Raghu Banda
Sr. Director - Enterprise Architect AI Advisor · SAP America
Raghu Banda is a Senior Director and Enterprise Architect Advisor at SAP, driving AI product strategy and business transformation across SAP’s global customer base. With over 25 years of experience in engineering, product leadership, and enterprise architecture, Raghu plays a key role in embedding AI into SAP’s Business Suite—helping customers realize intelligent, adaptive enterprises. Since joining SAP in 2001, he has contributed to foundational SAP solutions in SRM, Procurement, Analytics, and Cloud ERP, and now focuses on integrating generative and agentic AI into architecture models and transformation roadmaps. Raghu collaborates closely with C-level leaders to align enterprise architecture with AI-first principles, leveraging tools like SAP Joule, Knowledge Graphs, and SAP BTP. A recognized thought leader, Raghu hosts the XTraw AI podcast, regularly engages in keynote sessions at global forums, and has authored two books including Building Social Equity with AI. His work bridges strategy and execution—guiding enterprises in scaling AI innovation with governance, clean core principles, and SAP-led reference architectures. Early in his career, Raghu contributed to distributed systems engineering and AI research projects with the professors of Indian Institute of Science (IISc), grounding his future-forward thinking in deep technical expertise. He continues to champion the evolution of Enterprise Architecture as the operating system for AI-powered business transformation.
View speaker profile →About This Session
There is a direct line between your data architecture decisions today and whether AI will work at scale tomorrow. Organisations that treat data migration as a lift-and-shift exercise and data architecture as a downstream concern are building the exact fragmentation that makes agents hallucinate, predictions fail, and governance collapse.
This session connects two journeys that most organisations run in parallel but should be architecting together: Cloud ERP transformation and AI enablement. Using SAP Business Data Cloud as the architectural foundation, you'll see how to design a data layer that serves both — zero-copy access across SAP and non-SAP systems (via Dremio and Apache Iceberg), unified entity truth (via Reltio), and the semantic layer that gives agents the context to reason correctly rather than just retrieve data.
We cover the practical architecture: BDC Connect for real-time data federation, BW modernisation paths, the role of the data architect in an AI-native landscape, and how Clean Core principles directly enable (rather than slow down) AI adoption. The session includes customer perspectives on how organisations are making these decisions in practice — balancing urgency, legacy complexity, and the need to build foundations that compound over time.
What You'll Learn
- Understand why data architecture for Cloud ERP and data architecture for AI are the same problem — and should be solved together
- Learn the SAP Business Data Cloud architecture: zero-copy federation, Apache Iceberg, BDC Connect, and how they eliminate unnecessary data movement
- Understand how Reltio provides entity truth — resolving the ambiguity that causes agents to reason incorrectly across systems
- See how Clean Core principles accelerate AI readiness rather than compete with it for priority
- Learn from customer examples: practical decisions made in the first 6-12 months of combined ERP and AI transformation
Date & Time
Tue, 17 Nov 2026 · 4:30 PM – 5:10 PM
Room
Harlekin
Venue
Tivoli Hotel & Congress Center
Address
Arni Magnussons Gade 2, 1577 København, Denmark
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