SAP has unveiled groundbreaking AI innovations across a technology foundation that drives 87% of global commerce, putting its generative AI copilot, Joule, at the center of a new way of doing business. At its annual SAP TechEd conference, SAP announced powerful new capabilities that complement and extend Joule, including collaborative AI agents equipped with custom skills to complete complex cross-disciplinary tasks. Other innovations include the SAP Knowledge Graph, a next-generation solution poised to help developers unlock the full value of SAP data by connecting it with rich business context, and new tools to ensure developers can continue driving business AI innovation.
“SAP’s innovation drives real business outcomes, and today’s advancements help customers harness the power of AI, data, and new development solutions to catalyze growth,” said Muhammad Alam, Executive Board, SAP SE, SAP Product Engineering. “Drawing on SAP’s unmatched business and technology expertise, the AI innovations we’re announcing at TechEd forge a new human-AI partnership to transform the landscape of modern business.”
Supercharging Joule
On the eve of its first birthday, Joule marks a watershed moment in how business gets done. SAP is introducing collaborative AI agents to a copilot that truly speaks the language of business, expanding Joule’s capabilities to support 80% of SAP’s most-used business tasks, and embedding Joule more deeply within the company’s portfolio.
Collaborative multi-agent systems deploy specialized AI agents to tackle specific tasks and enable them to collaborate on intricate business workflows, adapting their strategies to meet shared objectives. SAP is infusing Joule with multiple collaborative AI agents that will combine their unique expertise across business functions to collaboratively accomplish complex workflows. These AI agents enhance productivity by breaking down silos and freeing workers to focus on areas where human ingenuity thrives.
Two use cases debuted at TechEd showcase the agents’ transformative power:
- A dispute management use case employs autonomous AI agents to analyze and resolve dispute scenarios, including incorrect and missing invoices, unapplied credits and denied or duplicate payments.
- A financial accounting use case employs autonomous AI agents to streamline key financial processes by automating bill payments, invoice processing, and ledger updates while quickly addressing inconsistencies or errors.
Harnessing the power of data
SAP’s AI innovations also draw on the company’s unmatched business data expertise. The new SAP Knowledge Graph solution, accessible through SAP Datasphere and Joule in Q1 2025, will give users a deeper layer of business understanding by seamlessly mapping relationships and context across SAP’s vast data landscape, empowering organizations to make better decisions with their data. By offering ready-to-use relationships between business entities like purchase orders, invoices, and customers, the solution can significantly reduce the complexity of manual data modeling. SAP Knowledge Graph grounds 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.
Empowering developers
SAP also launched a suite of innovations for developers to continue driving business AI innovation. New generative AI developer capabilities, such as code explanation and documentation search in SAP Build, the company’s platform for extending its solutions, will reduce development time for Java and JavaScript developers. SAP Build is also adding an Extensibility Wizard feature that will let developers access SAP Build directly from SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, simplifying the extension process. Meanwhile, ABAP developers and fusion teams will get seamless access to ABAP Cloud development tools from SAP Build.
Finally, SAP announced that it has already fulfilled its pledge to upskill 2 million people worldwide by 2025. Through its learning opportunities, the company has narrowed the world’s digital skills gap through role-based certifications, free training materials, hands-on opportunities for developers, and more. SAP continues to expand its growing portfolio of AI-related learning opportunities, including courses on generative AI, AI ethics, and SAP’s advanced AI tools and platforms.