SAP is transforming its Business Suite into an AI-first platform, introducing role-aware assistants and a data architecture meant to dissolve long-standing silos. Unveiled at the company’s recent SAP Connect event in Las Vegas, the updates center on Joule—SAP’s AI copilot integrated across cloud applications—which now coordinates squads of specialized agents across sectors from supply chain to customer experience.
The pitch seems to be: here’s AI that partners with people, not a bolt-on chatbot but a coordinating layer that routes work to the right agent and returns auditable results.
Joule’s new approach is explicitly role-based. A finance lead might work with a Financial Planning Assistant that in turn orchestrates agents for cash management and accruals. A people manager can call on a People Intelligence Agent to surface compensation anomalies. In supply chain, SAP’s new Supply Chain Orchestration links Joule with a live knowledge graph to spot multi-tier risks and coordinate responses before disruptions cascade.
SAP says it has added more than 40 agents across ERP, HR and consumer experience.
Boosting Connectivity
Supporting the assistants is a data move that boosts connectivity. SAP Business Data Cloud Connect offers zero-copy sharing of semantically rich SAP data into customers’ existing platforms. The first connector, with Databricks, is available now, and support for Google BigQuery is planned for 2026.
The goal is to sidestep ETL pipelines that duplicate data and inject latency, letting external platforms query SAP-harmonized objects (think purchase orders normalized across systems) in place and in real time. If it works as described, it could decrease both the cost and the lag of feeding AI with trusted operational data.
Customer experience is getting its own agentic lift. SAP previewed a loyalty platform built around a wallet model to support points, targeted offers and personalized rewards. Within the CX suite, Joule agents for sales and service aim to make quotes, pricing, proposals and order flow far less manual. Sales reps can step in anytime, but the default is touchless. That vision extends to service and returns: agents moving across service data could tailor retention offers at scale, something that’s difficult when systems operate in isolation.
Driving Targeted Outreach
SAP is also organizing front-office tools under a new Engagement Cloud, which uses business context to drive targeted outreach across customers, suppliers and partners. Engagement Cloud is slated for general availability in February 2026. In the interim, marketing, sales and service teams can trial agent-assisted workflows that promise faster campaign setup and more consistent follow-through.
These shifts by SAP appear coordinated to appeal to enterprises that prefer to avoid a multi-vendor infrastructure. Stitching together stacks of disconnected apps increases integration costs regardless of individual vendors. In theory, an AI-driven approach offers an intelligent system that can manage the hiccups of mixed vendor interoperability.
Whether this all will work seamlessly is an open question. In any case, enterprise buyers will need a robust layer of governance and change management tools to trust agents with consequential tasks.
Still, SAP’s strategy here is clearly forward-looking: collapse data boundaries, put coordination in the AI layer, and embed agents where work happens. If customers can match that architecture with disciplined data practices, the suite’s AI turn could offer true competitive advantage.
