SAP goes all-in on agentic AI at SAP Sapphire

SAP is fully committed to agentic AI as it seeks to reimagine the future of enterprise applications. At its annual SAP Sapphire conference today in Orlando, Florida, the ERP software titan debuted a slew of new innovations, including AI Foundation, which it calls the AI operating system for SAP business AI, as well as new AI agents across the SAP Business Suite, and an omnipresent Joule copilot that’ll accompany and support users as they move across applications.

“SAP started off slow in this space,” says Scott Bickley, advisory fellow at the Info-Tech Research Group. “However, their broader and integrated vision is now coming into focus, and they’re poised to benefit from the clean core approach to RISE and GROW over the past few years. Through holistic integration of the S/4 core, acquisitions such as Lean IX and WalkMe, and the introduction of a well-thought-out AI ecosystem, SAP is delivering on its promise of AI first and AI everywhere.”

AI Foundation

AI Foundation brings together a gen AI hub, Joule Studio, and SAP Knowledge Graph capabilities to give developers tools to guild, extend, and run custom AI solutions and agents at scale.

AI hub leverages technology SAP acquired with enterprise architecture management (EAM) software provider LeanIX in November 2023 to provide centralized inventory and governance for AI agents. Customers can use it to map AI agents to their business capabilities and make it easier to identify additional opportunities to optimize the business with agents. SAP said it plans to make AI hub generally available in Q4 2025.

Joule Studio, which helps developers build custom AI, is part of SAP Build. The company said it will add a new Joule skill builder to create, deploy, monitor, and manage custom Joule skills, and plans to make the skill builder generally available in Q3 2025. The company also plans to add low-code and no-code capabilities to create custom AI agents in Q4 2025.

SAP Knowledge Graph is a database designed to power Joule’s ability to provide accurate answers and allow users to explore data directly within Joule. It’s also used to represent the relationships between objects, events, situations, and concepts in the knowledge base. SAP plans to make support for Knowledge Graph generally available for SAP Cloud ERP and Business Data Cloud by Q3 2025, and plans to add support for other lines of business in the future.

“SAP Knowledge Graph should prove beneficial in grounding AI actions and delivering more accurate, relevant results via the graph’s semantic capabilities applied across the SAP data ecosystem spanning LOBs, using Joule as the conduit,” Bickley says.

AI Foundation also includes a tabular AI service based on the SAP Foundation Model that’s intended to make it easier to leverage structured, tabular data for predictive insights. SAP plans to make the service generally available in H2 2025.

Plus, SAP is adding a prompt optimizer to AI Foundation that aims to automatically generate prompts customized for any LLM or specific use case requirement. SAP said it can eliminate the need for prompt engineering and enables customers to immediately leverage new models without manual testing and conversion. SAP is running a limited customer release program for customers now and plans general availability later this year.

New Joule agents for SAP Business Suite

SAP has partnered with industry leaders to create an ecosystem of interoperable Joule agents to execute end-to-end processes. The new Joule agents are powered by SAP Business Data Cloud and have the ability to access enterprise data across both SAP and non-SAP systems.

SAP plans to introduce two new sales and order management agents in Q2 2025: Quote Creation Agent to transform email quote requests into read-to-send quotes; and Catalog Optimization Agent to maintain and optimize product data. The company will also introduce three new supply chain agents in Q4 2025: Maintenance Planner Agent, which uses real-time data to suggest adjustments in maintenance schedules; Shop Floor Supervisor Agent, which minimizes shop floor disruptions by accessing disruption details, assessing their impact, and then recommending production rescheduling and orchestrating stock; and Field Service Dispatcher Agent, which uses real-time resource availability information to schedule and optimize service orders.

Then SAP plans to add an additional three new spend management agents in Q4 this year: Meeting Location Planner Agent that can plan and estimate travel costs, identify central locations, source accommodations, and find optimal flight times and fares; Expense Report Validation Agent, which leverages alerts and guided experiences to fix issues based on past data, company policy, and patterns to reduce report rejections and resubmissions; and Sourcing Agent, which creates tailored sourcing events using sourcing event requests, past event data, and supplier information.

In addition, SAP will debut two new agents for finance operations automation in Q3 2025: Dispute Resolution Agent, which uses dispute details and relevant business records to validate cases and propose solutions; and Accounts Receivables Agent that analyzes data related to overdue receivables to follow up with customers.

Finally, in Q4 2025, SAP plans to introduce Performance Agent, a new HR agent to provide managers with data-driven insights ahead of conversations with employees.

“SAP is making big bets and even bigger promises with its announcement of expanded Joule Agents,” Bickley says. “From a customer perspective, the expectation is clear: at the very least, these agents need to drive meaningful improvements in process efficiency. However, SAP has promised more, claiming that advanced reasoning capabilities will enable the ability to autonomously make critical business decisions, and that the associated process changes with a human in the loop. There are countless use cases for AI agents that can operate across lines of business, tap into vast pools of data, and handle tasks that typically require human intervention. But customers paying a premium for these capabilities will expect real, measurable value in return.”

Making Joule omnipresent

Updates to SAP’s Joule copilot will make the AI copilot so-called omnipresent. Joule will be able to follow users through all the systems they use during the workday, even outside the SAP Business Suite, to help them find data, provide them with insights, and streamline workflows.

A new action bar for Joule will be available by Q3 2025, which leverages technology from SAP’s acquisition of WalkMe (completed in September 2024) to study user behavior and the business context within any cloud application to provide insights, support, and recommendations without prompting.

SAP specifically called out improved integration with Microsoft 365 Copilot. Joint customers will be able to leverage Joule within 365 Copilot in Q2 2025, and the partners will make bi-directional integration generally available by Q3 2025.

“The direction a lot of agents are going is akin to what we see in the Iron Man movies: a companion that aids you — artificial and human thinkers collaborating with each other,” says Daniel Yu, chief marketing officer of SAP data and analytics. “Whether you’re doing data entry on your ERP system, some supply chain tasks, or maintenance on parts, the Joule agent will learn from real-time data you have and help you optimize the task at hand.”

New Joule integrations

New planned Joule integrations by Q3 2025 include:

• SAP Ariba Procurement to retrieve supplier bids, display past purchases and approvers, and give access to supplier information.
• SAP Fieldglass to search for and execute reports in natural language. It’ll also use conversational context to recommend job postings and statements of work templates.
• SAP Signavio to process best-practice recommendations, analyze as-is processes, and improve recommendations.

SAP is also making Joule available in SAP Service Cloud, SAP Service Management, and SAP Analytics Cloud. And by the end of 2025, it plans to integrate Joule with SAP Field Service Management for AI-assisted scheduling and dispatching; and SAP Integrated Business Planning for improved supply planning. Available now, however, is Joule in SAP BTP Cockpit to ask questions about SAP BTP resources and services, but SAP Mobile Start will be generally available within SAP SuccessFactors Mobile and SAP Sales Cloud Mobile by the end of Q2 2025.

SAP also announced new core capabilities for Joule either available now or in Q3 this year, including:

• Usage metrics dashboard to show Joule usage by scenario and capability.
• Support for streaming responses to display longer responses as they’re generated in real-time.
• Conversation threads to help manage multiple parallel conversations with extended inactive timeouts.
• Conversation insights to collect and aggregate user feedback on Joule responses.
• Context-aware conversational search that can filter answers based on criteria like country, role, or organizational unit.
• Expanded language support to make Joule usable by non-English speakers, currently available in 11 languages.

“Through holistic integration of the S/4 core, acquisitions such as LeanIX and WalkMe, and the introduction of a well-thought-out AI ecosystem, SAP is delivering on its promise of AI first and AI everywhere,” says Bickley. “While the transition from legacy and highly customized ERP environments has proved painful for many existing SAP customers, application development should be vastly improved through the provision of a unified view of business data and its relationships, reducing the need for manual data modeling.”