Artificial Intelligence
SAP continues to ground artificial intelligence innovations to real business results through Joule, its generative AI copilot. This week, SAP announces significant enhancements to Joule by introducing collaborative AI agents, expanding its capabilities across many lines of business and embedding it more deeply within SAP’s portfolio.
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SAP Transforms Joule with Collaborative AI Agents
SAP announces that it will infuse Joule, its generative AI copilot, with multiple autonomous AI agents that will combine their unique expertise across business functions to collaboratively accomplish complex workflows. Available in Q4 2024, these AI agents will help organizations unlock massive productivity gains by breaking down silos and freeing workers to collaborate on areas where human ingenuity thrives.
“Collaborative AI agents from SAP will push us into the next era of enterprise productivity,” said Philipp Herzig, Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer at SAP. “Because SAP applications support all business functions, we’re uniquely positioned to deliver autonomous AI agents that can help every enterprise.”
Unlike solutions supported by lone AI agents that are only trained to perform one type of task, Joule will perform much more complex workflows by bringing multiple specialized AI agents together in a way that lets them each perform their expert business processes – such as in supply chain, procurement, or finance – and adapt their strategies to achieve their collective objective. Like all of SAP’s artificial intelligence innovations, Joule will do this following the company’s strict ethical, business and privacy guidelines, while also keeping humans in the driver’s seat.
SAP is introducing two out-of-the-box autonomous AI agent use cases, bringing unprecedented productivity gains to the finance sector based on Joule’s expert capabilities:
A dispute management use case will employ autonomous AI agents to analyze and resolve a range of dispute resolution scenarios, including incorrect and missing invoices, unapplied credits and denied or duplicate payments.
A financial accounting use case will employ autonomous AI agents to streamline key financial processes by automating tasks such as bill payments, invoice processing, and ledger updates while quickly addressing any inconsistencies or errors that arise.
In Q1 2025, developers will be able to extend Joule by building their own autonomous AI agent use cases with SAP Build.
SAP Expands and Elevates Joule to Drive Business Innovation
SAP’s vision of a generative AI copilot that truly speaks the language of business is now a reality. On the eve of Joule’s one-year anniversary, in addition to the agentic capabilities set to debut by year-end, Joule boasts new core capabilities including custom skills and improved analytical insights. Joule will also support 80 percent of SAP’s most-used business tasks by the end of the year, and SAP announces expanded capabilities in existing Joule integrations across the SAP portfolio.
Amplifying Joule’s Impact
SAP continually improves Joule’s core capabilities to enhance the user experience and business outcomes:
In Q4 2024, SAP will release Joule studio in SAP Build. Joule studio will provide a dedicated environment for businesses to create, deploy, monitor and manage custom skills for Joule developed with low-code, no-code capabilities. Custom skills, which complement Joule’s out-of-the-box capabilities from SAP, extend conversational AI to organization-specific workflows. Additionally, customers can now integrate any third-party system into Joule for an entirely integrated conversational user experience.
By Q1 2025, Joule will translate natural language inquiries within business applications into insights based on real-time data from SAP data and analytics solutions. This helps enterprises unlock the value of their data and uncover business insights faster.
SAP Consulting Capability for Joule will launch in Q1 2025. The new capability, announced at the SAP Sapphire conference, helps system integrators increase financial margins and firm capacity by making every consultant more efficient at SAP implementations and cloud transformations. Consultants will save time with on-demand expert-level answers grounded in content from more than 50 SAP certifications and over 2 terabytes of curated SAP content. They will also have access to automated text summaries that explain the purpose, logic and structure of code to save time when assessing legacy ABAP code for migration.
Tasks such as document uploads will be streamlined by the end of the year, so users can drag and drop files directly into relevant conversations. Ongoing innovation also means that by Q1 2025, the copilot will operate more like a trusted colleague who knows company-specific terms and shorthand. With conversation threads, Joule will be able to pick up and put down topics of conversation to accommodate multitasking, enabling users to transition workstreams then resume their original thread without losing context.
Broadening Joule’s Presence
SAP also is focused on offering Joule to more users. By Q1 2025, Joule will be available in the SAP Service Cloud solution and SAP Concur solutions. Also:
Joule will be available to use with SAP HANA Cloud by the end of this year, making the database easier to use for full-stack engineers and other system administrators who work across multiple technologies. Joule will provide navigational assistance for SAP HANA Cloud, streamline repetitive tasks, summarize performance data alerts and enable users to ask questions in natural language that previously required extensive knowledge of database administrative tasks or query semantics. Joule will also identify and summarize root causes of performance issues and recommend steps to resolve the issues, ultimately reducing IT administration costs
Joule will be available by the end of the year for all SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition customers. Additionally, in Q1 of 2025, Joule capabilities will expand to support key functions including sales professionals, warehouse clerks and project managers.
Joule will soon be able to look across a company’s supply chain data and propose solutions for supply chain challenges in simple, natural language. SAP’s unique access to data across a business’s supply chain enables Joule to provide an unmatched level of transparency and insight to address complex issues. SAP now offers Joule across the SAP Integrated Business Planning solution, the SAP Digital Manufacturing solution, and the SAP Asset Performance Management application. SAP will continue to roll out Joule across the entire SAP Supply Chain portfolio, building the foundation of an autonomous AI-enabled supply chain with use cases available by the end of Q1 2025 including:
SAP Integrated Business Planning: Demand, supply, and inventory planners can interact with Joule to gain insights into variables, constraints, and recommended solutions, leading to more informed decisions and proactive planning.
Recipe Formulation: Joule can assist in developing, enhancing, and customizing recipes to expedite product innovations, enhance productivity, and support product compliance and sustainability for manufacturers of formulated products.
In Q4 2024, Joule will be available in the SAP Sales Cloud solution with navigational and task-management assistance, including updating opportunities, scheduling appointments and viewing relevant information from SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition.
By the end of the year, Joule will help SAP LeanIX solutions users manage and optimize their IT landscape faster with conversational access to insights. Users can ask natural language to ask questions about their applications and underlying IT infrastructure, and Joule will provide links to the most relevant architectural objects, reports and diagrams. Additionally, Joule will have full access to the SAP LeanIX public documentation to increase time-to-value.
In Q4 2024, Joule will help SAP Signavio solutions users understand, improve and transform their business processes by using natural language requests to quickly access process diagrams, simplify navigation and get recommendations on process KPIs.
Extending Joule’s Influence
Joule’s capabilities also continue to mature where it is already embedded in the SAP solution portfolio:
Joule will be available in SAP Mobile Start in Q4 2024, including assisted Q&A, approvals, providing and requesting feedback and accessing people profiles. This means users who are traveling or away from their computers can still work efficiently with Joule.
Joule will be incorporated into SAP BTP cockpit – the user interface for administering SAP BTP accounts – by the end of the year. Platform administrators will be able to ask Joule for recommendations related to SAP BTP services or administration. Joule can be directed to perform transactional scenarios like creating a subaccount, onboarding users, and answering questions about SAP BTP administrations in general. The copilot will also ensure all steps are taken in the correct sequence and confirm necessary prerequisites are complete before beginning specific activations.
Updates to SAP Fiori in Q1 2025 will enable developers to create SAP Fiori elements apps directly from an image using SAP Build. Adding to the ability to build an app directly from a business requirements document, Joule will help developers create a near-fully formed app in minutes rather than manually building an app over the course of days or weeks.
SAP Knowledge Graph to Unlock Business Context Across SAP Ecosystem
SAP announces SAP Knowledge Graph, a new solution that will unlock the full value of SAP data by connecting it with the rich business context captured in SAP applications. It comes preloaded with a comprehensive representation of SAP’s business entities (including ABAP tables, CDS views, APIs, and key data models), and will play a critical role in grounding AI models and enabling them to deliver more reliable, context-aware insights. Accessible through SAP Datasphere and Joule in Q1 2025, it will help root AI in SAP-specific business semantics, reducing the risk of inaccurate or irrelevant results and making it easier for organizations to build intelligent applications and leverage generative AI more effectively.
In its initial release, this solution will focus on SAP S/4HANA, providing a semantic layer that connects over 450,000 ABAP tables, 80,000 CDS views and thousands of SAP Fiori applications, along with OData APIs and entity sets. By offering ready-to-use relationships between entities like purchase orders, invoices, and customers, the solution significantly reduces the complexity of manual data modeling.
SAP is already using SAP Knowledge Graph in its internal development efforts. One notable example is its use with the SAP Foundation Model for structured data, which was introduced earlier this year. The solution is instrumental in training this model, ensuring that its predictions and insights use SAP’s vast business context. Unlike conventional AI models focused on unstructured data (such as text and images), the model is tailored to understand, analyze, and predictively complete structured data (such as the database tables that form the business backbone of SAP's suite of enterprise cloud solutions).
SAP Expands Strategic AI Partnerships
SAP announces expanded engagements with strategic AI partners to further support developers innovating in AI and to accelerate technical advancements:
Anthropic: SAP introduces Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet in Amazon Bedrock to generative AI hub, a capability within SAP AI Core that makes it easy to build generative AI use cases for SAP applications. The introduction of Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet will help to facilitate the creation of high-quality use case patterns.
HCLTech: HCLTech announces a newly built AI Center of Excellence in Munich focused on developing AI use cases for the AI Foundation on SAP BTP, which enables developers to create and manage AI projects. More details available here.
IBM: SAP announces the addition of IBM Granite, IBM’s flagship series of transparent and efficient LLMs, to the growing repository of AI models available in generative AI hub. More details available here.
Meta: SAP continues to execute its multi-vendor strategy for LLMs with the addition of Meta Llama 3.1 70B, which is built to deliver performance and cost efficiency.
Mistral AI: SAP continues to expand its partnership with Mistral AI by adding Mistral Large 2, a text generation model with advanced reasoning capabilities, to generative AI hub. SAP has access to the Mistral Codestral model, which will further enhance SAP ABAP LLM code-generation capabilities and development tools.
PwC: PwC announces it is using generative AI capabilities based on SAP’s generative AI hub to help customers generate and streamline gap assessments of their value chains for human rights and environmental compliance.
SAP Announces Updates to Generative AI Hub
SAP announces improvements to the generative AI hub capability in SAP AI Core and SAP AI Launchpad by the end of Q4 2024 that will let developers build, customize, and deploy complex AI-driven solutions more efficiently and with greater confidence. These improvements will let customers tailor interactions to generate relevant and personalized results, as well as improving extensibility, scalability and access to the latest and most powerful foundation models.
Developers will be able to:
Create sophisticated AI-driven applications by customizing pre-trained AI models for specific business purposes through a guided process in generative AI hub. A simplified integration and customization process lets developers deliver innovations faster and more precisely, enabling more relevant and effective AI-driven solutions for better business outcomes.
Easily integrate advanced AI capabilities into web applications with new software development kit (SDK) support for ABAP, Java and Javascript in generative AI hub. This user-friendly toolkit makes it easier to embed intelligent features like chatbots and content generators, speeding up development and giving users more context-aware and relevant AI-generated content.
Access generative AI hub capabilities from custom ABAP applications using the ABAP AI SDK powered by the intelligent scenario lifecycle management for SAP S/4HANA Cloud functionality. Using the ABAP AI SDK, ABAP developers can easily infuse AI capabilities into their custom applications and extensions, for example, directly from within SAP S/4HANA and its integrated development environment.
Scale the development of generative AI-powered business applications due to new data centers for generative AI hub in SAP AI Core Available by the end of Q4 2024:
AWS: Singapore
Google Cloud Platform: Australia (Sydney); Japan (Osaka)
Microsoft Azure: Australia (Sydney); Switzerland (Zurich)
These new data centers improve performance by offering faster data access and processing speeds, greater reliability through enhanced redundancy and uptime, and better regulatory compliance by ensuring data residency requirements are met for different regions.
Developers will also benefit from more accurate and relevant AI-generated content due to new document grounding capabilities and a new integration with vector databases that lets generative AI hub gather more relevant information before generating responses.
Finally, new large language models will be available for generative AI hub by the end of 2024, including:
Aleph Alpha Pharia-1
Amazon Titan Image Generator
IBM Granite
Mistral Large 2
OpenAI Dall-E 3
AI Innovations Propel RISE with SAP and GROW with SAP
SAP announces new AI capabilities for the RISE with SAP and GROW with SAP solutions that boost productivity, optimize processes and accelerate decisions.
SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition
Following the introduction of Joule into SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition in July, SAP today launches a feature pack with new use cases that let business users instruct Joule with simple commands. Procurement professionals can update purchase requisitions and purchase orders. Finance professionals can access information such as general ledger account balances and journal entries, and service departments can create solution quotations directly through Joule.
The feature pack includes a new implementation wizard that installs a model outlining criteria to evaluate extensions built with low-code, no-code and pro-code tools on SAP S/4HANA and SAP BTP. This helps system administrators, system architects and project leads standardize cloud ERP extensions. The implementation wizard also configures the ABAP test cockpit, a custom-code analysis tool that simplifies system upgrades.
By the end of the year, Joule will be incorporated into the top 300 most-frequently-used SAP Fiori apps. By then, Joule will also be able to take master data change requests within SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition, so users don’t have to navigate across multiple menus. Joule tracks and subsequently shares changes with key users, ensuring visibility and accuracy across teams.
SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition
Joule will be available by the end of the year for all customers in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition. Capabilities available now include navigation assistance as well as information retrieval and summary. Expansions planned by Q1 2025 include:
Notification of critical issues for business users, as well as support in the resolution process.
Analysis and summary of complex sales order fulfillment issues for sales professionals.
Real-time data on departure and delivery times for warehouse clerks.
Intelligent summaries for project managers that outline changes, highlight project status and recommend next steps.
With SAP Business AI, the Document Information Extraction service will also soon have enhanced capabilities to extract unstructured data from business documents, reducing manual work and increasing accuracy in data extraction. The update, including processing features for quality certificates, delivery notes, and birth certificates, will be available in beta this month for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition customers.
SAP Takes Bold Steps Toward Autonomous AI-Enabled Supply Chain
SAP introduces new Business AI capabilities for its supply chain portfolio, expanding on the foundation of supply chain uses cases in Joule. This builds SAP’s momentum toward creating an autonomous, AI-enabled supply chain. New AI capabilities available by Q1 2025 include:
SAP Integrated Business Planning: Intelligent lead-time prediction leverages goods movement data in SAP S/4HANA, to help supply, demand and inventory planners predict future lead times more accurately. The results are automatically inputted into SAP Integrated Business Planning to help planners make more informed decisions.
SAP Digital Manufacturing: With AI-assisted production engineering, production engineers can analyze production process errors faster, reducing idle time and support costs.
SAP Asset Performance: AI-enabled visual inspection monitors assets to help gauge wear and tear on critical components. This minimizes unplanned maintenance outages, reduces disruptions across the supply chain, and optimizes asset performance.