Why SAP Is Partnering With the Nonprofit That Helped Build the Open Internet

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Enterprise data has a trust problem. As AI agents begin making business decisions autonomously, that problem is about to get very expensive. To solve this, SAP is enlisting the help of the Open Data Institute (ODI), a nonprofit think tank founded by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, dedicated to advancing trust in data. The goal: give businesses data that is not only rich in business context but also accurate, governed, and authorized enough for AI to act on—no human review required.

“AI will define enterprise competitiveness for the next decade, but competitive advantage doesn’t come from AI models alone. It comes from the quality, governance, and autonomy of the data beneath them,” Louise Burke, ODI’s chief executive, says in a release. “Most organizations are sitting on data that simply isn’t ready for AI, and the consequences of getting this wrong, from biased outputs to regulatory non-compliance, are significant.”

The partnership has three concrete outputs: an independent governance structure for certifying data as AI-ready, new research to guide CIOs and CDOs through the process, and a cross-industry community of customers, partners, and policymakers tasked with building open standards, sharing best practices, and influencing research priorities.

As Irfan Khan, SAP’s president and chief product officer, explains to The AI Economy, businesses today have adopted a human-in-the-middle approach in which humans look at data and determine which answer is right or wrong. Human beings were always the safeguard. However, as automation continues to scale alongside the adoption of an agentic workforce, there needs to be a better way forward.

“Data has to have the means, and the user, agent, or the service needs to be able to associate a distinction between how accurate and reliable this data is, and that’s a very difficult problem to solve for precisely because we don’t know the reliability of the data,” he states.

The approach may be sound in theory, but convincing customers that it isn’t simply SAP writing rules that benefit SAP may prove harder to sell. This is where ODI fits in—its independence and Berners-Lee’s credibility provide SAP with the cover it needs to prove this is all for the customer, not itself. “ODI gives a framework and a partnership, from an SAP point of view, to work with a body that has institutionalized the value of mega trends like the internet,” Khan remarks. “Tim Berners-Lee, who’s one of the serving members of ODI, has a track record of taking something from conception to wide-scale everyday usage, which is now an inseparable part of our lives.” He goes on to add that this partnership aims to “achieve the ambition of having ready-built AI data with the preserved business context to accelerate the means of the end customer.”

Tech providers like SAP, Snowflake, Salesforce, Oracle, and Microsoft have spent years helping customers get more from their data, more so now in the AI era. But Khan argues that most organizations are only scratching the surface. They are only exposed to data provided through fixed dashboards, standard reports, and prebuilt queries, all designed to answer specific, known questions. These are what he calls “deterministic” systems: run the same query, get the same answer. It’s certainly reliable, but not for the open-ended, unpredictable demands of AI.

The future of data, Khan contends, isn’t about having more of it—it’s about understanding it well enough to trust what it’s telling you. “The winners in this market right now who really are able to provide that business context are going to be the ones that can do it with a vast selection of…SAP and non-SAP data, and be able to do so in a precise way, in a very short time period, where latency in itself is not a barrier to being able to use the data.”

He points out that SAP’s ethos is to improve people’s lives and make the world run better, and that making things all about SAP would violate that principle. In other words, the company wants to engage in coalition building. To that end, Khan refers to the ODI tie-up as a “catalyst” for bringing a community together and operating beyond “the boundary of a vendor and talking more openly and collaboratively in terms of going across from the infrastructure layer,” whether it’s a hyperscaler or another vendor like Salesforce or Oracle. “Our goal is to provide a single thread that pieces together all of the different…counterparties that would necessarily need to be worked together where, historically, they probably wouldn’t have an alliance desire or the need to do that.”

Khan acknowledges the tension business leaders face—quarterly revenue pressure pulling hard against long-term strategic investment. His argument, however, is that in an increasingly volatile world where geopolitical shifts can upend supply chains overnight, sound decisions simply can’t be made on the spot. Organizations need their data to already have the right business context. That, ultimately, is what SAP and ODI are building toward.

Featured Image: SAP's logo appears on the side of an office building. Credit: SAP