SAP’s role-aware Joule Assistants will partner with workers

SAP is rolling out new role-aware Joule Assistants, department-specific clouds, and tools for finance, HR, and supply chain professionals at SAP Connect, its new event for line-of-business leaders.

The assistants are designed to partner with human workers while managing and orchestrating agents across SAP Business Suite. In addition, more than 40 new agents in all areas of the SAP portfolio add to the functionality announced at SAP Sapphire in June. They will be available between now and the middle of 2026.

SAP’s Business Technology Platform president, Michael Ameling, said that the aim of the updates is to help customers focus more on innovation. “This is how they can differentiate, compete in the market, and basically run their processes better and more efficiently, and of course, with a higher return on investment,” he said.

Here’s a look at some of the new offerings.

Finance and spend management

The Cash Management Agent, planned for Q1 2026, will look at bank statements and automate reconciliation tasks as well as identifying potential cash shortages and surpluses and recommending optimizations. And in beta in December 2025, with availability sometime in 2026, the International Trade Classification Agent will, based on trade regulations, classify products being exported and recommend customs tariff numbers and commodity codes.

An update to SAP Ariba source-to-pay, available in February 2026, integrates AI into all areas of the product, as well as adding enhanced supplier profiles, performance evaluations, and AI-based risk analysis. A new Bid Analysis Agent, to be available in Q1 2026, will automatically compare supplier bids to highlight trade-offs and offer insights that manual analysis may miss.

CRM and customer experience

The new SAP Engagement Cloud, the company says, is “a unified system of engagement designed to help organizations use data for AI-driven segments, triggers, and campaigns.” Using the Joule copilot and embedded AI, as well as data from SAP Business Data Cloud, it aims to “accelerate campaigns, automate decisions, and scale personalization to a large customer base.” Its API-first architecture lets partners, IT Teams, and vendors integrate with existing systems. It will be generally available in February 2026.

Business AI

Joule deep research, to be available in beta in December 2025, will give Joule the ability to delve deeply into user questions, leveraging data from internal SAP sources, external intelligence, and trusted resources to provide “deep, strategic research, analysis, and reporting.”

Other announcements included the addition of Joule Studio in SAP Build, an agent builder now in beta, with general availability expected in Q4 2025; Agent to Agent (A2A) protocol support coming sometime in Q4 2025; an AI agent hub in SAP LeanIX; and the SAP Joule Action Bar, expected in March 2026, providing users with an AI assistant that anticipates their needs and helps simplify complex tasks.

Partner connectivity

SAP has announced the first two partners integrating with Business Data Cloud Connect, which enables secure, no-copy bidirectional sharing of data between SAP data products and customers’ data lakes and platforms. SAP Business Data Cloud Connect for Databricks is now generally available, and SAP Business Data Cloud Connect for Google BigQuery is planned for the first half of 2026.

Supply Chain

The company has also launched SAP Supply Chain Orchestration, built on the SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP), which SAP says will “enhance risk detection, deliver actionable insights, and enable coordinated responses across supply chains.” It can use data from SAP Business Network (which now runs on BTP) to identify potential issues with supply chains, and uses AI to help resolve or mitigate situations. General availability is planned for the first half of 2026.

A second new supply chain offering, SAP Logistics Management, scheduled for Q1 2026, is a new cloud-native product which, SAP says, gives companies a single platform to manage inventory, shipments, and freight collaboration with carriers.

AI features are coming to SAP Integrated Planning, with Joule integration, intelligent automation, scenario simulations, and more, all of which are now in beta and planned for release in Q2 2026. Also planned in that timeframe are three new Joule agents for supply chain management. Two, the Production Planning and Operations Agent and the Change Record Management Agent, are part of Cloud ERP, and one, the Supplier Onboarding Agent, is part of SAP Business Network.

SAP SuccessFactors

SAP’s human capital management product (HCM), SuccessFactors, received four new Joule agents, all expected to be generally available in May 2026: Career and Talent Development Agent to help with succession planning; HR Service Agent, a self-service information source for employees; People Intelligence Agent to assist managers and HR staff in detecting and offering solutions to staffing issues and spotting trends; and Payroll Agent to answer questions about pay from both employees and payroll administrators.

The company has also announced a workforce knowledge network, with planned availability in the first half of 2026, that will ingest knowledge from third party HR experts for use in Joule.