SAP has shown the Autonomous Enterprise in action at the SAP Connect event, highlighting how Joule Work and Joule Assistants generate value for customers in all business areas.
“This is a defining moment for Enterprise AI,” said Christian Klein, CEO of SAP SE during the meeting. “The Autonomous Enterprise has arrived. With Joule and SAP Autonomous Suite, built on the SAP Business AI Platform, we are helping companies like Novartis, Morgan Foods, Nestlé and PwC connect intelligence in all areas to provide reliable business results.”
At SAP Connect, these customers have shared how the Autonomous Enterprise is already providing measurable value to their businesses: “We have recently co-developed and launched a pilot of SAP Joule Sourcing Assistant,” said Christoph Buerki, Head of Procurement, at Novartis. “Our vision is for AI agents to handle the heaviest manual tasks, allowing procurement professionals to focus on strategy, supplier relationships and value creation.”
“At Morgan Foods we are already laying the foundation for the adoption of agentic AI, especially through our technological infrastructure. The biggest change will be moving from a reactive approach to a predictive one, in which agents can connect demand signals, inventory levels and the situation of suppliers faster than ever,” said Steve Hankins, Chief Financial Officer of Morgan Foods. “Our big advantage will come from putting people above agents. Our approximately 1,000 employees are the ones who make our supply chains work and technology helps them do it even better.”
“Our transformation with SAP S/4HANA in 140 countries is creating a connected digital core, with coherent processes, reliable data and greater visibility between markets and business areas. On this basis, Joule and Accounts Receivable Assistant can automatically prioritize collection tasks based on risk and business context, recommend the most appropriate action at any time and help our financial teams respond more quickly to changes,” said Luca Dell’Orletta, Global Head IT Innovation & Enterprise Architecture at Nestle.
SAP Autonomous Enterprise Scales
Joule Work is beginning its rollout to customers as a new AI user interface that allows employees to interact with SAP solutions in their own language and complete tasks, both with SAP and third-party data. Based on SAP Knowledge Graph business context, which establishes relationships between more than 7 million data fields, Joule provides information that users can trust. At SAP itself, Joule Work is already being used by 110,000 employees, and the company is seeing productivity improvements of 20% across finance, HR and purchasing environments. A select group of customers are also using Joule Work in their business environments.
“After 28 years as a SAP customer, collaborating with the company on our AI journey and participating in the Joule Work Desktop early adoption program has allowed us to make more progress in just a few months than in all the previous years,” said Peter Wied, Director of Complexity Management at Maschinenfabrik Reinhausen. “What previously required up to an hour of manual work in our SAP S/4HANA environment is now available in seconds using natural language, radically transforming the way our teams interact with business data.”
“The dedicated team has been extraordinary. Their proactive communication, efforts to accelerate architecture deployment, rapid bug resolution, and overall support have allowed us to be ready for Joule much sooner than would have been possible if we had had to face these challenges on our own,” said Keith Smith, SAP Platform Architect at CONA Services.
When a query is not enough, Joule Assistants execute operational work directly in business workflows using established data, authorizations, and traceability records. Clients control the level of autonomy. SAP’s approach is also open: through the Agent2Agent protocol, Joule can connect with third-party agents and AI, providing governed business context into broader AI workflows.
Capabilities drive results with SAP Autonomous Suite:
- In finance, controllers can automate revenue recognition, information breakdowns and international trade compliance with the early adoption of International Trade Assistant, reducing the effort spent on trade classification by up to 50%.
- In supply chain, planners can resolve issues in the planning, manufacturing and logistics areas that usually last several hours with a single click.
- In HR, leaders can establish the best way to address staffing needs, while employees can more intelligently choose the benefits that fit their needs.
- In purchasing, decision makers can identify savings opportunities by comparing with similar companies and manage the entire lifecycle of external personnel.
- In customer experience, organizations can turn customer interaction into sales opportunities with AI-powered campaigns, commercial offers, and customer service workflows.
- Across sectors, SAP is collaborating with customers to apply AI in specialized vertical processes, helping organizations in manufacturing, retail, commodity trading, and asset-intensive industries improve decision-making, automate routine actions, and build more resilient operations.
The platform that powers enterprise AI
SAP Business AI Platform provides organizations with a single place to build, contextualize, and govern AI across SAP and third-party environments. With Joule Studio, business users and developers can create and extend capabilities and agents from workflows ranging from no-code environments to professional programming, with the ability to choose from more than 70 AI models. SAP Business Data Cloud and SAP Knowledge Graph provide these actors with a trusted business database and context, helping organizations select the most appropriate model for each use case and better manage the value and consumption of AI.
SAP managed governance helps organizations scale AI with transparency, accountability, and control. The AI Agent Hub in SAP LeanIX solutions provides a central inventory of business agents, while SAP’s independently certified ISO/IEC 42001 governance architecture supports regulatory requirements, established authorizations, and auditable AI operations.
To help organizations adopt AI at scale, SAP’s Business Transformation Management portfolio, including SAP Signavio, SAP LeanIX, and SAP WalkMe solutions, provides the toolchain to analyze processes, govern applications and agents, and drive adoption across the enterprise.
SAP incorporates embedded payments into Cloud ERP
SAP has also announced that it is entering the payments market with SAP Pay, powered by Tereina, an SAP company. Embedded directly into SAP Cloud ERP, SAP Pay executes and reconciles payments within the same workflow when an invoice is due, reducing manual file management and reliance on external processes, while providing customers with greater control.
Partners expand the scope of the Autonomous Business
SAP is expanding the Autonomous Enterprise, beyond SAP’s own application catalog, through new alliances that incorporate specialized intelligence directly into SAP work processes.
SAP’s approach is also open: through the Agent2Agent protocol, Joule can connect with third-party agents and AI
A new alliance has been created between SAP and Moody’s Corporation to integrate Moody’s supplier risk monitoring data into SAP Ariba Supplier Lifecycle and Performance. This equips purchasing teams with continually updated information on the financial health of suppliers, their operational risk and regulatory compliance status at the time of decision making. Organizations will be able to move from conducting periodic risk reviews to enjoying continuous monitoring, allowing Joule Agents to identify signs of supplier risk and offer alternatives before the problem affects the business.
An expansion of the collaboration with ORO Labs has been announced, which brings the orchestration of purchasing processes to SAP customers as an extension of its solutions. SAP Ariba Procurement Orchestration by ORO Labs is an orchestration layer specifically designed to connect end-to-end procurement workflows in heterogeneous business environments, offering business users a seamless experience to make requests and actions, and gain visibility into the entire process.
