SAP unveiled its next evolution of its Joule AI agent and plan is to make it omnipresent across the ERP giant's platform and even follow business users to third party systems too.
The vision for Joule aims to create seamless AI assistance within SAP and extend to other business applications. The proactive AI approach is powered by SAP's WalkMe, which takes context from business applications and UI behaviors to suggest actions, automation and agents to use.
To extend to external data and systems, SAP said Joule will combine AI platforms and SAP Knowledge Graph data to solve business problems.
CEO Christian Klein argued that Joule will bring "agenticness" to SAP's platform. SAP Business Suite will include a number of pre-built agents in customer experience, supply chain and spend management. Most of those will be delivered in the fourth quarter. SAP added that it has partnered with Google Cloud to make agents interoperable. "With the expansion of Joule, our partnerships with leading AI pioneers, and advancements in SAP Business Data Cloud, we’re delivering on the promise of Business AI as we drive digital transformations that help customers thrive in an increasingly unpredictable world," said Klein.
Joule was the headliner, but there were a bevy of smaller announcements in various categories at Sapphire.
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SAP is also betting that Joule can make SAP implementations easier and move customers to S/4HANA Cloud. The company launched Joule for Consultants and a set of AI tools to accelerate cloud transformation.
Customers will also see some SAP Business AI pricing changes. The base AI package will include Joule Base, which has navigational and informational capabilities, and standard embedded features. Usage in Base AI is unlimited.
SAP is adding per user per month plans with Joule Premium, which will include variations of its agent for functions such as supply chain, human capital management, customer experience, and developers. These plans require a set amount of AI units.
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Transactional capabilities such as Datasphere, document grounding, SAP Document AI and others will be on a consumption based model where AI units are consumed per request or record.
There are also tools to build custom Joule agents via Joule Studio in SAP Build. Enterprises will be able to build custom skills and AI agents for business needs. Joule Studio will be generally available in the second quarter.
What remains to be seen is whether SAP's omnipresent Joule approach becomes the new operating system for enterprises or simply a natural language interface. It's a question a lot of enterprise software vendors, who are used to cross-selling applications, are trying to answer.
Constellation Research's take
Constellation Research has a handful of analysts at SAP Sapphire making sense of the barrage of developments. Here's what Holger Mueller had to say:
"It's Joule, Joule, Joule at Sapphire and SAP is right to push on its AI agent as it holds the biggest potential for its customer to change business outcomes. The re-platform of SAP AI on SAP Business Data Cloud on top of Databricks is the architecture area to pay attention to. As everybody knows - AI is only as good as the underlying data. Assuming the data is right, it'll be critical to see what SAP will do on the innovation side for Finance, HCM, SCM, Purchasing and more.
After data it is the APIs that determine the capability of agent. SAP needs to show some innovation and further capabilities here. The good news is that customers are moving to the cloud - less because SAP has gotten the upgrade value proposition right - but because CxOs know the need to be in the cloud in order to leverage AI."
