During its annual SAP TechEd conference, the SAP company announced a series of AI innovations that expand its portfolio for developers. Enhancements to Joule solutions and SAP Business AI Platform, including SAP’s latest tabular foundational model, provide new tools for creating and enhancing AI agents, a richer business and data context for AI agents to reason with, and strengthened governance controls to use them responsibly in organizations.
SAP Business AI Platform offers organizations a single environment to develop, contextualize and govern AI, both in SAP and third-party environments. With Joule Studio, business users and developers can use no-code and pro-code tools to create and extend agents, choosing from more than 70 AI models. Customers participating in the Joule Studio early adopter program can also design and run n8n workflows in Joule Studio, a feature whose availability will be expanded soon.
SAP Business Data Cloud and SAP Knowledge Graph enable these agents to draw on reliable and contextualized business data, helping organizations select the right model for each use case and better manage the value and consumption of AI. Importantly, SAP customer data remains the property of SAP customers. SAP does not share its customers’ data with third parties to train or improve language models.
“SAP TechEd has always been the place where those who create technology shape what is to come,” said Philipp Herzig, CTO of SAP SE. “This year we showed how we are moving from an AI that learns how the business works to an AI that makes it work. Joule Work is the space to express the goal to achieve and carry out the work, through a unique experience that spans the entire SAP ecosystem and goes beyond. That is the change we are taking to scale. Everything behind it runs on the SAP Business AI Platform, which allows you to obtain value more quickly thanks to an understanding of the business integrated as standard, greater precision and a preparation for the business environment that guarantees security, governance and compliance from the first deployment. Added to this is a unique context layer, built on more than fifty years of experience in processes and industries and integrated into every action that agents perform. “This is an AI created where real work takes place.”
Joule Work and Joule Studio make the autonomous company a reality
The new Joule Work capabilities will help AI agents be more effective in managing complex business processes using open protocols (A2A and MCP). These innovations enable Joule Work to better understand context, make decisions, and execute multi-step business workflows across systems and business areas.
SAP also announced that Joule Studio adds new monitoring capabilities and administrative controls that give developers and administrators greater visibility into agent behavior, model usage, and associated spend. Joule Studio is the AI-first development environment, accessible through Joule Work and designed to create and extend enterprise agents.
Additionally, Joule Studio will offer a limited-time promotion for select customers, whereby deploying and running custom agents in the SAP-managed Joule Studio runtime will remain free until December 2026. Development tools for building and testing n8n agents and workflows, with AI-assisted development capabilities, will remain free within established reasonable usage limits.
The driving force behind the autonomous company
SAP Business Data Cloud Ontology Manager, within SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC), arrives to offer a native AI creation experience to develop ontologies with SAP and third-party data. By helping AI understand how data from different teams, systems, and applications relate to each other, AI agents can reason and make decisions more accurately across the enterprise. These solutions complement the SAP Knowledge Graph, which provides rich business context for SAP data.
In addition, SAP BDC is expanding its lakehouse capabilities with Dremio, incorporating native support for Apache Iceberg and Apache Polaris, as well as a high-performance federated query engine that will allow data to be accessed in a unified way without the need to move or copy it. SAP expands its collaboration with Databricks, bringing the full scope and latest innovations in data engineering and enterprise AI to SAP Business Data Cloud through SAP Databricks. Key innovations such as Lakeflow, Agent Bricks, Unity Gateway and Lakebase will help customers simplify data management and establish a strong database on their AI journey.
Through deeper integration with SAP Business Data Cloud, a new SAP Application Data Foundation, as well as integration between Joule and Genie, SAP and Databricks help customers establish an enterprise-wide lakehouse as the foundation for Autonomous Enterprise and Joule Work.
The SAP Reltio solution, recently announced at SAP Connect, will bring multi-domain master data management capabilities to SAP BDC. The solution unifies and enriches customer, supplier and product records from both SAP and other systems, turning them into reliable, reusable data products that can serve as the basis for AI applications and agents.
A reliable tabular foundation model for companies
SAP has announced its latest tabular AI model, SAP-RPT-2.0, which will expand its capabilities beyond classification and regression to support anomaly and outlier detection, as well as more advanced AI-based analytics using vector representations (embeddings).
These native multi-table capabilities will further reduce manual engineering work while delivering faster, deeper insights from structured data. Additionally, a new SAP-RPT-TS model will help customers predict values in time-indexed business metrics for key forecasting use cases using the SAP Integrated Business Planning solution, without the need for custom machine learning.
In collaboration with HPE, SAP has also announced the deployment of SAP-RPT on the HPE Spaceborne Computer-2, aboard the International Space Station (ISS), which represents one of the most relevant edge computing validations carried out to date for an enterprise AI model.
SAP-RPT is planned to run directly aboard the ISS to help analyze and prioritize anomalies, anticipate problems before they become serious failures, reconstruct missing sensor values from historical data, and generate understandable mission status reports for astronauts and teams on the ground, all without needing to send the data back to Earth for analysis.
“The same trusted SAP-RPT model that powers global supply chains can also work in space,” Herzig said. “SAP’s extensive and proven experience has led the International Space Station to use our foundational tabular model to predict potential mission-critical failures while in orbit. With SAP-RPT and TabPFN from Prior Labs, we are bringing the unique capabilities of tabular AI to the enterprise and all kinds of new horizons.”
Assistants and agents make the difference
For five decades, SAP has developed the systems of record on which businesses operate. It will now offer, as standard, a set of assistants and agents for five horizontal environments, all based on SAP Business AI Platform and with sector specialization, which will provide a foundation for intelligence systems and action systems.
SAP’s global partner ecosystem brings new capabilities for the continued operation and expansion of SAP Business AI Platform solutions, helping customers move towards the Autonomous Enterprise. Another series of partner-related announcements were made known at SAP TechEd:
The collaboration with Intel closes the loop between enterprise workflows and autonomous robots, connecting information technologies (IT) with operational technologies (OT) through physical AI.
Additionally, new SAP solution extensions with Docusign, Parloa and Redwood expand the autonomous capabilities available to customers, helping them run their core processes from start to finish, without the need to handover between systems.
Beyond technology, SAP continues to boost its strong developer community with new training and engagement initiatives. Tens of thousands of people have joined Devtoberfest in the weeks leading up to SAP TechEd, along with new reference architectures, tutorials, and hands-on experiences that attendees can try both in-person at the event and from home.
