There’s no need to rebuild your enterprise around AI. AI must be carefully introduced into enterprises in a way that respects and enhances what is already working.
SAP and Anthropic today announced plans to expand their partnership to deliver advanced AI solutions to enterprise customers, making Anthropic’s AI model, Claude, a key inference and agent capability built into SAP’s entire portfolio of AI-enabled solutions powered by Joule and Joule agents.
Announced today at SAP Sapphire, Anthropic and SAP are collaborating to incorporate Claude’s agent capabilities into the newly announced SAP Business AI Platform, advancing SAP’s vision of an autonomous enterprise in the age of agent AI.
This collaboration builds on SAP’s more than 50 years of business applications expertise across process, data, and governance. This complements SAP’s open ecosystem approach to supporting any model, giving customers greater choice and flexibility to meet their evolving AI requirements.
By connecting directly to SAP Business AI Platform, Claude enables agents to perform tasks. This includes coordinating across SAP S/4HANA, SAP SuccessFactors, SAP Ariba solutions, and other systems via MCP, from closing quarter-end closes to answering complex employee leave questions to forwarding orders to suppliers during shipping.
“Our open platform means we are deeply integrated with the world’s leading companies across our portfolio. Together with Anthropic, we are building something of unique value for our customers,” said Christian Klein, CEO of SAP SE. “Autonomous enterprises need AI that understands the business context and works within the controls that the organization relies on. Our partnership with Claude will play a key role in this.”
“We built Claude to support tasks that help businesses run their operations, such as accounting, rerouting late orders, and approving expenses. With Claude on SAP Business AI Platform, that work is done within the systems that companies have already invested in and that SAP customers trust, with the reliability and governance that SAP customers rely on,” said Daniela Amodei, co-founder and president of Anthropic.
Claude bring addition Agent functionality and connection to Joule
Joule from SAP is an AI-enabled business assistant that helps teams make faster, smarter decisions by embedding contextual and safer AI directly into SAP and non-SAP business workflows. Now, SAP is extending Claude’s capabilities to Joule with plans to integrate Anthropic’s advanced agent AI capabilities across the newly announced SAP Business AI Platform.
By going deeper with Claude and accessing Anthropic’s frontier models, SAP customers can expect additional capabilities such as:
- better reasoning above Complex business tasks: Claude helps agents take real action for hundreds of thousands of SAP customers across finance, human resources, procurement, and the supply chain. Agents powered by Claude connect to the SAP Business AI platform to understand business context based on SAP data, make more accurate decisions, and operate securely within defined processes. For example, a finance manager can ask Joule to prepare a CFO briefing for a bank meeting and within minutes receive a completed presentation with live data and analysis, as well as flagged financial risks. Tasks that previously took hours to complete by hand can now be completed in minutes.
- Agent AI that understands business context: Claude manipulates the business context across SAP enterprise systems and other tools connected through MCP. Step-by-step actions include finding data, updating data, triggering approvals, and advancing tasks. Anthropic and SAP will work strategically to build custom agents and agent workflows in SAP, optimizing them for key industries such as public sector, healthcare, education, life sciences, and utilities. This combines SAP’s expertise in enterprise applications and AI with Claude’s reasoning and agent capabilities.
Bringing AI to systems that businesses already trust
As AI moves from advice to action, trust becomes important, especially in businesses and regulated industries. Anthropic brings secure, reliable AI to processes that businesses already trust. When AI coordinates orders, triggers workflows, and makes recommendations within an SAP customer’s environment, it does so within the same controls that govern human decision-making: the approval, policy, and compliance frameworks already built into SAP solutions.
Anthropic and SAP plan to work together to bring this model to life by combining the depth and scale of Claude and SAP to help organizations move from experimentation to the core of how they operate.
Philipp Herzig is CTO and member of the Extended Board of Directors of SAP SE.
