SAP Analytics Cloud's Q3 2026 release puts artificial intelligence and simulation directly inside the story canvas and planning process, instead of adding another module to switch into. Here's what's new for finance teams already working in SAC, and what it means for how you plan, report, and export your data.
SAP Analytics Cloud's AI moves into the places you already work
Two releases earlier, SAP Analytics Cloud focused on live connectivity and planning flexibility. Q3 2026 shifts the spotlight to intelligence itself, bringer AI directly into the story canvas and the planning process rather than building it into a separate module.
Just Ask in SAC understands fiscal time and shows its work
Just Ask, SAC's natural-language query feature, gets one of its biggest upgrades yet. You can now ask questions using fiscal and calendar time expressions. Such as, "cost of goods sold for P01 2025" or "sales by week for Q2". SAC resolves them against the correct time hierarchy automatically. Dynamic time filters like "YTD", "last year" or "previous three quarters" now update their results as time moves forward, so a saved query stays current instead of going stale.
Two smaller additions make the results easier to trust:
- Every answer now comes with an AI-generated explanation, showing which measures, dimensions, filters, and variables it recognized in your question.
- For SAP Datasphere models, dimension member suggestions appear inline as you type, so you do not need to know the exact member names in advance.
Together, these changes lower the barrier to self-service reporting: business users can ask sharper, time-aware questions in plain language, see exactly how SAC interpreted them, and stop waiting on a modeler to build the right view first.
AI-assisted prompt insights turn a table into a conversation
Story design gets its own new AI entry point: the AI-assisted prompt insights widget. Drop it into a story, type a natural-language prompt, and SAC generates data-back business insights straight from the table beneath it. Combining your planning data with real-time web search in one response.
SAP Analytics Cloud's compass simulation now lives inside your stories
Compass, SAC's simulation-based planning capability, becomes part of the story itself in Q3 2026. A new Compass widget lets story designers embed risk simulation results directly alongside their tables and charts, so reviewing values next to their risks no longer means switching back and forth between a story and a separate module. The simulations themselves also get more realistic. Driver ranges can now be built from predictive time series forecasts, so a simulation is grounded in historical patterns instead of a manually estimated best guess.
The result: a simulation that fits inside the story a planner is already reviewing, built on ranges the data itself suggests.
Sharper SAC visuals and a cleaner Excel exports
Three new chart types: Gauge, Funnel, and Sankey
SAC's chart library, already expanded with Area and Pareto charts earlier this year, grows again with three additions:
- Gauge charts: show the performance of a single KPI at a glance
- Funnel charts: visualize how data narrows as it moves through sequential stages
- Sankey charts: show how quantities flow from one point to another
A set of ready-to-use custom charts is also available for building visualizations without any coding, though this is limited to SAC tenants that are part of a BDC formation and is not available on SAC Enterprise tenants. Each new chart type covers a visualization gap the existing library did not handle well, giving story designers a more precise way to match a chart to the story it needs to tell.
Table exports keep their true Excel formatting
A smaller but genuinely useful change: when exporting a table to Excel with formatting enabled, you can now choose Format as true value type, instead of Format as general. That preserves real excel value types, currency, percentages, scale formats like thousands and millions, dates, times, decimals, and separators, instead of collapsing everything into text.
For finance teams who pull SAC data into excel for further analysis, this closes a gap that has been there for a while: what the story shows now matches what actually lands in the file.
Two quarters of connectivity and control groundwork have set up a release that's really about intelligence: smarter natural-language queries, AI-generated insights inside your stories, and Compass results embedded right where you're already looking. See what these updates could mean for your own SAC environment. Contact our SAP team through email.
