Business AI
SAP Business AI enhances productivity with cutting-edge technology that supports organizations' AI strategies, from developing effective agents to managing AI. At SAP Sapphire, the company introduced new innovations, partnerships, and integrations that enable real-time, proactive assistance. Joule, SAP’s generative AI copilot, is now accessible to all users across SAP and non-SAP systems. Additionally, SAP advanced its agentic AI strategy by launching new agents for various use cases and an AI operating system that will simplify AI development, helping developers build, deploy, and scale solutions more easily.
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SAP Makes Joule More Prevalent and Proactive Across SAP Business Suite and Third-Party Applications
SAP is rolling out significant updates to its Joule copilot that will help provide enterprises with always-on AI that breaks down vendor silos, anticipates business users’ needs, and delivers deeper insights by combining SAP and third-party data. This proactive copilot enhances productivity for SAP customers whether they are using SAP or third-party solutions.
New Omnipresent AI Helps Break Down Silos
SAP is introducing features that will make Joule omnipresent and help create a common AI experience across SAP and third-party cloud applications. Significantly widening its reach beyond SAP Business Suite, Joule assists users as they traverse different systems. Leveraging this information, Joule can help users find data, surface in-the-moment insights, and streamline workflows. Its omnipresence helps advance productivity at scale and simplify users’ AI experience, promoting greater adoption.
Further strengthening this enterprise interoperability is the bidirectional integration of Joule and Microsoft 365 Copilot. Users can leverage the capabilities of Joule from within Microsoft 365 Copilot for a unified AI experience across SAP and Microsoft systems. The first step in this bidirectional integration is planned for general availability in Q2 2025. It is expected that the integration of Microsoft 365 Copilot in Joule will be complete in Q3 2025.
New SAP Action Bar for Joule Provides Always-On, Proactive Recommendations
SAP is introducing a new action bar for Joule that will radically change how people work. Currently, Joule reacts to specific prompts and within specific guidance. With the action bar, SAP takes a significant step forward in advancing Joule to become an always-on, omnipresent, and proactive copilot that can anticipate business users’ needs before they arise. General availability is expected by Q3 2025.
Leveraging technology from WalkMe solutions, the action bar studies users’ behavior and the business context within SAP or third-party cloud applications. Joule uses this information to independently—and proactively—provide real-time insights, support, and recommendations to customers wherever and whenever they are working. Whether customers are e-mailing a supplier or investigating a financial transaction, SAP uniquely provides AI that—with its simplicity—democratizes AI for all users.
New Answer Engine Connects External and Internal Data to Solve Complex Business Challenges
SAP and Perplexity AI, an AI-powered answer engine that provides accurate, trusted, and real-time answers to any question, are collaborating to extend SAP’s generative AI and search capabilities by bringing together the best of both worlds in unstructured and structured data. By integrating Perplexity’s ability to address questions accurately and transparently with business answer capabilities, Joule and AI agents can deliver richer, context-aware answers using SAP Business Suite data through Joule with external signals from Perplexity AI. Through this collaboration, enterprises can get instant solutions tailored to their business needs including enhanced analytics and decision-making across SAP Cloud ERP solutions. Read more.
Fulfilling the Promise of Joule Through Integration and Customer-Driven Improvements
SAP continues to integrate Joule across SAP Business Suite and adds a steady stream of customer-requested enhancements.
New Joule integration includes:
SAP Ariba Procurement solutions: Joule can enhance daily tasks such as retrieving supplier bids, displaying past purchases and approvers, and providing ready access to supplier information, available by Q3 2025.
SAP Field Service Management solution: Joule will enable AI-assisted scheduling and dispatching, scheduled to be available by the end of 2025.
SAP Fieldglass solutions: Joule will enable users to search and execute reports in natural language. It can also accelerate existing workflows and processes by using conversational context to recommend job postings and statement of work templates, all available by Q3 2025.
SAP Signavio solutions: Joule will be more deeply integrated across the portfolio, enabling users to more efficiently process best-practices recommendations, analyze as-is processes, and improve recommendations by Q3 2025. Read more.
SAP Integrated Business Planning solutions: Joule will allow planners and partners to understand supply planning results faster, better, and more easily through intelligent analysis of demand, inventory, and supply planning, generally available by the end of 2025.
Joule in SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) cockpit: Users can ask questions and discover more about SAP BTP resources and services, generally available now.
SAP Customer Experience solutions: Joule will be available in the SAP Service Cloud and SAP Enterprise Service Management solutions by Q3 2025.
SAP Mobile Start app: After announcing integration of Joule with SAP Mobile Start in Q4 2024, Joule will be generally available within SAP SuccessFactors Mobile and SAP Sales Cloud mobile apps by end of Q2 2025.
SAP Business Data Cloud: Joule will also be available within components of SAP Business Data Cloud. Available now, data professionals can use Joule while in the SAP Datasphere solution to ask questions about metadata Business Data Cloud metadata and receive an immediate response. Additionally, Joule will be generally available within the SAP Analytics Cloud in Q3 2025.
Analytical insights: This feature advances the ability of Joule to answer business questions, enabling employees across business functions to ask questions in natural language and instantly receive structured, visual answers—such as charts and metrics—directly within their SAP workflow. Generally available now.
SAP will deliver new capabilities for Joule based on customer feedback, including:
Usage metrics dashboard: Shows Joule usage by scenario and capability, helping customer administrators assess training needs and track adoption of custom capabilities developed within Joule Studio. Available Q3 2025.
Support for streaming responses: Displays longer responses as they are generated in real time, making conversations natural and dynamic, and minimizing delays for full replies. Available now.
Conversation threads: More easily manage multiple parallel conversations with extended inactive timeouts and revisit expired conversations, enabling topic separation, access to recent history, and continued engagement during long-running requests. Available now.
Conversation insights: Collect and aggregate user feedback on Joule responses to support improvements to the copilot’s quality. Available now.
Context-aware conversational search: Strict filters that provide more relevant answers based on criteria like country, role, or organizational unit. Generally available in Q3 2025.
Expanded language support: Joule capabilities are generally available now in 11 languages, broadening usability for non-English-speaking users.
SAP Expands Agentic AI Footprint Across SAP Business Suite
SAP launches an expanded network of Joule Agents designed to foster autonomous collaboration across systems and lines of business, delivering smarter insights and enhanced efficiency. Partnering with industry leaders, SAP offers an ecosystem of interoperable agents that can execute end-to-end processes.
This interoperability strategy—combined with deep industry expertise and SAP Business Suite—uniquely positions SAP to turn its agentic AI into tangible business outcomes. Additionally, SAP agents go beyond serving suggestions to users. Using advanced reasoning capabilities, agents can “think” through business problems, coordinate cross systems, decide what action should be taken, and act autonomously—with human oversight.
Enabled by SAP Business Data Cloud, Joule Agents can access enterprise data and act across both SAP and third-party systems. Agents can deeply understand data structures, semantics, and processes, and this additional context can drive further business impact for Joule Agents.
The new agents span customer experience, supply chain management, spend management, finance, and human capital management, and promise to help companies streamline operations, accelerate decision-making, and enhance cross-functional processes.
Transforming Customer Experience
SAP introduces two agents to enhance sales and order management, with general availability planned for Q2 2025:
Quote Creation Agent: Transforms e-mail quote requests into ready-to-send quotes and orders, enabling customers to place and modify orders while helping eliminate manual data entry and errors.
Catalog Optimization Agent: Maintains and optimizes product data, improving merchandising accuracy and agility.
Elevating Supply Chain Agility
SAP is integrating agents across its supply chain applications. General availability is planned for Q4 2025:
Maintenance Planner Agent: Performs reasoning using real-time data and suggests adjustments to maintenance schedules. This helps streamline planning, enables more precise resource allocation, and reduces disruptions to critical assets.
Shop Floor Supervisor Agent: Retrieves and reasons through disruption details, assesses impact, recommends production rescheduling, and orchestrates stock, minimizing shop floor disruption effects.
Field Service Dispatcher Agent: Reasons through real-time resource-availability information to autonomously schedule and optimize service orders, saving time and helping ensure the right resources are allocated for each job.
Enhancing Spend Management
SAP introduces new spend management agents, with general availability planned for Q4 2025:
Meeting Location Planner Agent: Automates time-consuming tasks for group travel that will improve efficiency and user experience. Agents can plan and estimate travel costs, identify central locations, source accommodations, and find the most suitable flight times and fares.
Expense Report Validation Agent: Uses alerts and guided experiences to help employees fix issues based on past data, company policy, and patterns before submitting reports, therefore reducing rejections and resubmissions.
Sourcing Agent: Reasons through sourcing event requests, past event data, and supplier information to act autonomously and create a tailored sourcing event. This supports faster, better-informed purchasing decisions, and more agile responses to supply chain disruptions and other changing business conditions.
Transforming Finance in SAP
New agents will bring intelligent automation to core finance operations, planned for general availability in Q3 2025:
Dispute Resolution Agent: Reasons through disputed details and relevant business records to validate cases and propose solutions. It acts on the human-approved resolutions to quickly close disputes, improve cash flow, and enhance customer satisfaction.
Accounts Receivable Agent: Processes data related to overdue receivables and performs appropriate follow-up tasks with customers, saving time by analyzing open items, minimizing bad-debt write-offs, and reduces the number of days sales outstanding.
Elevating People Management
SAP introduces a new human resources agent with general availability planned for Q4 2025:
Performance and Goals Agent: Prepares people managers with data-driven insights ahead of one-on-one conversations with their employees, helping to promote consistent and productive conversations.
Ecosystem Rallies Around Joule Agents
Deloitte will integrate Zora AI with Joule to empower clients to build intelligent digital workforces using agentic AI. Zora AI, a suite of ready-to-deploy agents using SAP BTP, autonomously executes complex business functions with speed and accuracy. When combined with SAP’s extensive enterprise capabilities—and amplified by SAP Business Data Cloud’s accessibility to data—Zora AI can help redefine work processes, enabling clients to fully harness the transformative power of agentic AI. General availability is planned for H2 2025. Learn more.
As part of its ongoing partnership with Google Cloud, SAP will enable the next wave of enterprise AI by supporting and contributing to the new Agent2Agent interoperability protocol, which establishes a foundation for AI agents to securely collaborate across platforms. This open standard is designed to ensure agents from different vendors can interact, share context, and work together, enabling seamless automation across traditionally disconnected systems. The first implementation of the standard is expected to be released in Q3 2025.
SAP and Mistral AI are partnering to bring advanced agentic AI to core finance processes, starting with a new agent, planned for general availability in Q3 2025. A new accruals agent will automate journal entry preparation for accruals by analyzing historical data and financial patterns. The agent will reduce manual work, improve accuracy, and accelerate month-end close to free accountants to focus on higher-value tasks.
In addition, SAP plans to integrate NVIDIA Llama Nemotron reasoning models to enhance AI-driven automation and enable businesses to optimize operations. This integration will advance the reasoning and decision-making capabilities of Joule Agents, deepening their ability to address complex business tasks. General availability is expected Q3 2025.
New AI Foundation Provides an Operating System for SAP Business AI
SAP introduces AI Foundation, the AI operating system for all SAP Business AI solutions to make AI development and operations easier and more productive. AI Foundation gives developers a single entry point for using a full set of tools that help build, extend, and run custom AI solutions and agents at scale.
Composed of new and well-established SAP AI solutions and components, such as the generative AI hub and Joule Studio capabilities and SAP Knowledge Graph solution, AI Foundation will accelerate AI innovation, boost productivity, simplify AI operations through a unified system, and reduce overall total cost of ownership (TCO).
AI Foundation includes these existing SAP solutions, which feature new enhancements:
Joule Studio: Part of the SAP Build solution, Joule Studio helps developers create custom AI. A new skill builder capability, planned for general availability in Q3 2025, will help developers create, deploy, monitor, and manage custom skills for Joule. Joule Studio will also help developers create custom AI agents using low-code and no-code capabilities, with general availability planned for Q4 2025. Read more.
SAP Knowledge Graph: This solution helps Joule provide more accurate answers and allows users to explore data directly within Joule, instead of using complex workflows from each line of business. Initial support for the SAP Cloud ERP and SAP Business Data Cloud solutions is expected to be generally available by Q3 2025. Other lines of business will be added in future.
AI agent hub in SAP LeanIX solutions: This capability uses SAP LeanIX technology to provide organizations with a centralized inventory and governance for its AI agents. Companies can map AI agents to their business capabilities, helping IT managers more easily identify other use cases and lines of business where AI agents could be deployed to optimize their organization. General availability is planned for Q4 2025.
Accelerating Predictive Scenarios Using Tabular Data
AI Foundation will also include a new tabular AI service, based on SAP Foundation Model. Tabular AI will redefine how businesses use structured data for predictive insights. Currently, leveraging structured, tabular data is difficult; it’s often fragmented and siloed with separate AI implementations that lack interoperability or a unified workflow. This service offering makes it easier for enterprises to convert tabular data into actionable insights smoothly and at scale and is planned for general availability in H2 2025.
By consolidating multiple AI services (like data-attribute or personalized recommendations) and embedded matching capabilities, tabular AI simplifies AI adoption for developers and democratizes access to predictive capabilities for business users.
New Feature Promises to Eliminate Cumbersome Prompt Engineering
A standout feature of the AI operating system is its new prompt optimizer, which can quickly create the most effective AI prompts. Developers use prompt engineering—typically manual, time-consuming and cost-intensive—to draft and refine prompts.
The prompt optimizer ushers in a new era that will drastically reduce this effort by automatically generating more effective prompts, customized for large language model (LLM) or specific use case requirements. For complex use cases, customers can reduce days of manual work to minutes. Prompt optimization is unique in its ability to rapidly utilize some of the best available AI LLMs. It automates the complex process of prompt optimization across multiple models, effectively eliminating the need for prompt engineering and letting customers immediately leverage new models without the usual delay caused by manual conversion and testing. It also enables customers to convert the prompts of their own custom AI solutions.
This service was designed collaboratively with Not Diamond, a frontier AI lab renowned for its model-agnostic approach. Leveraging SAP’s framework and Not Diamond’s state-of-the-art technology, the prompt optimizer will help ensure peak performance across a wide range of AI models. This lays the foundation for a multi-model future, where applications are decoupled from specific models and can utilize the most suitable model at any time. Moving forward, organizations can seamlessly utilize AI capabilities without being locked into single-model dependencies, fostering both flexibility and innovation in how businesses build AI solutions. Learn more.
Already in use internally at SAP, the prompt optimizer enhances ready-to-use scenarios in Joule and embedded AI use cases such as the SAP Joule for Consultants solution. A limited customer release program is now available with general availability expected later in 2025. Customers may register to test the prompt optimizer. Learn more.