SAP Democratises Joule for ‘Pervasive Enterprise AI’

SAP is holding its SAP Sapphire 2025 global convention this week in Orlando (USA), the European edition of which will be held next week in Madrid.

Of course, the key player is once again the generative AI co-pilot SAP Joule, which is becoming more sophisticated and expanding throughout the ecosystem of Europe’s largest software maker. This is what the ICT market dictates: a massive adoption of generative AI in enterprise environments to facilitate the daily work of users and also increase the scalability of services offered by organisations.

However, there has also been an announcement that should not go unnoticed because of its potential impact on the enterprise AI market. So far, we have seen major manufacturers developing and deploying their own AI co-pilots and agents, each with their own peculiarities yet under the same premise of assisting in manual tasks and dealing with large volumes of information that humans are ‘slow’ to process.

Nontheless, they are doing so independently of the rest of the alternatives in terms of assistants or co-pilots available from other manufacturers. The result is that AI silos are being created, a problem for companies that are working with different technologies at the same time.

Well, SAP has announced during Sapphire 2025 the two-way integration between SAP Joule and Microsoft 365 Copilot to deliver a unified AI experience. In practice, this integration will allow both assistants to communicate with each other, understand each other and exchange corporate data to respond much more efficiently to user queries.

SAP has confirmed that this integration, which had already been discussed last year, will become available in Q2, while two-way communication between the two AI platforms will be launched in Q3 2025. This is an important move that could lay the groundwork for future partnerships with other manufacturers to improve the user experience. Moreover, the next step could be the integration of AI agents, those capable of interacting with each other without the need for human intervention.

Joule expands into SAP portfolio

In addition to this announcement, SAP has unveiled the expansion of its AI co-pilot Joule across a wide range of the company’s solutions, including SAP Ariba Procurement, SAP Field Service Management, SAP Fieldglass, SAP Signavio, SAP Integrated Business Planning, SAP BTP Cockpit, Customer Experience, SAP Mobile Start and components of SAP Business Data Cloud. New capabilities based on customer feedback have also been introduced, such as a usage metrics dashboard, support for streaming responses, conversation threads, conversation insights and context-aware conversational search, as well as support for 11 languages.

SAP CEO Christian Klein said during his presentation, ‘With the expansion of Joule, our partnerships with leading AI pioneers and advances in SAP Business Data Cloud, we are making enterprise AI a reality as we drive digital transformations that help our customers thrive in an increasingly unpredictable world.

SAP AI Foundation partners with Joule as it takes off

In parallel to Joule, SAP has introduced an expanded library of AI agents. These agents are designed to ‘reinvent business processes and workflows from the ground up’ as they said on the opening day of the conference.

Driven by real-time business data and orchestrated by Joule, these agents operate across systems and lines of business to anticipate, adapt and act autonomously, enabling organisations to remain agile. Unlike traditional AI, these agents can reason over business problems, coordinate across systems, decide what actions to take and execute them (with human oversight). The new agents cover critical areas such as customer experience, supply chain management, expense management, finance and human capital management.

To support this AI expansion, SAP has announced SAP AI Foundation, an AI development operating system of sorts that transforms the way enterprises build, deploy and scale artificial intelligence solutions. AI Foundation provides developers a single entry point with a comprehensive set of tools to build, scale and run custom AI solutions and agents at scale.

It includes components such as the Generative AI hub, Joule Studio (which enables the creation of custom skills and agents with low-code/no-code capabilities), and SAP Knowledge Graph capabilities (which powers Joule’s ability to provide accurate answers by exploring data). It will also integrate with SAP LeanIX for inventory and centralised governance of AI agents. A standout feature is a new prompt optimiser that drastically reduces prompt engineering effort, automatically generating the most effective prompt for any large language model (LLM) or use case.

While still in this block and also related to new partnerships, SAP announced a collaboration with AI engine Perplexity that enhances Joule’s ability to solve complex business problems by integrating structured and unstructured data. Using Perplexity and SAP Knowledge Graph technology, Joule can respond instantly with real-time and visual information within SAP workflows, allowing, for example, the impact of external events on the business to be predicted using internal data.

News beyond AI, but also with AI

In the area of cloud applications, SAP has introduced SAP Business Suite packages. This new modular approach aims to simplify customers’ interaction with the SAP portfolio, providing an easy entry point and aligning capabilities with key lines of business: finance, supply chain operations, human resources, procurement and sales. These packages offer enterprise-wide integration and intelligence and can be extended with additional functionality. The packages combine Cloud ERP, enterprise applications, SAP Business Data Cloud and SAP Business AI, all powered by the SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP). SAP Build is integrated into these packages, allowing organisations to customise applications.

SAP has also unveiled new intelligent applications for SAP Business Data Cloud. SAP Business Data Cloud is the company’s reference data and AI solution. The intelligent applications are pre-built and composable, integrating data products, AI capabilities and business simulations to support business leaders. They go beyond traditional analytics, automating and orchestrating work through analytical and transactional workflows, enabling customers to make decisions and take action within the Business Data Cloud.

In addition to Joule Studio for agent and skill creation, new AI capabilities for developers are introduced within the SAP Build Work Zone and AI capabilities for ABAP, accelerating application development. SAP Build capabilities for SAP Business Suite extension are also expanded, with an enhanced interface as a central entry point, an extensibility wizard for SAP Cloud ERP and SAP SuccessFactors, integration with SAP Business Data Cloud to discover data products, and support for event-driven applications and extensions. Simplified pricing and packaging for SAP Build has been announced.

SAP Integration Suite is also receiving enhancements, including a new user experience with AI capabilities for more efficient development, an AI adapter for designing integration workflows with LLMs, and AI-driven API trends and predictions. New integration adapters have been added for a variety of third-party systems. The SAP Business Accelerator Hub is updated with accelerators and the ability to search for AI-specific APIs, events and integrations.

Enhancements to SAP HANA Cloud include the ability to selectively migrate HANA database objects to HANA Cloud using self-service technology to accelerate deployments. Improved consumption monitoring and cost visibility is also introduced.

Additionally, SAP has announced that the SAP Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) solution is now available on SAP BTP. This is crucial for a successful data strategy, improving security and privacy and delivering personalised experiences, as the vendor claims.

Next week we will be covering the European edition of SAP Sapphire 2025, to be held at IFEMA (Madrid) on 27-29 May, where the manufacturer will be bringing all these innovations to the local market.