SAP Sapphire Round Up: The Suite of Business AI Innovations

SAP has unveiled a suite of AI innovations at its annual Sapphire conference, with the company forecasting productivity gains of up to 30% for organisations that implement the new technologies.

Firstly, the company has expanded its Joule copilot – an AI assistant that provides contextual support to users – and introduced additional AI agents designed to operate across multiple business systems and functions.

These developments form part of SAP's strategy to make what it terms ‘Business AI’ accessible throughout organisations.

“SAP combines the world's most powerful suite of business applications with uniquely rich data and the latest AI innovations to create a virtuous circle of customer value,” says SAP CEO Christian Klein.

“With the expansion of Joule, our partnerships with leading AI pioneers and advancements in SAP Business Data Cloud, we're delivering on the promise of Business AI as we drive digital transformations that help customers thrive in an increasingly unpredictable world.”

What is unique about SAP’s approach to AI?

Muhammad Alam, Member of the Executive Board of SAP SE, Product and Engineering, described the company's approach as a “flywheel of apps, data and AI” that enables organisations to overcome fragmented IT environments.

“In the age of AI, true differentiation will lie in how you create value from this end-to-end context for your organisation,” he says.

“This can only happen when you simplify and innovate your core and not add another layer of complexity to your landscape.”
SAP states this integration strategy addresses a common challenge for enterprise technology leaders.

“Most organisations have a very disparate and heterogeneous application landscape built over time, often because of acquisitions or because one application may offer a few extra features than another,” says Muhammad.

“We estimate that organisations can spend up to 80% of their effort and budget putting together this fragile balance of apps and data, leaving only 20% of your resources to focus on value creation."

SAP Joule: The “omnipresent” AI assistant 

The company has positioned Joule as an “omnipresent” AI assistant that now extends beyond SAP's traditional application environment.

The copilot has been enhanced to provide support throughout a user's workday, regardless of which applications they use.

SAP has also introduced a new action bar powered by WalkMe technology – one year after announcing the acquisition of WalkMe, a digital adoption platform.

This feature monitors user behaviour across applications, enabling Joule to provide assistance based on anticipated needs.

The company states this functionality adheres to SAP's ethical AI guidelines.

A collaboration with Perplexity

A new collaboration with Perplexity also enhances Joule's capability to draw on structured and unstructured data for solving complex business problems.

Powered by Perplexity and the SAP Knowledge Graph – a technology that maps relationships between business data – Joule now answers questions with structured, visual responses grounded in real-time business data within SAP workflows.

SAP has additionally announced integration plans to extend Joule across its product portfolio.

“By integrating Perplexity’s ability to answer questions accurately and transparently with business answer capabilities, we are bringing both worlds together: the power of Joule to answer your business questions and the power of Perplexity to understand what’s happening in the world,” says Dr. Philipp Herzig, CTO at SAP SE in a LinkedIn post.

“With the power of SAP Business Data Cloud, SAP Knowledge Graph and our integration with Perplexity, Joule can now seamlessly combine your internal business data with real-world insights.”

“Whether data is structured or unstructured, from your systems or the broader web, Joule brings it all together, delivering intelligent answers in real-time.

Aravind Srinivas, Co-Founder and CEO of Perplexity adds in another LinkedIn post: “With Perplexity's ability to process raw unstructured information: both internal and external, we think business customers will derive tremendous value in their day to day research workflows through our product integration and partnership.”

SAP Ariba Procurement
By the third quarter of 2025, the company says Joule will be integrated with SAP Ariba Procurement solutions to assist with supplier bids and purchasing information.

SAP Service Cloud and SAP Enterprise Service Management solutions
The company plans to make Joule available in SAP Service Cloud and SAP Enterprise Service Management solutions in the same timeframe.

Microsoft 365 Copilot
Another integration announced at Sapphire is a bi-directional connection between Joule and Microsoft 365 Copilot.

The first phase of this integration is planned for the second quarter of 2025, with complete integration expected by the third quarter – which will allow users to access Joule capabilities from within Microsoft 365 Copilot, creating what SAP describes as a unified AI experience across both environments.

SAP AI Foundation driving business automation with agent development tools

SAP has also introduced AI Foundation, described as an operating system for Business AI that consolidates tools for building, extending and deploying AI solutions at enterprise scale.

The foundation combines existing SAP technologies with new capabilities designed to simplify AI development and operations.

The AI Foundation incorporates several components, including Joule Studio for creating custom AI capabilities.

A new skill builder for Joule is planned for the third quarter of 2025, while custom AI agent development tools are scheduled for the fourth quarter.

The foundation additionally includes SAP Knowledge Graph, which helps Joule provide contextual answers by exploring connections within enterprise data.

For organisations working with structured data, SAP is introducing a tabular AI service based on SAP Foundation Model.

This service, planned for the second half of 2025, consolidates multiple AI capabilities such as data-attribute recommendations and matching functions.

The company positions this as a solution to the challenge of fragmented, siloed structured data that lacks interoperability.

SAP’s library of AI agents

Beyond the Joule copilot, SAP has further introduced an expanded library of AI agents designed to work across different systems and business functions.

These agents operate with the ability to anticipate requirements and act within defined parameters.

The company has developed agents for specific business domains, including:

• Customer experience
• Supply chain management
• Spend management
• Finance
• Human capital management

According to SAP, these agents employ reasoning capabilities to analyse business problems, coordinate across systems, determine appropriate actions and operate autonomously with human oversight.

The agents leverage SAP Business Data Cloud to access enterprise data and act across both SAP and third-party systems.

The announcement included new Intelligent Applications for SAP Business Data Cloud, each targeting specific business functions.

These applications use continuous learning capabilities to simulate outcomes and guide decision-making based on business data.

“We're delivering on the promise of Business AI as we drive digital transformations that help customers thrive in an increasingly unpredictable world,” concludes Christian Klein.

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