Concept card

SAP AI Foundation on SAP BTP — the three-layer map

As of 2026-09-23

Edited by Cédric-Olivier Mâry, sole editor and publication director — 27 years in the SAP ecosystem. How these pages are produced, and where automation is used.

What is SAP AI Foundation on SAP BTP?

AI Foundation is SAP's name for the AI layer of BTP: prebuilt AI services, the lifecycle stack (SAP AI Core, generative AI hub, SAP AI Launchpad) and the business data and context that grounds them. Since May 2026 it sits inside the SAP Business AI Platform — and two of the four classic AI services left the price list on 31 March 2026.

What the map is

Training material on SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) draws "AI Foundation on SAP BTP" as three stacked layers. It is a teaching map, not a SKU: you never buy "AI Foundation" as such, you subscribe to the services inside it. Reading it correctly matters because each box has its own plan, its own metering and, in 2026, its own lifecycle status. This card walks the map box by box, shows how the boxes compose, and marks where SAP has redrawn it.

Layer 1 — AI services (prebuilt)

These are managed services you call through an API without training a large model yourself. The training slide lists four:

Why it matters

Two of the four AI services on the classic slide (Data Attribute Recommendation and Personalized Recommendation) cannot be renewed after their current term: proposing them in 2026 is a credibility error.
The map explains who pays for what: Document AI, Translation Hub, AI Core and HANA Cloud are separate entitlements, even when a single use case touches all of them.
Since May 2026 SAP sells the same building blocks under the SAP Business AI Platform banner; knowing both vocabularies lets you read old training material and new sales decks side by side.

Key points

Layer 1 (AI services): SAP Document AI and SAP Translation Hub are live; Data Attribute Recommendation and Personalized Recommendation were removed from the Eligible Cloud Services on 31 Mar 2026.
Layer 2 (lifecycle): SAP AI Core runs workloads, the generative AI hub (AI Core extended plan) gives governed model access and orchestration, SAP AI Launchpad is the UI.
Layer 3 (data & context): HANA Cloud Vector Engine, HANA Cloud Knowledge Graph Engine, SAP Datasphere and SAP Knowledge Graph ground the models.
The six capability labels (Access, Exploration & Development, Deployment & Delivery, Governance, Orchestration, Trust & Security) are features of layer 2, not separate products.
SAP Business AI Platform (May 2026) redraws the map as Build · Contextualize & Reason · Govern and absorbs AI Foundation.
SAP-RPT-1 in SAP AI Core is SAP's named alternative for DAR's classification and regression jobs.
The orchestration translation module is powered by SAP Translation Hub — a layer-1 service used inside layer 2.
Current certification: C_AIG_2604 (system-based, 3 h, 76 %); C_AIG_2412 on older slides is superseded.

Terms used on this page

AI Foundation: SAP's name for the AI layer of BTP (AI services, AI Core, generative AI hub, AI Launchpad and grounding data). A map, not a product you order; absorbed into SAP Business AI Platform in May 2026.
Eligible Cloud Services: SAP's list of cloud services that can be ordered or renewed. Removal means no renewal after the current subscription term, with maintenance until that term ends.
Generative AI hub: Capability of SAP AI Core and SAP AI Launchpad (extended plan) giving governed access to foundation models, orchestration, prompt registry and grounding.
SAP AI Launchpad: SaaS user interface to manage AI scenarios, executions, deployments and metrics across AI runtimes; hosts the generative AI hub screens.
Resource group: Isolation unit inside an SAP AI Core tenant, passed as the AI-Resource-Group header; deployments, secrets and quotas are scoped to it.
SAP-RPT-1: SAP's relational pre-trained transformer for tabular predictions (classification, regression) by in-context learning, offered in the generative AI hub; versions 1.5 and 1.6 released in 2026.
Knowledge Graph Engine: RDF triple store with SPARQL inside SAP HANA Cloud, for graphs you build — distinct from the SAP-authored SAP Knowledge Graph.
SAP Business AI Platform: Umbrella announced at Sapphire (May 2026) unifying SAP BTP, SAP Business Data Cloud and AI Foundation into Build, Contextualize & Reason and Govern layers.

Sources

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