NTT DATA and Conduct Forge AI Alliance to Overhaul SAP Transformations

LONDON, UK – May 11, 2026 – NTT DATA Business Solutions, a global heavyweight in SAP integration, has announced a strategic partnership with the London-based startup Conduct, aiming to inject a powerful dose of artificial intelligence into the notoriously complex world of enterprise resource planning (ERP) transformations. The collaboration will embed Conduct's agentic AI platform across NTT DATA's global SAP delivery services, promising to accelerate and de-risk the journey to SAP S/4HANA for thousands of businesses worldwide.

The partnership marks a significant move to address a core challenge for modern enterprises: how to modernize legacy SAP systems without disrupting decades of embedded business logic. By combining NTT DATA's vast implementation experience with Conduct's cutting-edge AI, the alliance aims to provide a faster, more intelligent path through digital transformation, impacting operations from the United Kingdom and Germany to the United States and Brazil.

"Our customers are under increasing pressure to modernise their SAP landscapes in order to unlock the full potential of AI," said Norbert Rotter, CEO of NTT DATA Business Solutions, in a statement. "By partnering with Conduct, we are strengthening our ability to deliver scalable, AI-enabled SAP business process transformation."

The Engine Remodeling Enterprise IT

At the heart of the partnership lies Conduct's specialized technology: an AI platform built on what are known as 'AI agents' and a proprietary 'SAP context engine.' Unlike traditional AI models that simply respond to prompts, agentic AI systems are designed to act autonomously to achieve complex goals. In this context, Conduct's AI agents can interpret a high-level objective—such as analyzing a company's readiness for an S/4HANA migration—and then independently execute the necessary steps to complete the task.

The key to this capability is the SAP context engine. It delves into a company's entire SAP estate, creating a complete 'semantic understanding' of every custom object, workflow, and dependency. For companies that have spent years tailoring their SAP systems, this customization is often a source of immense complexity and risk during upgrades. Conduct's platform treats it not as a bug, but as a feature to be understood.

This AI-driven analysis automates what was previously a painstaking manual process. Teams can now run fit-gap analyses, compare custom code against SAP standard practices, and generate detailed functional specifications at a fraction of the time. This transforms the critical discovery phase of a project from a potential bottleneck into a source of speed and deep insight.

"The enterprises NTT DATA Business Solutions serves have built their operations on SAP systems that are deeply, meaningfully customised to how their businesses work," explained Jan Philipp Haas, CEO and Co-Founder of Conduct. "That customisation is not a problem to be eliminated but an asset that needs to be understood, preserved where it matters, and evolved intelligently. Conduct exists to make that possible at the pace and scale that AI now allows."

A Strategic Play in a Competitive Arena

The NTT DATA-Conduct alliance does not exist in a vacuum. The race to infuse AI into the enterprise software landscape is accelerating rapidly. SAP itself has declared an "AI-first" strategy, embedding its own generative AI copilot, Joule, across its entire application suite. Other major system integrators, including Accenture and Deloitte, are also heavily investing in AI capabilities and forming their own partnerships to enhance their SAP service offerings.

However, this partnership's structure offers a distinct competitive angle. It pairs the global reach and deep industry knowledge of NTT DATA—a $30+ billion services leader serving 75% of the Fortune Global 100—with the focused, specialized technology of an agile AI innovator. While larger players may build more generalized AI tools, Conduct's platform is purpose-built as an "AI operating system for enterprise IT," designed specifically to navigate the intricacies of the software change lifecycle.

This specialization appears to be a key differentiator, allowing the partnership to offer a solution that is not just an AI add-on but a fundamental change to the delivery model for SAP S/4HANA transformation, application management services (AMS), and change management.

From High Risk to High Confidence

The ultimate promise of this partnership is a shift from risk and uncertainty to speed and confidence. Large-scale ERP projects are infamous for running over budget and behind schedule. The complexity of understanding a legacy system, planning the migration, and testing the new environment creates countless points of failure. The joint offering aims to mitigate these risks directly.

While this partnership is new, evidence of Conduct's impact is already emerging. A separate strategic partnership announced between Conduct and Boston Consulting Group (BCG) earlier this month revealed tangible results from early adopters. According to that announcement, global leaders including Daimler Truck, Heidelberg Materials, and Fraport have used Conduct's platform to cut project costs by over 30%, save millions in annual maintenance, and ship new features months ahead of schedule.

These figures provide strong validation for the claims of accelerated execution and reduced risk. By giving project teams an immediate and complete understanding of their SAP landscape, decisions can be made with greater confidence and production risk falls sharply. For the large-scale programs NTT DATA specializes in, this represents a step-change in delivery.

Aligning with SAP's AI-First Future

This collaboration is perfectly timed to align with SAP's overarching strategy. SAP has made it clear that its future is built on AI and a cohesive, integrated suite of cloud applications. However, it relies heavily on its vast partner ecosystem to help customers navigate this transition. Partners who can bring specialized expertise and innovative technology to the table are crucial for turning SAP's AI vision into a reality for customers on the ground.

The selection of Conduct by SAP's own executive leadership as one of a small number of AI partners to sponsor the upcoming SAP Sapphire 2026 conference in Orlando is a powerful endorsement. It signals that Conduct's approach is not only compatible with but also central to SAP's strategy for enabling an AI-powered enterprise.

As businesses worldwide look to modernize their core systems to compete in an AI-driven economy, the demand for smarter, faster, and safer transformation methods will only grow. By embedding agentic AI at the core of SAP delivery, NTT DATA Business Solutions and Conduct are betting they have found the formula to meet that demand, offering a glimpse into a future where enterprise transformation is driven by intelligence from day one.