Joanna Milliken on SAP Engagement Cloud: “This Isn’t About a New Name”
The CEO of SAP Engagement Cloud on why six years of integration changes what marketing can do
SAP Engagement Cloud is six years in the making. The solution, until recently known as SAP Emarsys, is now fully embedded within SAP’s operational stack, sitting on the same data that runs supply chains, tracks inventory and powers ERP systems across some of the world’s largest enterprises. Joanna Milliken, its CEO, is clear that the name change is the least interesting part of the announcement.
“From my experience seeing competing systems internally over who’s the primary marketing solution is just a waste of time and energy,” she told The Media Stack.
What the move represents, in Milliken’s account, is six years of integration finally delivering something structural. SAP Engagement Cloud now sits directly on SAP’s operational data, the same ERP data that tracks inventory, manages supply chains and runs procurement across some of the world’s largest enterprises. This is not an API connection or a data feed. The product and the operational layer are, in her words, the same core.
“Engagement decisions are increasingly dependent on business context, service issues, inventory levels, supply chain breakdowns happening locally. What SAP Engagement Cloud represents is our ability to combine those proven omnichannel capabilities with SAP operational data and the AI platform. That’s what’s different.”
What existing customers actually see
For day-to-day campaign users, the change is incremental for now. The segmentation tools, channel capabilities and automation are the same.
“They’re going to see their job as generally the same — they’ll still segment, they can still hit the send button,” Milliken said.
“But that’s going to change dramatically over time.”
At the CMO level, the proposition is more immediate. Milliken’s argument is that most large brands currently run separate engagement systems for consumers, distributors, retailers and partners. Those systems share almost nothing despite drawing on the same product data, the same compliance requirements, and the same brand guardrails. She used Wella as an example. A product launch would typically run a consumer campaign in parallel with entirely separate communications to retail and distributor networks: launch kits, promotional calendars, and demand alerts.
“Right now, that’s coordinated across different departments, different tools. If there’s a common view across all of those, the data is the same, the tools carry the same thread, you get a much more holistic analysis of your business. You can bring it all together in one solution.”
For brands already running SAP’s ERP platform, the integration is direct: product IDs, inventory positions and supply chain signals connect without heavy configuration. For those outside the SAP ecosystem, Milliken’s case rests on the same underlying problem.
“Being able to communicate to all of your audiences with the same toolset, the same data, with the same IT teams doing the same product catalogue ingestion, that reduces complexity. And brands need to flex with their business. You shouldn’t have to go and buy a new piece of technology every time your model changes.”
The gap SAP’s own research exposes
The announcement arrived alongside new research that gives Milliken’s positioning some external grounding. Conducted among 10,000 consumers and 4,800 executive leaders globally, the study found that only 22% of brands believe they have a problem with delivering a seamless customer experience, while 82% of consumers report dissatisfaction. SAP CMO Sara Richter, presenting the findings at the company’s Engage online event, called it the engagement divide.
Mark Ritson, renowned marketing professor and founder of the Mini MBA in Marketing, spoke at the Engage event and put the gap in context. He cited Bain research showing that 80% of brands believed they were delivering superior customer experience, while only 8% of customers agreed.
“The SAP report is the update a decade on,” he said. “We’re not getting any better.”
Ritson’s diagnosis maps directly onto what Milliken describes as the problem her solution addresses. The gap, he argued, is not primarily a technology failure. It is organisational: siloed teams, fragmented data, and a marketing function that cannot see beyond its own systems. The SAP research found that only 40% of decision-makers believe their departments are truly coordinated on customer experience. Data compounds the problem: 60% of companies have what the report terms “dark data” they cannot use, and two-thirds remain dependent on third-party rather than first-party data pools.
“You need to engage with your consumers, your distributors, your retailers, your partners, your employees. Right now, that engagement is very fragmented, in different systems, becoming unnecessarily complex when all of it should sit on top of the same business data, the same product data, the same compliance and guardrails,” Milliken said.
Loyalty: why discounts are no longer enough
SAP also published an updated Omnichannel Guide to Retention and Loyalty alongside the Engage event, drawing on four years of Customer Loyalty Index data from surveys of more than 10,000 consumers across the US, UK, Australia and Germany. The numbers sit awkwardly alongside the way most brands still spend their retention budgets.
The report identifies five distinct types of customer loyalty — from incentivised loyalty built on discounts and points, through inherited and silent loyalty, to ethical and true loyalty at the far end. The further along that spectrum a brand can move its customers, the better the commercial outcomes.
The trend data across 2021 to 2024 makes the direction clear. Incentive-driven loyalty has remained broadly flat. Experience-led true loyalty has grown by six percentage points; ethical loyalty, driven by a brand’s stance on social and environmental issues, by seven percentage points. The conclusion is straightforward: discount and points-based retention programmes are delivering diminishing returns, while the investment case for experience-led engagement is getting stronger.
The research on what drives and damages loyalty is equally pointed. High-quality products top the list of positives at 57%. On the negative side, irresponsible data handling is cited by 32% of consumers as damaging loyalty, and making it harder to reach a human by 24%, both live risks for brands deploying AI-driven automation without the operational data infrastructure to make it feel personal.
It is a tension Milliken acknowledges directly in her AI roadmap: the engagement agent she is building is designed to scale personalisation, not replace the human judgement that sets the guardrails around it. The loyalty data suggests that distinction will matter to customers.
The AI agent Milliken is building for 2026
Through 2025, SAP built out AI capabilities across segmentation, analytics and content generation within the platform. Milliken’s roadmap for the first half of 2026 focuses on bringing those pieces together as an engagement agent: a system that works alongside the marketer to produce audience selections, channel mixes, and content approaches from a stated goal, with the marketer setting the business rules and guardrails.
“You put in your goal at the top, it generates the right content, the right audience, the right business logic, the right channels — and then you can manipulate it, and it continuously does that. We have all those pieces and parts. You’ll start to see that come together over the summer.”
Ritson’s argument at the Engage event ran in the same direction. The greater value of AI in customer engagement, he said, lies not in front-end features consumers can see but in the back end, predictive segmentation, operational signals that feed real-time decisions, and churn detection before it becomes churn.
“The less we talk about AI and the more we do AI, the better our engagement becomes.”
Six years after SAP acquired Emarsys, Milliken’s case is that the platform is now genuinely different from the one it acquired: not a mid-market direct-to-consumer tool sitting within a larger organisation, but the engagement layer for the enterprise data beneath it. Whether that framing lands with marketing teams used to working in their own systems is the next test.
