SAP ‘Supercharging’ Joule AI Copilot With New Agent Capabilities

Holding its TechEd Virtual event this week, the software giant is also significantly expanding its SAP Build development tools offerings and debuting new Knowledge Graph software for Joule to provide data context for AI tasks.

Software giant SAP is expanding the capabilities of its Joule generative AI copilot, adding collaborative AI agents that the company says help complete cross-disciplinary tasks and embedding Joule more deeply within SAP’s product portfolio.

SAP, which is holding its SAP TechEd Virtual conference this week, also unveiled new Knowledge Graph software that maps data relationships across SAP systems and a wave of new SAP Build developer tools and functionality for extending SAP software.

“This is the new SAP and the new SAP is about meeting our customers where they are,” said JG Chirapurath, SAP chief marketing and solutions officer, in an interview with CRN about the TechEd announcements. “It is not for us to go in and tell them what to do. It’s for us to basically listen, understand where our customers are and offer them simple, easy-to-use solutions that meet the market and meet their needs.”

SAP launched its Joule copilot software in September 2023 to work with the company’s enterprise cloud application portfolio to improve user productivity and drive more effective business outcomes. At this year’s Sapphire conference in June SAP detailed plans to expand Joule integrations with additional SAP software including SAP Ariba procurement applications and SAP Analytics Cloud software.

“We are seeing a pretty significant uptake of the usage of AI in our applications,” Chirapurath said, noting that SAP makes AI available in three ways: Through scenarios within SAP applications themselves, through the SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) and through the Joule copilot.

The CMO said SAP also sees “a ton of uptake” of the company’s AI capabilities among its channel partners, including partners that are building AI systems that work with SAP applications and SAP data.

“AI is simply the next frontier of ways that partners can make money with us,” he said. “By helping us define that future for our customers and for their benefit, it basically makes a whole new business and whole new revenue stream for them. “To me, the value of the partner in the AI equation cannot be overstated.”

This week at TechEd Virtual SAP said it will infuse Joule with multiple autonomous AI agents that will “combine their unique expertise across business functions to collaboratively accomplish complex workflows,” said Muhammad Alam, SAP head of product engineering, in a press conference prior to the TechEd Virtual event.

“We’re supercharging Joule,” Alam said. “Our announcements with Juul mark a major moment in how business gets done for our customers. We are introducing collaborative AI agents, which increase Joule’s capability to speak the language of our customers, entire businesses. These AI agents will help organizations unlock massive productivity gains by breaking down silos.”

Unlike software supported by AI agents that perform singular tasks, the latest additions will allow Joule to perform more complex workflows by bringing multiple specialized agents together to perform their expert business processes – SAP cited procurement, supply chain management and finance as examples – to achieve a collective objective.

The first out-of-the-box autonomous AI agent use cases SAP is introducing are a dispute management use case to employ AI agents to analyze and resolve a range of dispute scenarios and a financial accounting use case where AI agents automate and streamline key financial processes.

SAP this week is also debuting new core capabilities in Joule including custom skills and improved analytics. Joule is also expected to support 80 percent of SAP’s most-used business tasks by the end of the year. Also this quarter, the company will release Joule Studio within SAP Build.

In the first quarter of 2025 developers will be able to extend Joule by building their own autonomous AI agent use cases using SAP Build. Also in early 2025, Joule will have the capability to translate natural language inquiries within business applications and provide insights based on real-time data from SAP data and analytics software.

Of particular interest to SAP’s systems integration partners will be the availability of SAP Consulting Capability for Joule in the first quarter of 2025. That functionality will make consultants more efficient with SAP implementations and cloud migrations, which the company said will help systems integrators increase their project capacity and financial margins.

By the end of this year Joule will be available to work with the SAP HANA Cloud database, the SAP S/4 HANA Public Cloud Edition application suite, SAP Sales Cloud, SAP LeanIX, SAP Sagnavio and SAP Mobile Start and be incorporated into the SAP Business Technology Platform cockpit user interface. (Joule was incorporated into SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition in July.) By the first quarter of 2025 Joule will be available in the SAP Service Cloud and SAP Concur applications.

SAP announced expanded engagements with a number of its strategic AI partners including PwC, Anthropic, Mistral AI, IBM and HCLTech. And the company is making a number of updates this quarter to its generative AI hub capability within SAP AI Core and SAP AI Launchpad.

The software giant also introduced SAP Knowledge Graph for Joule, which connects data within SAP systems with the business context captured within SAP applications. The company said Knowledge Graph will “play a critical role in grounding AI models” and enabling them to deliver more reliable, context-aware insights. Knowledge Graph will be available through SAP Datasphere and Joule in early 2025 with an initial focus on SAP S/4HANA.

“In the era of data and analytics, and AI in particular, the meaning of data is as important as the data itself, because that understanding gives copilots like Juul that much more intelligence,” Chirapurath said.

Alam said Knowledge Graph for Joule “will unlock the full value of SAP data by connecting it with the rich context captured in SAP applications.”

On the application development front SAP unveiled a number of enhancements to its SAP Build suite of low-code and pro-code application development and automation tools. The new capabilities include streamlined SAP S/4HANA extension development, new generative AI capabilities, and expanded access to ABAP development tools.

“We want our developers to be as productive as possible,” Chirapurath said. “And when you talk about developer productivity, you can't have developers go to three different places to build anything. The day you do that you have disserved your developers [and] you've also disserved your applications.

“The benefit to the customer and to benefit to the SAP developer is that they only have to work with one development tool, a single development tool, and they can work in the language or the environment of their choice.”

“The whole perspective is to unify the development experience and the development task that a typical SAP developer does, to make this useful and helpful to them,” the CMO said.

Joule will play a key role here as well. By the end of this year Joule will be integrated into the SAP Build Work Zone low-code tool for building web sites. In early 2025 ABAP developers will be able to use Joule to generate high-quality code and unit tests that comply with SAP’s ABAP Cloud development model. And Joule also will make it easier to generate explanations for legacy code, making it easier to modernize legacy applications and migrate to new applications, according to SAP.

And a number of new generative AI capabilities provided with the Rise with SAP and Grow with SAP software and service packages are designed to optimize and accelerate cloud migration decisions and processes.

SAP also unveiled a new option for partners to develop custom ABAP code in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, providing a standardized way for partners to build, ship and maintain application add-ons. The company announced new embedded data lake capabilities for SAP Datasphere. And the company expanded its portfolio of learning and certifications for developers and tech professionals with 60 new role-based certifications.