management, SuccessFactors HCM, integrated product development, asset management and SAP Business AI Platform.
Demos at the “Insider Tour” event showed how AI is being built into that portfolio. One presentation used SAP Engagement Cloud to show the shift from manual campaign work to AI-supported marketing orchestration. Another focused on “SAP runs SAP” workflows, where agent-based processes support customer service and cloud operations. A third showed AI-supported plant maintenance, where SAP S/4HANA Asset and Service Management can help reduce downtime and administrative work.
The press tour also offered a look at the SAP AI Code Camp. Béla Tolvaj, global development and technology lead for supply chain management planning, says the Budapest program brought together around 260 SAP SCM developers. Cross-functional teams of developers, product managers, UX experts and business-domain specialists worked with approved AI tools such as Claude Code, GitHub Copilot and Cline to create working prototypes or validated concepts from real product-area challenges.
Péter Sárközy, an SCM data science expert, also presented SAP’s work on proprietary generative AI models for structured business data, including the RPT-1 model, designed to find patterns, classify information, fill missing data and make predictions in large enterprise tables. Anikó Hanke, HR leader at SAP Hungary, presented the workplace dimension.
“The company’s headcount in Hungary has grown by 15% since last year, which clearly shows Budapest’s strengthening role in SAP’s global network and also confirms that we offer an attractive, competitive opportunity for Hungarian talent,” she said.
Hanke added that a strong benefits package alone is no longer enough. “The real calling card of SAP Hungary is sustainability and inclusion, which already appear in our recruitment strategy: five generations and 48 nationalities work with us. In our quarterly employee survey, our Hungarian employees reported 93% satisfaction with how inclusive and diverse our company is. That is what we are really proud of,” she says.
This article was first published in the Budapest Business Journal print issue of July 3, 2026.
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