SAP has announced solutions for the “Autonomous Enterprise”, a new platform that aims to help improve the most critical business workflows, so that people and AI work together to respond to the growing demands of organizations around the world in a cost-effective, strategic and secure way.
“For our customers’ mission-critical processes, ‘almost right’ is not enough,” said Christian Klein, CEO of SAP SE. “By bringing together SAP Business AI Platform with SAP Autonomous Suite, we integrate AI agents into business processes, data and governance to deliver accurate, compliant and secure results, unlocking new revenue streams and significant cost savings.”
The Autonomous Enterprise includes a unified AI platform to create, contextualize and manage agents, an autonomous suite that runs core business operations, and a new user experience that redefines the way people work with enterprise software.
Introducing SAP Business AI Platform
SAP Business AI Platform is a new foundation for building and deploying enterprise AI based on real business context. SAP Business AI Platform now unifies SAP Business Technology Platform, SAP Business Data Cloud and SAP Business AI into a single governed environment.
At its core is the SAP Knowledge Graph solution, which provides AI agents with a structured map of business entities, processes and relationships across a customer’s SAP environment. Joule Studio is SAP’s AI-focused solution for creating business agents, agent-based applications and workflows. Developers can build applications using their preferred no-code, code-based, and AI environments on an SAP-managed infrastructure that is secure, scalable, and optimized for enterprise AI.
Deploying SAP Autonomous Suite
Building on this foundation, SAP also introduced SAP Autonomous Suite, which equips existing SAP business applications with artificial intelligence agents capable of executing end-to-end processes.
The suite will deploy more than 50 Joule Assistants specific to each area in finance, supply chain, purchasing, human capital management and customer experience. These assistants automate end-to-end processes by orchestrating a subset of more than 200 specialized agents to execute precise tasks. For example, the new Autonomous Close Assistant can reduce the financial close process from weeks to days by automating accounting entries, reconciliation, and error resolution throughout the entire process.
The Autonomous Enterprise includes a unified AI platform to create, contextualize and manage agents
SAP has also launched Industry AI, expanding its broad sector portfolio with seven autonomous solutions that will enable end-to-end industrial processes and integrate sector-specific process logic, data models and regulatory requirements. At SAP Sapphire, SAP presented its collaboration with European energy giant RWE to leverage industrial AI, which has helped reduce unplanned downtime at its offshore wind turbines. With SAP’s autonomous asset management scenario, AI agents are designed to analyze data from thousands of past incidents, identify the possible root cause, and generate pre-filled work orders with the right tools and solutions tested in other facilities.
Designing the autonomous user experience
The company also unveiled Joule Work, which redefines how users interact with SAP software. Instead of navigating through individual apps and entering data across multiple screens, users will now interact directly and exclusively with Joule as a platform. Starting from the description of a business result, Joule will coordinate the right combination of workflows, data and agents to achieve it.
Joule Work goes beyond the conversation by proactively surfacing relevant insights and automating routine tasks in the background, so work continues moving forward even when people aren’t actively involved. It will be available for desktop, mobile and voice, both on SAP and third-party systems.
Accelerating the customer experience towards autonomy with an investment of 100 million euros
SAP has optimized its partner and customer programs to accelerate each organization’s path to the Autonomous Enterprise platform. To drive adoption, the company has launched a €100 million fund for partners to help customers deploy AI assistants and agents built with SAP. The fund is also available for partners to extend or create new partner agents on SAP Business AI Platform with Joule Studio.
SAP has also introduced new agent-led transformation tools
SAP has also updated its RISE with SAP and SAP GROW offerings to accelerate its customers’ adoption of AI. Each RISE customer will have three Joule assistants activated in the first year, while GROW customers will receive access to the full catalog of assistants upon onboarding. SAP S/4HANA on-premises and SAP ERP Central Component (SAP ECC) customers are not excluded: those who commit to migrating the majority of their current environment to SAP Cloud ERP will gain access to select AI scenarios, allowing them to bridge the gap between their current environment and their cloud destination.
SAP has also introduced new agent-led transformation tools that can reduce ERP migration efforts by more than 35%, enabling faster, more predictable projects by automating systems analysis, code remediation, configuration and testing at scale.
Lastly, SAP announced a wide range of strategic alliances across all categories:
- Platform and suite alliances include Anthropic, whose Claude model is part of the base models that SAP’s AI platform will use to power Joule agents in HR. HR, purchasing and supply chain; Amazon Web Services, which offers copy-free data integration between SAP Business Data Cloud and Amazon Athena; Google Cloud and Microsoft, which enable bidirectional interoperability between Joule agents and external agent frameworks; Mistral AI and Cohere, which offer sovereign model options on SAP cloud infrastructure; n8n, which provides visual orchestration of AI workflows within Joule Studio; NVIDIA, whose OpenShell provides the secure and trusted runtime environment for Joule Studio; and Parloa, which brings AI agents to SAP Service Cloud to manage customer interactions with full access to business data and service processes.
- Implementation partnerships include Palantir and Accenture, collaborating on complex data migration scenarios, and Conduct for AI-powered cloud ERP migrations.
