On Sapphire 2026 SAP presents its vision of the autonomous enterprise. The goal is to empower companies' most mission-critical workflows so that people and artificial intelligence (AI) work closely together to address increasing global business demands in an efficient, strategic and secure manner.
At the same time, SAP is entering into closer collaboration with Anthropic, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft, NVIDIA and Palantir to accelerate enterprises' adoption of AI.
’’Almost right’ is not enough when it comes to our customers’ most important business processes. By combining SAP Business AI Platform and SAP Autonomous Suite, we are making AI agents an integral part of business processes with a direct connection to data and governance. This means accurate, compliant and secure responses, while opening up new revenue opportunities and savings,”, says Christian Klein, CEO at SAP.
The self-governing enterprise includes a unified AI platform for creating, customizing, and managing agents, a standalone suite that manages core business processes, and a new user experience that transforms how people work with enterprise software.
A new foundation for AI in business
SAP Business AI Platform is a new foundation for building and deploying AI that is rooted directly in customers' business operations. SAP Business AI Platform solves this by bringing together SAP Business Technology Platform, SAP Business Data Cloud, and SAP's Business AI in a single, managed environment.
A central part of the platform is the SAP Knowledge Graph, which provides AI agents with a map, that is, a comprehensive and structured overview of all business units, processes and relationships in the customer's SAP environment.
Joule Studio is SAP’s AI-focused solution for developing enterprise agents, applications, and agent-based workflows. Developers can build solutions using the no-code, pro-code, and AI frameworks of their choice on an SAP-managed infrastructure that is secure, scalable, and optimized for AI in enterprise environments.
SAP Autonomous Suite in every business function and industry
SAP also introduced SAP Autonomous Suite that provides SAP's existing business applications with AI agents that can manage processes from start to finish.
The solution includes more than 50 specialized Joule assistants in areas such as finance, supply chain, purchasing, HR and customer management. The assistants automate entire processes from start to finish by coordinating more than 200 AI agents, each performing specific tasks. For example, the new Autonomous Close Assistant can shorten the closing process from weeks to days by automatically handling accounting, reconciliations and error correction.
SAP is also expanding its many industry solutions with Industry AI – seven standalone solutions targeted at specific industries. They are designed to manage entire business processes from start to finish, taking into account industry-specific logic, data models, rules and workflows.
On SAP Sapphire showed SAP announced its collaboration with European energy giant RWE to use Industry AI to help reduce unplanned downtime at the company’s offshore wind farms. With SAP’s Autonomous Asset Management scenario, AI agents are designed to analyze data from thousands of past incidents, identify the likely cause, and generate pre-populated work orders using the right tools and proven solutions from other facilities.
A new way to work with SAP
SAP also introduced Joule Work, which changes the way users work with SAP systems. Instead of navigating different systems and manually entering data in different places, the user can now interact directly with Joule and describe the desired outcome. Joule then assembles the right workflows, data, and AI agents to solve and execute the task.
Joule Work goes beyond pure dialogue. It works proactively in the background, highlighting relevant insights and automating routine tasks so that work moves forward – even without continuous input from the user. The solution will be available on both desktops, mobile devices and via voice control and can be used in both SAP and non-SAP systems.
Shortens the path to independent operation with a contribution of 100 million Euros
SAP has optimized its customer and partner programs to facilitate the transition to a more autonomous business. To drive adoption, SAP has established a €100 million fund for SAP partners. It will help customers implement AI assistants and AI agents developed by SAP. The fund is also available to partners who extend or develop new partner agents on the new SAP Business AI Platform using Joule Studio.
Additionally, SAP has expanded its RISE with SAP and SAP GROW offerings to accelerate AI adoption. Both include access to the Joule Assistants portfolio. RISE with SAP customers get three assistants activated in their first year, while SAP GROW customers get full access to the portfolio right from the start. Customers using SAP S/4HANA, on-premise, and SAP ERP Central Component (SAP ECC) are not excluded. Those who commit to transitioning the majority of their current environment to SAP Cloud ERP will get access to select AI scenarios, bridging the gap between their current environment and the cloud they are moving to.
SAP is also introducing new AI-assisted transformation tools that can reduce the workload associated with ERP migrations by approximately 35 percent by automating analysis, code updates, configuration, and testing.
Finally, SAP unveiled a whole range of strategic partnerships across various categories:
- Platform and software suite partnerships include: Anthropic where the Claude model is included among the basic models that SAP's AI platform will use to power Joule agents in HR, purchasing and supply chain; Amazon Web Services enabling copy-free data integration between SAP Business Data Cloud and Amazon Athena; Google Cloud and Microsoft enabling bidirectional connectivity between agents in Joule and external agent frameworks; Mistral AI and Cohere delivering superior modeling options on SAP's cloud infrastructure; n8n which provides visual AI workflow coordination inside Joule Studio; NVIDIA whose OpenShell provides the reliable and secure runtime environment for Joule Studio; and Parloa which brings AI agents into SAP Service Cloud to manage customer interactions with full access to business data and service processes.
- Partnerships in implementation include Palantir and Accenture who collaborate on complex data migration scenarios, and Conduct for AI-driven migrations to cloud-based ERP systems.
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