SAP Unveils New Central AI Hub, Application Agent Suite At Sapphire Event

SAP launched a wave of new AI and agent products and technologies that the software giant said will speed customer AI adoption and help them transform into “autonomous enterprises.”

SAP is taking its artificial intelligence offerings to the next level, debuting today the SAP Business AI Platform, a unified system that combines the SAP Technology Business Platform, SAP Business Data Cloud and SAP Business AI—the latter the company’s earlier AI offerings built into SAP applications—into a single governed environment.

The software giant, which is holding its Sapphire customer and partner event in Orlando this week, also launched the SAP Autonomous Suite, a series of AI agents for specific business functions that augment the company’s existing business applications.

And the company has expanded its Joule generative AI copilot with new functionality including Joule Work, a new user interface for Joule.

“AI is the most significant trend in technology in a generation and, frankly, in society at large in a generation,” said Jeremy Barnum, CFO at financial services giant JPMorganChase, a major SAP customer, speaking during the Sapphire opening keynotes session.

“And as a result, everyone, I think all of us, are experiencing pressure to use it everywhere,” Barnum said. “But in a finance organization, the risk of that is that you sprinkle AI on broken [business] processes and you miss the opportunity to retire technical debt and modernize the entire ecosystem. From our perspective, AI is only as good as the data and processes underneath it.”

The new SAP Business AI Platform, according to SAP, provides the foundation for building, contextualizing, deploying and governing AI agents. The platform “forms the basis for our vision of the future of business, the autonomous enterprise,” SAP CEO Christian Klein (pictured onstage) said, introducing the new offering in his Sapphire keynote.

The concept of the AI-powered “autonomous enterprise,” which incorporates the Business AI Platform, SAP Autonomous Suite and the Joule Work agentic workspace, was the overriding framework at Sapphire for SAP’s announcements.

CEO Klein noted that AI systems today are often only about 80 percent accurate – a poor track record for business operations like financial accounting, payroll and supply chain management. While large language models, meanwhile, are trained on huge volumes of publicly available data, they don’t work well with an organization’s own business data and processes. And many agents fail to comply with governance or security requirements.

SAP AI Business Platform, Autonomous Suite Details

At its core the SAP Business AI Platform includes the SAP Knowledge Graph data modeling technology, introduced in 2024, that connects business data with semantic context across SAP systems.

The AI Platform unifies the functionality of the SAP Business Technology Platform, the company’s PaaS system for application and data integration and automation, the SAP Business Data Cloud that unifies and governs SAP and third-party data, and the earlier SAP Business AI portfolio of enterprise-grade AI capabilities embedded into SAP applications.

“We’re so excited about Business AI platform, a platform that is designed to close the adoption gap by delivering outcome, speed, enterprise readiness, and, of course, all the context you need. It’s the place where you build, contextualize, reason and govern AI, end to end,” SAP CTO Philipp Herzig said during the Sapphire Keynote.

The SAP Autonomous Suite is a collection of Joule agentic assistants that work with SAP’s existing applications, including its flagship S/4HANA applications, to help automate end-to-end business processes.

“The power of the new AI platform enables us to transform our software application layer, and as a result we are re-imagining how your businesses will run our ERP and industry applications,” Klein said.

The suite includes 50 domain-specific Joule Assistants across finance, supply chain, procurement, human capital management and customer experience. The Joule Assistants, in turn, orchestrate a subset of more than 200 specialized tasks. And the suite includes Industry AI, domain-specific agents with vertical industry knowledge and processes.

Industry solutions have always been the superpower of SAP,” said Sebastian Steinhaeuser, SAP COO, during the keynote presentations. “Real business transformation requires deep industry understanding.”

SAP’s vision with the new Joule Work user experience interface is that users will now interact primarily with Joule across all SAP applications rather than navigating individual applications and entering data across multiple screens. Users will describe a desired business outcome, according to the company, and Joule will orchestrate the workflows, data and agents to accomplish the task.

A new AI Agent Hub will also be generally available in the third quarter of this year.

The AI roadmap presented by SAP executives at Sapphire also included several recent acquisitions by the company.

In March the company struck a deal to buy master data management platform developer Reltio and today Herzig said that technology will be used within the SAP Business Data Cloud to create a master data record of SAP and non-SAP data that agents can tap into.

Earlier this month SAP announced a deal to acquire Dremio, which develops a data lakehouse that supports the Apache Iceberg data table standard. The Dremio technology will be used to transform the SAP Business Data Cloud into an agentic data lakehouse to power AI agents, according to Herzig.

Go To Market Services And The Channel

SAP is revising its Rise with SAP and SAP Grow service programs to accelerate AI adoption, including providing access to the Joule Assistants portfolio, and introducing new ERP migration Joule assistants. (SAP Rise is the company’s business transformation services for migrating legacy on-premises SAP applications to SAP S/4HANA Cloud. SAP Grow is a bundle of applications and services that mid-size businesses use to rapidly adopt SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition.)

Klein announced the creation of a €100 million fund for the company’s partner ecosystem to help customers deploy SAP-built AI assistants and agents. The fund is also available to partners that extend or build new partner agents on the SAP Business AI Platform using Joule Studio.

In a pre-Sapphire interview with CRN Sid Misra, chief marketing officer for SAP Business Technology Platform, said the Sapphire announcements open up new opportunities for partners by offering a unified platform that partners can use to develop AI extensions and custom agents for their clients.

SAP’s AI offensive comes at a time when some SAP customers are taking steps to upgrade their systems. Mainstream support and maintenance for aging SAP ECC (ERP Central Component) applications expire at the end of 2027. And many customers, perhaps more than half of SAP’s core ERP customer base, are still running on-premises software despite the fact that SAP is limiting most of its new AI capabilities to its cloud software.

Just last week, Lemongrass, an SAP consulting and transformation services partner, and cbs, a global SAP consulting firm specializing in data migration and transformation projects, announced that they had completed a complex SAP transition project for Propelis, a global marketing services company. The work, completed in eight months, included moving from a shared ECC system to S/4HANA.

Eamonn O’Neill, CTO and co-founder at Dublin, Ireland-based Lemongrass, said in a pre-Sapphire interview with CRN that many clients today are looking to upgrade their SAP systems and, while doing so, adopt AI capabilities as quickly as possible.

“How can we maximize the amount of AI they can access. That’s the big demand from customers right now,” O’Neill said. “Everybody wants to know what they can get their hands on [and] how they can see real AI, agentic AI, working around SAP. And the good news is it’s possible today.”

“We’re saying: ‘Look AI today. But also modernize. Don’t stop the modernization. Keep going on the SAP roadmap, get the S/4HANA, get the Rise with SAP. The more you do that, the more access you’ll have to innovation,’” O’Neill said. Clients who don’t run SAP upgrades and AI adoption in parallel are “missing out on an opportunity to reduce costs massively.”

PwC, a major provider of implementation and business transformation services around SAP software, is also seeing significant demand for its services as clients look to upgrade their SAP applications—often as part of broader digital modernization initiatives, said Cory King, a principal at PwC who recently took over as the firm’s U.S. SAP alliance leader.

While customers are looking to migrate off their aging ECC systems, many use the projects as a chance to simplify their IT landscapes, eliminate “technical debt” and remove old customizations and extensions that prevent them from getting to a “clean core,” King said, also in a pre-Sapphire interview with CRN.

“They’re really doing what I call application rationalizations” and “lots of workflow redesigns,” King said. “Having an ERP foundation that is modernized and ready to roll is incredibly important.”

Many clients, of course, are asking for AI, King said, and “expectations are certainly super-high” for initiative outcomes. But many are also wary of starting AI projects and generally underestimate what’s required from a personnel perspective. The PwC executive said his firm has been applying AI during customer engagements to reduce the amount of time clients have to be involved and using AI to help eliminate risk during the project work.

“At the highest level, it’s transforming how we do work,” King said of AI. “From the way we do projects to the way that we work internally, to the way our internal business runs, it’s changing significantly because of AI. And frankly, we're disrupting ourselves every day with bringing new AI tools into the way we do business.”

“And it’s really just the beginning, in my mind,” he said.