SAP wants Joule to run business workflows, not just answer questions

SAP says it is ushering in a new era of agentic AI, one where agents don’t just learn a business, but help run it.

This week at its TechEd conference, the company is announcing new tools in its SAP Business AI Platform that will extend AI agents’ capabilities, give them richer, more enterprise-specific data and context, and beef up governance controls so they can be rolled out safely across enterprise workflows.

“There used to be a time where AI assistants or interfaces could do a couple queries, and you had to get the query more or less right,” SAP chief AI officer Jonathan von Rüden told CIO. “And then if you asked three, four questions, eventually it would say, ‘I can’t go that far.’ Now that constraint isn’t really there anymore.”

New orchestration layer

SAP has introduced new capabilities in its AI-driven workspace Joule Work and its AI no-code/pro-code agent building environment, Joule Studio.

Joule Studio will now be natively integrated with Joule Work, giving users a single build layer. They will be able to describe their intent, and the system will orchestrate the right agents, apps, and data. Joule Work is built on the SAP Business AI Platform, which provides context, data, and governance.

“Effectively, business users get a coding agent into their hands, but they don’t know it is one, so they come up with all kinds of very, very interesting use cases,” von Rüden said.

SAP has put a good deal of R&D effort into graduating from conversations to a generative UI to “step-by-step” replace classic UIs, he noted. “You don’t need those anymore, you can have them tailor made per person.”

A new orchestration layer in Joule Work will support more complex, multi-step workflows. Beyond working across SAP environments, agents will be able to plug into external systems, data, and tools via Modern Context Protocol (MCP) and Agent2Agent (A2A) Protocol.

Further, Joule Studio will be more tightly integrated with SAP Business Data Cloud so that builders can access various data products across SAP, and users across different teams will be able to collaborate on agents while customizing them to their different roles. These shared environments will have role-based access, and developers will be able to design and run n8n workflows, test pre-deployment in built-in sandboxes, and perform offline evaluations.

Governance, debugging tools

The company also announced that the SAP Knowledge Graph will now have the ability to pull data from both SAP and non-SAP sources, while interoperability tools will allow third-party agents to securely invoke Joule Agents through a governed gateway. This will enable safe collaboration between agents from different providers, SAP said.

A new SAP Integration Suite will provide tools that analyze bugs, flag anomalies, simplify schema setups, manage GitHub integrations, perform core Git operations, standardize communications, and automate processes across platforms like Gmail, Microsoft Excel, and Salesforce Service Cloud.

From a governance perspective, a new SAP Enterprise AI Gateway will consolidate authentication, policy enforcement, routing, monitoring, usage tracking, and auditing, giving users the ability to view and govern all traffic and interactions. Joule Studio also has new observability and administrative controls, and a new Governance Agent will help companies comply with the EU AI Act.

The Enterprise AI Gateway will bring “enterprise-grade governance to AI interactions” in one control plane, SAP said.

SAP is rolling out Joule Work and the various new Joule Studio features in phases, and general availability for SAP Enterprise AI Gateway and the new SAP Knowledge Graph capabilities are planned for Q1 2027.

Accessing hundreds of assistants for enterprise workflows

With Joule Work and Joule Studio, users can immediately customize a skill load, von Rüden said, and can easily build a reusable dashboard. “Now they have these standard backend connections to SAP.”

For instance, he explained, say a user wants to plan deliveries for the next six weeks. They can pull in data from Jira and GitHub, but also overlay that with data from project planning. “I crunch all of this up in completely natural language, and with out of the box UIs, I can see whether I can actually deliver on what I’ve planned over the next six weeks,” he said.

If a user likes something they co-designed with AI, they can tell it to persist that workflow as a skill. “I can share it back with other colleagues, and that becomes a very powerful workflow,” von Rüden said. “I’m not queuing for eight months in the IT backlog.”

With Joule Studio, users have access to 40 specific assistants that can orchestrate hundreds of agents beneath. These include, for example, billing, campaign, enterprise architecture, case management, or HR operations assistants.

“Customers can map these assistants to actual personas,” von Rüden said. Then, assistants can be connected to other relevant assistants (like accounts payable and accounts receivable). “We have one central place where they can exchange trust, and we can secure everything, do policy enforcement.”

Essentially, the right integrations can support near-infinite iteration in AI systems, von Rueden asserted.

New data tools, Tabular foundation model

Also at TechEd this week, SAP is introducing new ontology tools, lakehouse capabilities, and governance and admin controls to take AI from “intent to trusted execution.” The company is building on its recent acquisition of Dremio and an expanded partnership with Databricks to unify data, simplify its management, and support faster contextual insights.

The company is also infusing AI into RISE with SAP, its subscription-based service that helps enterprises transition from on-premises enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to the cloud. Customers will get AI-assisted implementation guidance, best practices, roadmaps, onboarding, and assessment, alignment, and business mapping tools.

Finally, SAP has announced its latest tabular AI model, SAP-RPT-2.0, which will go beyond classification and regression to anomaly and outlier detection and AI-powered analysis. These capabilities will reduce manual engineering and help customers predict values across business metrics for forecasting purposes. Customers will be able to use SAP-RPT-2.0 through the SAP Integrated Business Planning platform.

von Rüden said that the model is being used for “so many wild use cases,” ranging from running small business loans and performing financial forecasting to the classification of astronaut health by NASA.