SAP is rolling out new AI and agent products and technologies that the software giant says will accelerate customers’ AI adoption and help them transform into “autonomous enterprises.”
SAP is taking its artificial intelligence offerings to the next level, today announcing SAP Business AI Platform, an integrated system that combines SAP Technology Business Platform, SAP Business Data Cloud, and SAP Business AI (the company’s previous AI products built into SAP applications) into a single managed environment.
The software giant, which is holding a Sapphire customer and partner event in Orlando this week, also announced SAP Autonomous Suite, a set of AI agents for specific business functions that power the company’s existing business applications.
And the company has expanded its Joule-generated AI copilot to include new features such as Joule Work, a new user interface for Joule.
[Related: SAP To Buy Dremio And Prior Labs To ‘Lead’ Agentic And AI Models]
“AI is the most important trend in technology in this generation, and frankly, the most important trend in society as a whole in this generation,” said Jeremy Burnham, CFO of financial services giant JPMorganChase, a major SAP customer, in his Sapphire opening keynote.
“As a result, everyone, perhaps all of us, feels pressure to use it everywhere,” Burnham said. “But the risk in financial organizations is to sprinkle AI on a broken organization. [business] Once the process is complete, you’ll be missing out on opportunities to eliminate technical debt and modernize your entire ecosystem. From our perspective, AI is only as good as the underlying data and processes. ”
According to SAP, the new SAP Business AI Platform provides the foundation for building, contextualizing, deploying, and managing AI agents. SAP CEO Christian Klein (pictured on stage) introduced the new products during his Sapphire keynote, saying the platform “forms the foundation of our vision for the future of business: the autonomous enterprise.”
The concept of an AI-powered “autonomous enterprise” incorporating the Business AI Platform, SAP Autonomous Suite, and Joule Work agent workspace was the overarching framework in the Sapphire for SAP announcement.
CEO Klein noted that today’s AI systems are often only about 80 percent accurate and have a poor track record in business operations such as financial accounting, payroll, and supply chain management. Large language models, on the other hand, are trained on large amounts of publicly available data and do not perform well with an organization’s own business data and processes. And many agents fail to comply with governance and security requirements.
Learn more about SAP AI Business Platform, Autonomous Suite
At the core of SAP Business AI Platform is the SAP Knowledge Graph data modeling technology, introduced in 2024, that connects business data and semantic context across SAP systems.
The AI platform brings together capabilities from SAP Business Technology Platform, the company’s PaaS system for application and data integration and automation, SAP Business Data Cloud for integrating and managing SAP and third-party data, and the previous SAP Business AI portfolio of enterprise-grade AI capabilities built into SAP applications.
“We are very excited about the Business AI platform, a platform designed to close the adoption gap by delivering results, speed, enterprise readiness, and of course all the context you need. This is the place to build, contextualize, reason, and manage AI end-to-end,” said Philipp Herzig, SAP CTO, in the Sapphire keynote.
SAP Autonomous Suite is a collection of Joule agent assistants that work with SAP’s existing applications, including the flagship S/4HANA application, to help automate end-to-end business processes.
“The power of our new AI platform is enabling us to transform our software application layer, thereby reimagining how our customers’ businesses run our ERP and industry applications,” Klein said.
The suite includes 50 domain-specific Joule Assistants across finance, supply chain, procurement, human capital management, and customer experience. The Joule assistant then coordinates a subset of over 200 specialized tasks. The suite also includes industry AI, domain-specific agents with vertical industry knowledge and processes.
“Industry solutions have always been a superpower at SAP,” said SAP COO Sebastian Steinhaeuser in his keynote address. “Real business transformation requires deep industry understanding.”
SAP’s vision for the new Joule Work user experience interface is that users will primarily interact with Joule across all SAP applications, rather than navigating through individual applications and entering data across multiple screens. The company says users describe a desired business outcome and Joule coordinates workflows, data, and agents to accomplish the task.
The new AI Agent Hub is also expected to be generally available in the third quarter of this year.
The AI roadmap presented by SAP executives at Sapphire also included several of the company’s recent acquisitions.
The company entered into an agreement to acquire master data management platform developer Reltio in March, and today Herzig announced that the technology will be used within SAP Business Data Cloud to create master data records for SAP and non-SAP data available to agents.
Earlier this month, SAP announced a deal to acquire Dremio, which develops a data lakehouse that supports the Apache Iceberg data table standard. According to Herzig, Dremio technology will be used to transform SAP Business Data Cloud into an agent data lakehouse and power AI agents.
Go To Market services and channels
SAP is revising its Rise with SAP and SAP Grow service programs to accelerate AI adoption. This includes providing access to the Joule Assistants portfolio and introducing the new ERP migration Joule Assistant. (SAP Rise is the company’s business transformation service for migrating traditional on-premises SAP applications to SAP S/4HANA Cloud. SAP Grow is a bundle of applications and services that midsized businesses use to quickly deploy SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition.)
Klein announced the creation of a €100 million fund for its partner ecosystem to help customers deploy SAP-built AI assistants and agents. This fund is also available to partners using Joule Studio to extend or build new partner agents on the SAP Business AI platform.
In an interview before the release of Sapphire CRN Sid Misra, chief marketing officer for SAP Business Technology Platform, said the Sapphire announcement opens up new opportunities for partners by providing an integrated platform that they can use to develop AI extensions and custom agents for their customers.
SAP’s AI offensive comes as some SAP customers are working on upgrading their systems. Mainstream support and maintenance for the aging SAP ECC (ERP Central Components) application will expire at the end of 2027. And even though SAP is restricting most of its new AI capabilities to cloud software, many customers, perhaps more than half of SAP’s core ERP customer base, still run on-premises software.
Just last week, Lemongrass, an SAP consulting and transformation services partner, and cbs, a global SAP consulting firm specializing in data migration and transformation projects, announced the completion of a complex SAP migration project for Propelis, a global marketing services company. This work included migrating a shared ECC system to S/4HANA and was completed in eight months.
Eamonn O’Neill, CTO and co-founder of Edison, N.J.-based Lemongrass, said in an interview before Sapphire’s launch. CRN Many clients are now looking to upgrade their SAP systems and at the same time implement AI capabilities as soon as possible.
“How do we maximize the amount of AI that our customers have access to? That’s a big demand from our customers today,” O’Neill said. “Everyone wants to know what they can get. [and] How can you see real AI, agent AI, working around SAP? And the good news is that it’s possible today. ”
“We’re saying, ‘OK, today is AI, but let’s modernize. Don’t stop modernizing. Stay on the SAP roadmap and get S/4HANA.’ [and] Get Rise with SAP. “The more you do that, the more innovation you have access to,” says O’Neill, noting that clients who don’t perform SAP upgrades and AI deployments in parallel are “missing opportunities to significantly reduce costs.”
PwC, a leading provider of implementation and business transformation services centered around SAP software, also sees strong demand for its services as clients look to upgrade their SAP applications as part of broader digital modernization efforts, said Cory King, a PwC principal who recently became the firm’s U.S. SAP alliance leader.
As customers look to migrate away from aging ECC systems, many are using the project as an opportunity to simplify their IT environments, eliminate “technical debt” and remove old customizations and extensions that prevent them from reaching a “clean core,” King said in the same pre-Sapphire interview. CRN.
“They’re really doing what I call application streamlining” and “a lot of workflow redesign,” King said. “Having a modernized, ready-to-deploy ERP foundation is critical.”
Of course, many clients are looking to AI, and “expectations are definitely very high” for the results of that effort, King said. However, many people are cautious about starting an AI project and generally underestimate what is needed from an HR perspective. PwC executives said the company applies AI during customer interactions to reduce the amount of time customers have to engage, and uses AI to eliminate risk during project work.
“At the highest level, it’s changing the way we work,” King said of AI. “From the way we do projects to the way we work internally to the way we run our internal businesses, AI is changing a lot because of AI. And quite frankly, we are disrupting ourselves every day by introducing new AI tools into the way we do business.”
“And in my opinion, that’s really just the beginning,” he said.
