As enterprises move from copilots to agentic AI, they are no longer constrained by model selection; rather, they are limited by governed activation of business data. SAP’s planned acquisitions of Dremio and Prior Labs signal an effort to position SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC) as an AI data control plane. With these arrows in the SAP quiver, customers can unify SAP and non‑SAP data and embed structured decision intelligence into operational workflows. This can accelerate execution for SAP‑centric customers while increasing data gravity, lock‑in, and governance stakes for mixed estates.

What SAP Announced — And Why It Matters Now

As AI systems begin to act on core business data, weaknesses in data integration, semantics, and governance become the primary blockers to scale. SAP’s planned acquisitions shift the focus from incremental AI features to governed data access and structured decision intelligence. These acquisitions matter because SAP can operationalize these capabilities via:

  • Unified and governed access to SAP and non‑SAP data. The planned acquisition of Dremio is intended to expand SAP BDC’s ability to combine SAP and non‑SAP data for analytical and AI workloads in real time. SAP states that SAP BDC will become an Apache Iceberg‑native enterprise lakehouse, enabling SAP and non‑SAP data to coexist on an open foundation and supported by a universal open catalog for shared meaning and lineage.
  • Structured decision intelligence for enterprise execution. The planned acquisition of Prior Labs targets AI purpose‑built for structured business data. SAP states that tabular foundation models will follow a direct path to productization across SAP AI Core, SAP BDC, and the agentic layer with Joule, enabling in‑context learning and instant predictions as part of enterprise AI workflows.

Implications For Technology Leaders

SAP’s acquisitions don’t affect all customers equally; the trade‑offs depend on how central SAP is to the data estate and AI stack. While the opportunity for enterprises is greater coherence for agentic AI, the risk is that SAP BDC becomes a focal point for control. As that control extends to data access and AI execution, SAP will gain pricing leverage across data, AI, and governance services. Some potential outcomes data and AI leaders should monitor include:

  • Architectural gravity hardens for SAP‑centric customers. SAP is positioning SAP BDC as the environment where SAP and non‑SAP data are unified and governed through shared semantics and decision logic. This can accelerate agentic AI by simplifying context and governance, with the trade‑off that semantics, lineage, and access control increasingly sit inside SAP’s platform.
  • Non‑SAP Dremio customers lose platform neutrality. Dremio’s roadmap is now tightly coupled to SAP BDC and its Iceberg‑native, catalog‑driven architecture, raising questions about long‑term ecosystem optimization outside SAP’s control plane.
  • Prior Labs users retain openness — but integration bears watching. SAP plans to operate Prior Labs independently and continue its open approach while also outlining a direct path to productization across SAP AI Core, SAP BDC, and Joule. Customers should watch how openness, governance, and commercial alignment evolve as tabular foundation models move into production.
  • Snowflake and Databricks customers face rising overlap risk. Previously, SAP positioned SAP Snowflake as a solution extension and SAP Databricks as a first‑party service within SAP BDC. The Dremio acquisition strengthens SAP’s own lakehouse and catalog foundation, increasing the risk of architectural overlap and duplicated spend unless workload boundaries are defined.

What Technology Leaders Should Do Next

SAP’s announcements do not warrant a call to replatform, but they do mark an architectural inflection point. Leaders need to be aware of future cost/pricing implications. The next 12–24 months are a window to make deliberate choices before agentic AI embeds those choices into systems of work.

  • Separate near‑term enablement from long‑term control‑plane commitments. Treat early adoption decisions as provisional while semantics, governance, and agentic workflows mature.
  • Decide explicitly where authoritative semantics and governance will live. Open formats reduce friction, but they don’t remove the need for a single authority for meaning, policy enforcement, lineage, and cost controls.
  • Design for portability to preserve leverage. Avoid deep entanglement of semantics, governance logic, and agent behavior in a single proprietary control plane unless that dependency is intentional.

Bottom Line

Don’t evaluate SAP’s moves as two acquisitions. Evaluate them as a coordinated claim on your enterprise AI data control plane. Whether this delivers durable value or deepens dependency will depend on execution — and on how intentionally technology leaders constrain control, preserve portability, and retain leverage as agentic AI moves from insight to execution.

Forrester Take: SAP’s Dremio And Prior Labs Moves Recenter AI Around Data Control

SAP’s planned acquisitions of Dremio and Prior Labs reflect a broader shift in enterprise AI from model competition to data control. As SAP BDC becomes a focal point for governing data access and structured decision intelligence, AI execution can accelerate — but so can platform gravity and pricing leverage. Technology leaders should decide deliberately where they want that control to reside before agentic AI embeds it by default.

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