For the second consecutive year, SAP has chosen Madrid to celebrate its most important event: Sapphire 2026. This edition, which closes today, occupies six pavilions at IFEMA and has the participation of clients, partners, analysts and business leaders. During these days, the German multinational has emphasized its concept of the autonomous company as the next step in the evolution of management software.
SAP’s proposal is based on the idea that AI should not be limited to answering questions, but rather to operate with real business context and coordinate processes within the company. In a context in which agents seem like they are going to put an end to the tasks carried out by workers, the company is clearly committed to a mixed model. The motto of Sapphire 2026, “The Beginning of Better”, is a declaration of intent about SAP’s proposal that involves a model in which AI assistants and agents work alongside people to automate tasks and free up time to perform functions of greater added value.
In case it wasn’t clear, in his keynote presentation, Christian Klein, CEO of SAP, summed up that ambition by noting that, “in the autonomous enterprise, agents manage the organization so that people can focus on what really matters.”
Sapphire 2026 or how to be an autonomous company
The starting point of the multinational’s strategy is SAP Business AI Platform, a technological base that unifies SAP Business Technology Platform, SAP Business Data Cloud and SAP Business AI in a single environment. The platform incorporates SAP Knowledge Graph, a business context layer designed for AI to work with trusted data, real processes and a more governed view of the business.
The platform also allows you to integrate SAP and third-party data to eliminate silos and facilitate a unified view of the company.
SAP maintains that this approach seeks to solve one of the great current limitations of generative AI, which is its dependence on public information and the lack of specific context for each company. The company claims that its experience accumulated over more than 50 years in business processes and ERP allows it to connect language models with the operational logic of companies.
At the functional core of the proposal is SAP Autonomous Suite, which extends finance, human resources, supply chain, purchasing and customer experience applications with artificial intelligence agents. The company ensures that it incorporates more than 50 specialized Joule assistants and more than 200 agents designed to execute specific tasks.
During Sapphire 2026, new capabilities have also been presented, such as Joule Studio, a solution that allows you to create business agents, applications and workflows based on AI, in addition to Industry AI, seven new autonomous sector solutions, and has shown how the user experience will change with Joule Work, a new interface that allows you to interact with business systems using natural language.
With Joule Work, users simply describe a need or task, and AI coordinates workflows, data and agents to get the desired result, eliminating the need to navigate between multiple applications. The experience will be available on computer, mobile and voice.
