SAP CX adds loyalty management, AI agents

SAP previewed new additions to its CX lineup, which will include Joule agents for sales and service and a customer loyalty management platform.

SAP has organized CX around its Engagement Cloud, which is planned for February 2026 release. In addition to connecting marketing, service, CRM and e-commerce apps, the Engagement Cloud will also include a loyalty management platform and Joule agents for marketing, service and sales. The loyalty platform will be based on a wallet metaphor, which can support common models such as "earn and burn" points-based programs, segmented offers to subsets of customers, personalized rewards and engagement incentives.

The sales agent for CRM will eventually automate quotes, pricing data, proposals and order flow between sales representatives and customers, making processes more "touchless," said Balaji Balasubramanian, president and chief product officer of SAP Customer Experience and Consumer Industries. Sales reps can step in and take control at any time, but with agentic AI, they act more like a relationship monitor than do current sales reps, who spend a lot of daily time facilitating those processes and jumping between apps manually entering data.

Customer service is also ripe for automation with agentic AI to automate processes and potentially drive better CX outcomes because of AI's ability to instantaneously plumb massive data sets, said Gartner analyst Brad Jashinsky.

Take the example of product returns: AI agents that work simultaneously with customer loyalty and customer service platforms can potentially drive higher customer retention outcomes than platforms working alone in siloed environments, with humans, or with non-generative AI tools.

"Being able to have an agent that is able to make updates within a loyalty platform and the customer service platform and provide a whole set of workflows?" Jashinsky said. "Today, you could do that manually, but when trying to do that across thousands, tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of SKUs…it's hard to map all those individually."

SAP's goal is to connect business processes, including ERP, HR, logistics, supply chain, front-office and CX into a unified platform, Balasubramanian said.

"We believe that making a harmonized suite of applications delivers immense value, especially in the AI-first world that we live in," Balasubramanian said. "Processes cut across domains, [and] boundaries cut across applications, people and their roles. By bridging [gaps] and bringing that together as a fully formed, integrated suite, then we can uncover a lot of value for our customers."

That said, agentic AI tools -- regardless of vendor -- leave some work for customers to do before switching them on. They need a firm foundation upon which they're built, otherwise the tools are unlikely to realize their potential, Jashinsky said.

"AI and generative AI have real promise, but they require strategy, and they require really careful implementation, significant integration and clean data [that isn't] siloed," Jashinsky said. "The same issues that have plagued brands that are trying to do digital transformations for a number of years don't magically go away with agentic AI."

SAP previewed 15 Joule agents to come spread across ERP, HR, CX and other applications in its business cloud suite at the SAP Connect user conference this week in Las Vegas.

Don Fluckinger is a senior news writer for Informa TechTarget. He covers customer experience, digital experience management and end-user computing. Got a tip? Email him.