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SAP unveils agentic AI tools to partially automate ERP suite
Major upgrades to Joule UI and Studio developer tool and 50 new teams of agents for typical tasks across five key business processes rely on a data foundation said to be unified.
ORLANDO, Fla. At its annual Sapphire conference, SAP unleashed an onslaught of AI applications and development and data management tools under new brands called SAP Business AI and SAP Autonomous Suite. The vendor characterized the new products as components of still another brand, an aspirational phrase for what's possible with the technology: the Autonomous Enterprise.
ERP vendors have faced increasing questions about the relevance of their platforms as special-purpose AI apps take over many tasks previously handled by people, insulating them from the complexities of the underlying transactional system.
Indeed, the opening-day stage presentations and press materials were notable for how rarely they mentioned SAP's main ERP platforms, S/4HANA and its predecessor, Business Suite. Moving customers from aging on-premises Business Suite systems to S/4HANA, especially the public cloud version, has been a priority of SAP for years. The urgency might be expected to be frenzied with SAP's 2027 deadline looming, but S/4HANA and two methodologies designed to facilitate the move, Grow with SAP and Rise with SAP, were typically mentioned as means to the benefits of AI rather than S/4HANA.
Still, SAP was careful to emphasize the continued importance of ERP, the technology at the center of its 54-year history.
"The ERP is still the trusted system of record running your company," SAP CEO Christian Klein said during the keynote, adding that it is also the "brain" that AI's large language models access for information. An LLM first finds "the right process from thousands of business processes in your company," Klein said. "Then, with the knowledge graph, [it] selects exactly the right data from over seven million data fields stored in your ERP landscape. And finally, before the outcome is shared, we check all your identity and authorization rules to ensure the outcome is not only accurate, but also compliant."
Closing the AI data gap
Providing AI with the information it needs to understand different business processes and reliably perform useful work has been a priority for AI users and vendors in recent months. In a press release, SAP asserted that Business AI Platform closes that gap by unifying Business Technology Platform (SAP's integration and development package), Business Data Cloud (the data management and integration platform) and Business AI into a single, governed environment.
Highlights of the product introductions include the following:
- 50 domain-specific Joule AI assistants that coordinate teams of 224 agents for finance, supply chain, procurement, human capital management and customer engagement.
- SAP Knowledge Graph, which helps LLMs make sense of data by providing a sort of map, is now integrated into the Joule AI assistant.
- Eight industry-specific autonomous AI packages.
- Joule Work, a dashboard for conducting all ERP operations through Joule instead of interacting with separate applications.
- Joule Studio 2.0, which SAP said has been opened to accept external LLMs and is now integrated with the context layer of SAP's AI architecture.
- Anthropic's Claude AI model is integrated throughout Business AI.
The new products are being released now through the end of the year.
"We're very excited because we index on culture, and what our staff really doesn't care about is jargon, newfangled UIs and concepts," said Britt East, CIO of John Boos & Co., a manufacturer of kitchen products and equipment, in an interview at Sapphire. "What they do care about is the semantic layer of engaging with systems seamlessly. There's a lot of applications our users have to know when to use, so if they could just go through Joule to get everything, that's a dream."
Business AI brand expanded with new products
SAP, like all its major competitors, has been coming out with business AI tools for years. So, what's Business AI, and what's new about it?
"Business AI really doubles down on the business context," Richard Grandpierre, SAP vice president of product management for Business AI, said in an interview. "It is a brand; it is an umbrella term. It is not a distinct product. There are distinct products within that brand, such as Joule, Joule for Consultants, Joule for Developers, and all of the AI capabilities and features that we released."
The announcements follow a similar agentic AI move that Oracle, SAP's top ERP competitor, made in April when it introduced 22 teams of agents for HR, finance, supply chain and customer experience.
David Essex is an industry editor who creates in-depth content on enterprise applications, emerging technology and market trends for several Informa TechTarget websites.
