SAP SE has demonstrated how artificial intelligence is transforming enterprise operations, unveiling advances in its Autonomous Enterprise vision at SAP Connect. The company showcased how Joule Work, Joule Assistants and the SAP Autonomous Suite are helping organizations connect intelligence across business functions, automate complex processes and deliver measurable business value. The announcement highlights SAP’s ambition to move enterprise AI beyond answering questions and generating insights towards executing tasks, coordinating workflows and supporting decisions within established business processes.
“This is a breakthrough moment for business AI,” said Christian Klein, CEO of SAP SE. “The Autonomous Enterprise has arrived. With Joule and SAP Autonomous Suite, built on SAP Business AI Platform, we’re helping organizations like Novartis, Morgan Foods, Nestlé and PwC connect intelligence across every function to deliver trusted business outcomes.” At SAP Connect, customers and partners illustrated how this approach is beginning to translate into practical applications across finance, supply chain management, human resources, procurement and customer experience.
Bringing AI Into Everyday Business Operations
A central development is the rollout of Joule Work, SAP’s new AI interface designed to help employees interact with enterprise systems in their own language and complete tasks using information drawn from SAP and third-party data sources. Powered by the business context provided by SAP Knowledge Graph, which maps more than seven million data fields, Joule is designed to deliver responses grounded in an organization’s operational information. SAP reports that Joule Work is already being used by 110,000 of its employees, with productivity gains of 20% across finance, human resources and procurement. A select group of customers is also beginning to deploy the solution in their own business environments.
Beyond conversational assistance, Joule Assistants can carry out operational tasks directly within business workflows. They operate using established business data, user permissions and audit trails, while allowing organizations to determine the level of autonomy appropriate for their operations. SAP is also pursuing an open approach to enterprise AI. Through the Agent2Agent protocol, Joule can connect with third-party AI systems and agents, extending its capabilities beyond SAP applications while maintaining access to governed business context.
AI Applications Across the Enterprise
The SAP Autonomous Suite brings these capabilities into specific business functions, with a focus on reducing manual work, improving decision-making and streamlining complex processes. In finance, AI assistants can support tasks such as revenue recognition, financial disclosures and trade compliance. Early deployments of SAP’s International Trade Assistant have reduced trade classification effort by up to 50%, demonstrating the potential for AI to ease administrative workloads in highly regulated environments.
In supply chain management, the technology is designed to help planners respond to disruptions that might otherwise require hours of analysis. By connecting planning, manufacturing and logistics processes, AI can help identify and execute appropriate resolutions with fewer manual interventions.Human resources teams can use AI to assess workforce gaps and determine how best to address them, while employees can receive personalized support when evaluating benefits options.
In procurement, AI-powered capabilities can help decision-makers identify savings opportunities by comparing performance against peer benchmarks and manage the full life cycle of contingent workers. SAP is also strengthening supplier oversight through access to more timely risk intelligence. Meanwhile, customer experience applications are designed to turn customer engagement into commercial opportunities through AI-powered campaigns, quoting and connected customer workflows. Across industries, SAP is working with customers to apply AI to specialized processes in manufacturing, retail, commodity trading and asset-intensive sectors. The objective is to improve operational decisions, automate routine activities and strengthen business resilience.
A Platform for Trusted Business AI
Supporting these developments is the SAP Business AI Platform, which provides a common environment for building, contextualizing and governing AI across SAP and third-party systems. Through Joule Studio, business users and developers can create and extend AI skills and agents using approaches ranging from no-code tools to professional development workflows. The platform offers access to more than 70 AI models, giving organizations flexibility in selecting models suited to particular business requirements.SAP Business Data Cloud and SAP Knowledge Graph provide the trusted data and contextual information needed to ground AI outputs in business reality. This foundation is intended to help organizations select suitable models for individual use cases while improving visibility into AI consumption and value.
Governance remains a central component of SAP’s strategy as businesses expand their use of autonomous technologies. SAP AI Agent Hub, available within SAP LeanIX solutions, provides a central inventory of enterprise AI agents, helping organizations maintain visibility over their growing AI environments. SAP also highlighted its independently ISO/IEC 42001-certified AI governance architecture, which supports regulatory compliance, established authorization structures and auditable AI operations. The company’s Business Transformation Management portfolio, including SAP Signavio, SAP LeanIX and SAP WalkMe solutions, complements these capabilities. Together, the tools help organizations analyze business processes, manage applications and AI agents, and encourage adoption of new technologies across the enterprise.
SAP Enters the Payments Market With SAP Pay
Alongside its AI announcements, SAP revealed plans to expand into payments with SAP Pay, powered by Tereina, an SAP company. Embedded directly into SAP Cloud ERP, SAP Pay is designed to execute and reconcile payments within the same workflow in which an invoice becomes due. By reducing manual file handling and reliance on external processing, the solution aims to simplify payment operations and give businesses greater control over their financial processes. The move extends SAP’s strategy of bringing essential business activities into integrated enterprise workflows, reducing the need to switch between separate systems to complete routine transactions.
Partnerships Extend the Autonomous Enterprise
SAP is also expanding its ecosystem through partnerships that bring specialized intelligence and additional workflow capabilities into its enterprise applications. A new partnership with Moody’s Corporation will bring supplier risk monitoring data into SAP Ariba Supplier Lifecycle and Performance. Procurement teams will gain access to continuously updated insights into suppliers’ financial health, operational risks and regulatory status, helping them make more informed decisions.
The integration is intended to move organizations away from periodic supplier assessments towards continuous monitoring. By identifying emerging warning signs and highlighting alternative suppliers, Joule Agents could help businesses respond to potential disruptions before they affect operations.SAP is also expanding its partnership with ORO Labs to introduce procurement orchestration capabilities to SAP customers through a solution extension.
SAP Ariba Procurement Orchestration by ORO Labs is designed to connect procurement workflows across different enterprise systems, providing business users with a more unified experience for submitting requests, taking action and tracking progress. By linking processes that traditionally operate across separate applications, the solution aims to improve visibility, simplify procurement journeys and make it easier for organizations to coordinate purchasing activities across complex technology environments.
Moving Towards More Autonomous Businesses
SAP’s announcements at SAP Connect reflect a broader shift in enterprise technology: from AI tools that primarily provide information to systems capable of carrying out work within defined business processes. The company’s approach combines AI agents, business data, workflow integration and governance to help organizations automate more activities without abandoning the controls required in enterprise environments. For businesses, the potential benefits extend beyond productivity improvements. Better-connected systems can help employees make decisions using consistent information, respond more quickly to operational changes and reduce the administrative burden associated with complex processes. However, realizing these benefits will depend on how effectively organizations integrate AI into existing operations, establish appropriate oversight and measure the outcomes of deployment. With Joule Work, Joule Assistants, SAP Pay and its expanding partner ecosystem, SAP is positioning the Autonomous Enterprise as a practical model for the next stage of digital transformation — one in which AI is embedded directly into the processes through which businesses operate, make decisions and create value.
