Sankara Narayanan has been appointed as Senior Vice President and Head of Product at SAP, where he will lead product engineering and design initiatives across SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) Build solutions.
In his new role, Narayanan will focus on driving AI-powered innovation across Joule Studio, Joule Work, enterprise application development, automation platforms, and workflow solutions as SAP continues expanding its enterprise AI and cloud platform ecosystem.
He brings more than two decades of global leadership experience spanning cloud engineering, enterprise software, artificial intelligence, conversational AI, automation platforms, and large-scale product development.
Prior to joining SAP, Narayanan held multiple engineering leadership positions at Microsoft, most recently serving as Director of Engineering. During his tenure, he led initiatives related to Copilot Studio, AI agent platforms, conversational AI systems, and enterprise AI-powered productivity solutions.
Before Microsoft, he served as Vice President of Engineering and Global Head of Cloud Engineering at Rakuten, where he contributed to building large-scale cloud-native platforms and enterprise infrastructure solutions.
At SAP, Narayanan will oversee product engineering, user experience, and platform innovation for several strategic BTP Build initiatives. His responsibilities include driving adoption, improving enterprise application experiences, and strengthening integration of SAP’s AI capabilities across development, automation, and enterprise workflow platforms.
SAP has been aggressively expanding its Business AI portfolio through SAP Business Technology Platform, SAP S/4HANA Cloud, and Joule AI initiatives as enterprises globally accelerate investments in AI-enabled automation, intelligent business applications, and cloud-native enterprise systems.
The appointment reflects SAP’s continued focus on strengthening leadership across enterprise AI, automation, and platform engineering as organizations increasingly adopt generative AI, AI agents, workflow automation, and intelligent enterprise technologies to improve productivity and operational efficiency.
Narayanan is also associated with the Industrial Internet Consortium, reflecting his broader involvement in enterprise technology, cloud innovation, and industrial digital transformation initiatives.
The move comes amid growing global competition among enterprise software providers to build AI-native business platforms capable of supporting autonomous workflows, intelligent automation, and next-generation enterprise application development.
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