SAP launches collaborative AI agents, adds Knowledge Graph

SAP’s promised collaboration between its AI copilot, Joule, and other agents will become reality in the fourth quarter of 2024, the company announced at its 2024 TechEd conference Tuesday.

The company first discussed the new functionality at its Sapphire conference in June, announcing that Joule would offer an integration with Microsoft Copilot enabling users to, for example, query their Outlook calendar from Joule.

At TechEd, SAP said that Joule will include multiple autonomous AI agents, each expert in a particular function, that will collaborate to execute complex workflows.

“We are infusing Joule with multiple autonomous AI agents that will combine their expertise across the business functions to collaboratively accomplish complex workflows,” said Muhammad Alam, head of product engineering at SAP, during a media briefing. “This will free workers to collaborate in areas where human ingenuity is best suited.”

But, noted Walter Sun, global head of AI at SAP, in an interview, there is always a human in the loop.

“One analogy we talk about is, if you think of these as musicians, each of these expert agents can play an instrument and they’re trained to do that. And Joule, which is a copilot, is a conductor of this orchestra to create music that’s beautiful to hear or listen to. And then the humans are the composers,” Sun said.

“The humans are ones that communicate with Joule, and by virtue of that, can actually make the request necessary and Joule, through the help of the AI expert agents, will complete the task,” he said.

Managing disputes

At the conference, SAP introduced two initial collaborative agent use cases for the finance sector: dispute management and financial accounting.

Dispute management will use autonomous AI agents to analyze and resolve situations such as incorrect or missing invoices, unapplied credits, or denied or duplicate payments, while the financial accounting use case will use autonomous AI agents to automate tasks such as bill payments, invoice processing, and ledger updates. They will also take care of errors or inconsistencies that occur.

From the first quarter of 2025, SAP said, developers will be able to create their own autonomous AI agents to further extend Joule.

SAP also announced that Joule is coming to more of its products. By the end of this year, it will be available in SAP HANA Cloud, SAP LeanIX, SAP Sales Cloud, SAP Signavio, and to all S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition customers. Early next year it will hit SAP Service Cloud and SAP Concur.

In addition, SAP said, by the end of March several autonomous AI use cases will be added to its supply chain portfolio.

Look under the hood

However, Scott Bickley, research practice lead at Info-Tech Research Group, is dubious. “SAP end users are expected to trust that Joule can magically create a series of agents (bots) and string together activities in a cogent manner, resulting in cohesive business workflows,” he said. “SAP customers must look under the hood here: What data structure is required? What level of complexity can this engine handle without error? How standardized does your process need to be for this to work?”

He also has questions about the two use cases being unveiled, noting that the announcement is short on details. “What prerequisites are required to deploy these autonomous workflows? What are the limitations? At what scale do they provide a positive ROI?” he asked. “And that is the real question: Assuming these solutions are not error-prone disasters lying in wait, what does it cost me to run an agentic workflow? A premium-level subscription plus an abstract method of consumption-based licensing leaves this analyst wanting a lot more than SAP’s AI cost calculator to soothe my nerves.”

He noted that it’s not easy for enterprises to downgrade from a Premium subscription tier for S/4HANA once they upgrade, so customers should negotiate flexibility into their SAP cloud agreements. “If they balk…ask yourself ‘Why?’” he said.

Knowledge Graph

SAP also unveiled SAP Knowledge Graph, a new solution that SAP’s Alam said “will unlock the full value of SAP data by connecting it with the rich business context captured in SAP applications.”

“SAP Knowledge Graph grounds AI in specific SAP Business semantics and their interrelationships, which reduces the risk of inaccurate and irrelevant results and makes it easier for organizations to build intelligent applications and leverage generative AI more effectively,” he said. “By offering ready to use relationships between business entities like purchase orders, invoices and customers, the service significantly reduces the complexity of manual data modeling.”

The Knowledge Graph, Sun added, can determine relationships between business objects, helping users understand what may be different terminology for the same thing in different applications.

Bickley has questions about this product too.

“The Knowledge Graph capabilities claim to provide a grounding mechanism for the AI overlay, which should provide a more reliable set of AI outputs,” he said. “Claims such as these must be verified. For example, Salesforce has set the bar high for taking Responsible AI seriously. Yet Slack [which is owned by Salesforce] was recently made the poster child for a ‘prompt injection’ attack that resulted in Disney dumping the product wholesale. Many of SAP’s AI claims predate future product releases with unverifiable business results.  Announcing graph databases and Monte Carlo analysis in SAP Analytics Cloud shows they are playing catchup.”

Integration Suite updates

SAP is introducing new capabilities to its integration platform-as-a-service, Integration Suite, including generative AI, updated features, and a new licensing option.

SAP Integration Suite, Starter Edition, will be available by the end of 2024 and offer “an unlimited number of prepackaged SAP integrations and fixed number of customizable integrations for GROW with SAP and SAP SuccessFactors customers,” the company said. It will include unlimited usage of SAP — SAP standard integration flows provided By SAP on its Business Accelerator Hub, as well as ten custom “iflows” — which can be either created from scratch or third-party integrations from Business Accelerator Hub.

In addition, SAP announced that a series of new non-SAP integrations, including those for Anaplan, Coupa, HubSpot, NetSuite ERP, and Snowflake, will join the approximately 170 existing adaptors in the Business Accelerator Hub.

Also by year-end, SAP will add capabilities to detects and respond to real time data and process changes, and an update to the migration tool will allow for mass migration of integration scenarios from SAP Process Orchestration to SAP Integration Suite.

AI will enter the mix in the first half of 2025, offering developers suggestions to help them optimize their integration scripts.