SAP today showcased the SAP Autonomous Enterprise in action at SAP Connect, demonstrating how Joule Work and Joule Assistants generate value for customers across business functions.
“This is a defining moment for enterprise AI,” said Christian Klein, CEO of SAP. “The SAP Autonomous Enterprise has arrived. With Joule and the SAP Autonomous Suite, built on the SAP Business AI Platform, we are helping organizations such as Novartis, Morgan Foods, Nestlé, and PwC connect intelligence across their businesses and deliver trusted business outcomes.” At SAP Connect, these customers shared how the SAP Autonomous Enterprise is already generating measurable value across their businesses.
“We co-developed and recently launched a pilot of SAP’s Joule Sourcing Assistant,” said Christoph Buerki, Head of Procurement at Novartis. “Our vision is for AI agents to take on the heavy manual work, allowing sourcing professionals to focus on strategy, supplier relationships, and value creation.”
“At Morgan Foods, we are already laying the groundwork for agent adoption, particularly through our technical infrastructure. The biggest change will be moving from a reactive approach to a predictive one, where agents can connect demand signals, inventory levels, and supplier status faster than ever before,” said Steve Hankins, Chief Financial Officer at Morgan Foods. “Our greatest differentiator will come from having people in command of the agents. Our approximately 1,000 employees are the ones who make our supply chains work. Technology helps make them even better.”
“Our transformation with SAP S/4HANA across 140 countries is creating a connected digital core, with consistent processes, trusted data, and greater visibility across markets and business functions. With this foundation, Joule and the Accounts Receivable Assistant can automatically prioritize collections work based on risk and business context, recommend the next best action, and help our finance teams respond more quickly to change,” said Luca Dell’Orletta, Global Head IT Innovation & Enterprise Architecture at Nestlé.
“In professional services, billing can be one of the most error-prone processes, and accuracy plays an important role in the customer experience. SAP’s Billing Assistant brings more intelligence to this critical process, helping identify potential issues early so our teams can deliver better outcomes for clients and build stronger relationships,” said Jill Notz, Chief Accounting Officer, Controller, Business Services Leader at PwC. Building on the success of Billing Assistant, PwC and SAP are expanding their collaboration into new areas of joint AI innovation.
Joule Work is beginning to become available to customers as a new AI-powered user interface that allows employees to interact with SAP solutions in their own language and perform tasks using SAP and third-party data. Powered by the business context of the SAP Knowledge Graph, which maps more than 7 million data fields, Joule provides information users can trust. At SAP, Joule Work is already used by 110,000 employees, and the company is reporting 20% productivity gains in finance, HR, and procurement. A select group of customers is also already using Joule Work in their business environments.
“After 28 years as an SAP customer, partnering with SAP on our AI journey and the Joule Work desktop early adopter program has generated more momentum in just a few months than we have seen in all the years before,” said Peter Wied, Director of Complexity Management at Maschinenfabrik Reinhausen. “What previously required up to an hour of manual work in our SAP S/4HANA environment can now be accessed within seconds through natural language, fundamentally changing how our teams interact with business data.”
“The dedicated team has been exceptional. Proactive communication, a focus on accelerating architecture activation, rapid resolution of issues, and overall support have enabled us to be ready to adopt Joule much earlier than would have been possible if we had to address these challenges on our own,” said Keith Smith, SAP Platform Architect at CONA Services. “The CONA team is excited about the progress achieved so far and looks forward to exploring and testing Joule’s capabilities in greater depth over the coming months as we continue our adoption journey.”
When a query is not enough, Joule Assistants execute operational tasks directly within business workflows, using established data, authorizations, and audit trails. Customers control the level of autonomy. SAP’s approach is also open: through the Agent2Agent protocol, Joule can connect to third-party AI and agents, bringing governed business context into broader AI workflows.
At SAP Connect, SAP demonstrated how these capabilities deliver outcomes across the SAP Autonomous Suite. In finance, controllers can automate revenue recognition, disclosures, and foreign trade compliance, with initial implementations of the International Trade Assistant reducing foreign trade classification effort by up to 50%.
In supply chain, planners can turn disruptions that previously required hours of work into one-click resolutions spanning planning, manufacturing, and logistics.
In HR, leaders can identify the best way to address workforce gaps, while employees can make smarter benefits decisions tailored to their needs.
In procurement, decision-makers can identify savings opportunities based on market benchmarks and manage the entire contingent workforce lifecycle.
In customer experience, organizations can turn customer engagement into sales opportunities through AI-powered campaigns, quotes, and customer workflows.
Across industries, SAP is collaborating with customers to apply AI to industry-specific processes, helping organizations in manufacturing, retail, commodity trading, and asset-intensive industries improve decision-making, automate routine actions, and build more resilient operations.
The Platform Powering Trusted Enterprise AI
The SAP Business AI Platform provides organizations with a single environment to develop, contextualize, and govern AI across SAP and third-party ecosystems. With Joule Studio, business users and developers can create and extend skills and agents across workflows ranging from no-code to pro-code, choosing from more than 70 AI models. SAP Business Data Cloud and the SAP Knowledge Graph ground these agents in trusted business data and context, helping organizations select the right model for each use case and better manage AI value and consumption.
SAP-managed governance helps organizations scale AI with transparency, accountability, and control. The SAP AI Agent Hub in SAP LeanIX solutions provides a central inventory of enterprise agents, while SAP’s governance architecture, independently certified under ISO/IEC 42001, supports regulatory requirements, established authorizations, and auditable AI operations.
To help organizations adopt AI at scale, the SAP Business Transformation Management portfolio, which includes SAP Signavio, SAP LeanIX, and SAP WalkMe solutions, provides the tools needed to analyze processes, govern applications and agents, and drive adoption across the enterprise.
SAP also announced its entry into the payments market with SAP Pay, enabled by Tereina, an SAP company. Directly integrated with SAP Cloud ERP, SAP Pay executes and reconciles payments within the same workflow when an invoice is due, reducing manual file handling and reliance on external processing while giving customers greater control.
SAP is expanding the Autonomous Enterprise beyond its own application portfolio through new partnerships that bring specialized intelligence directly into SAP workflows.
A new partnership between SAP and Moody’s Corporation has been established to incorporate Moody’s supplier risk monitoring data into SAP Ariba Supplier Lifecycle and Performance. This provides procurement teams with continuously updated information on suppliers’ financial health, operational risks, and regulatory status at the point of decision-making. Organizations will be able to move from periodic risk assessments to continuous monitoring, allowing Joule Agents to flag indicators of supplier risk and present alternatives before a disruption affects the business.
An expanded partnership with ORO Labs brings procurement orchestration to SAP customers as a solution extension. SAP Ariba Procurement Orchestration by ORO Labs is an orchestration layer purpose-built to connect end-to-end procurement workflows across heterogeneous enterprise environments, providing business users with an integrated experience for requests, actions, and visibility.
