SAP Hungary opened its Budapest office to the press as part of an Insider Tour timed with the local stop of the SAP AI Code Camp. While the three-day internal AI development workshop was underway, the company showed how its global technology strategy, the local development footprint, customer engagement and employee experience are linked at its Budapest hub.
Why SAP matters
SAP is a major player in enterprise applications and business AI: 99 of the world’s 100 largest companies use SAP solutions, SAP customers handle 84% of global trade, and roughly 77% of revenues tied to global business transactions are associated with SAP systems.
Hidvégi Péter, CEO of SAP Hungary, said that AI is not a separate trend for the company but a capability embedded into corporate processes that can drive the next significant phase of operational improvement. SAP’s AI copilot Joule offers more than 2,400 distinct capabilities across SAP cloud solutions, and the company currently lists over 350 generative AI use cases.
SAP expects companies to increasingly rely on AI assistants and agents that can support or partly manage end-to-end business processes. The company also stressed that AI alone will not deliver business breakthroughs: deep process and industry knowledge, structured and semantically rich business data, and enterprise-level governance and control are also required.
Multi-focus approach in Hungary (2026)
According to Hidvégi, SAP Hungary will concentrate on four priority areas in 2026. In large-enterprise transformation, Private Cloud S/4HANA migrations using the RISE with SAP package and related AI integrations remain central; SAP works with more than 20 stable, long-term customers in this area. In the public sector, digitalisation, data sovereignty and data hygiene are key growth directions, supported by more than 40 long-term client relationships.
SAP Labs Hungary — a regional development center in Budapest
Markus Hilken, Managing Director of SAP Labs Hungary & CEE, described the Budapest development centre’s role in Central and Eastern Europe. SAP Labs Hungary started in 2005 with about 50 employees and has grown to a professional community exceeding 2,000 people. The local Labs organisation comprises roughly 1,000 developers, 500 technical support specialists and 400 cloud & DevOps engineers, and the company offers opportunities for more than 100 students to join international technology projects during their university studies.
Budapest teams work on several globally important SAP areas, including SAP Supply Chain Management, SAP Customer Experience, SAP Finance and Spend Management, SAP SuccessFactors HCM, SAP Integrated Product Development, SAP Asset Management and the SAP Business AI Platform. The organisation’s stability is reflected in an average tenure of 5.9 years and an average age of 36.8; hiring continues at about 200 new entrants per year.
SAP’s presence in Hungary exceeds sales and customer support: the company has been in Hungary for 28 years and, together with the previously acquired Emarsys Budapest team, employs around 2,200 people. After Germany, Hungary hosts the second-largest SAP Labs development centre in Europe. Approximately 80% of the TOP100 Hungarian companies use SAP solutions.
Markus Hilken summarised that SAP Labs Hungary is a diverse and highly capable innovation centre whose teams are united by delivering SAP solutions that help customers get the most from their businesses.
Demos: AI in practice
Three practical demos at the Insider Tour illustrated how AI appears in SAP solutions. The SAP Engagement Cloud / Emarsys demonstration traced the path from manual campaign management to AI-driven marketing control. Another demo explained the "SAP runs SAP" approach — how SAP uses agent-based, end-to-end processes in its own customer support and cloud operations. The third demo focused on autonomous supply chain management and showed how S/4HANA Asset and Service Management AI solutions can support logistics and maintenance work at larger manufacturing or production companies.
SAP AI Code Camp — from idea to working prototype in three days
Attendees were also given a glimpse inside the ongoing SAP AI Code Camp. Tolvaj Béla, Global Development and Technology Lead for Supply Chain Management (SCM) planning, said roughly 260 developer colleagues from the SAP SCM organisation participated in the three-day programme in Budapest.
The Code Camp brings cross-functional teams — developers, product managers, UX experts and business-domain specialists — together to seek AI-based solutions for real business problems. It is presented as a practical innovation workshop rather than a traditional training or contest: teams start from backlog items, business challenges or future development directions on their product area and explore how AI can deliver faster, smarter or more scalable solutions.
Sárközy Péter, head of data science for SCM, showed that SAP also develops its own generative AI models that go beyond conventional large language models and are primarily applied to tabular enterprise data. He cited the SAP-developed RPT 1 model as an example: it can detect relationships, perform classification, fill missing values and produce predictions in large tabular datasets, and its pretraining incorporated SAP domain expertise.
SAP Hungary as an employer
At the office tour close, Hanke Anikó, HR lead at SAP Hungary, outlined areas of employer focus and how the company builds employee experience in a setup combining international development work, customer-centric operations and community office life. She noted SAP Hungary’s headcount grew by 15% since last year, a sign, she said, of Budapest’s strengthening role and the company’s attractiveness to local talent.
Hanke emphasised that a competitive benefits package alone is no longer sufficient; SAP Hungary’s recruiting and employer brand emphasise sustainability and inclusion. The local organisation employs five generations and 48 nationalities. Quarterly internal surveys show 93% employee satisfaction regarding the company’s inclusiveness and diversity. SAP Hungary places priority on health and wellbeing initiatives and treats flexible working hours as an integral part of its culture to support sustainable performance and work–life balance.
