SAP used its Sapphire 2026 event in Orlando, Florida, to outline a major shift in its AI strategy. The company said it is building an “Autonomous Enterprise,” where AI agents do more than assist employees and instead execute business processes themselves.
CEO Christian Klein said SAP is “building nothing less than a new SAP” and that the company is becoming a “business AI company.” The plan centers on the SAP Autonomous Suite, which includes more than 50 domain-specific SAP Joule AI assistants across finance, supply chain, procurement, HR, and customer engagement.
Those assistants are designed to coordinate more than 200 specialized agents that can carry out tasks end-to-end. SAP said those tasks include compressing the financial close process and automating supply chain rebalancing. Klein argued that enterprise AI has to be held to a much higher standard than consumer AI. “If AI runs payroll, financial close, or supply chain planning, 80% accuracy is not good enough,” he said.
To support the suite, SAP introduced a new Business AI Platform. The company said the platform brings together its Business Technology Platform, Business Data Cloud, and AI capabilities into one governed environment. SAP said the system uses what it calls “company memory,” a context graph that includes policies, procedures, Slack conversations, and email approval chains so agents know what to do and what to avoid.
Muhammad Alam, an SAP executive board member responsible for product engineering, said exceptions are added to company memory so that agents adapt across the system. “When there’s an exception, it’s added to company memory and all agents adapt instantly,” he said.
SAP also announced Joule Work, a new interface aimed at changing how people interact with SAP software. Instead of moving through multiple applications and data entry screens, users can describe the outcome they want and let Joule coordinate the workflows, data, and agents needed to complete it.
For developers, SAP launched Joule Studio 2.0, which is available free through year-end. SAP said it allows developers to build agents with Python, Claude Code, or Cursor and deploy them to a managed runtime. The company also introduced the AI Agent Hub, which is due in the third quarter and will be available at no additional charge. SAP said the hub will provide one place to discover, manage, and govern agents across SAP and non-SAP systems.
SAP brought several partners and customers into the announcement. Anthropic President Daniela Amodei said Claude models power Joule agents in finance, procurement, and supply chain. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang discussed open agent protocols that let AI operate safely inside enterprises.
JPMorganChase CFO Jeremy Barnum said the bank is upgrading its general ledger to SAP’s unified platform and is exploring agentic capabilities for treasury management. “You can’t realize the full potential of AI in a legacy environment,” he said.
SAP also pointed to customer deployments already in production. According to Rob Fisher, KPMG’s global head of advisory, KPMG has deployed Joule across 270,000 users, with 3,000 consultants using 20 agents, and is targeting $120 million in reduced contract leakage. Ericsson said it has saved 90,000 hours through personalized AI recommendations used by its 85,000 employees. SAP said Bayer is using cash-collection assistants, Novartis has deployed high-volume sourcing agents, and H&M has shown a store-intelligence system that gives managers real-time performance data and AI-driven recommendations.
Even with those examples, SAP acknowledged that adoption is still behind the company’s ambitions. Maribel Lopez, founder of Lopez Research, said enterprises are not yet deploying what is already available. “SAP customers are very cautious because the SAP workloads are at the heart of running the business,” she said.
Mickey North Rizza, group vice president of enterprise software at IDC, offered a more positive view. She said 73% of AI agents and assistants are used frequently and save users 30 to 90 minutes a day. “SAP’s AI vision is a north star for their clients to move successfully into the AI world,” she said.
Governance remains central to SAP’s pitch. Alam said the company built SOX auditor compatibility into the framework so it is audit-ready at the agent level, and every action is logged and traceable. Jonathan von Rüeden, SAP’s chief AI officer, said autonomy will vary by process. “In a financial close process, the CFO is going to want to have a look when books are being closed,” he said. “But people are more comfortable with autonomous accruals.”
SAP is also pushing interoperability. Agents built in Joule Studio will support the A2A protocol to connect with third-party agents, and SAP said its orchestration layer will govern non-SAP agents at no additional cost.
To speed adoption, SAP said RISE with SAP customers will get three Joule assistants activated in their first year, while GROW with SAP customers will get access to the full agent portfolio when they onboard. SAP said its agent-led transformation tooling can reduce migration efforts by about 35%.
Lopez said customers do not need thousands of agents right away. “Right now, customers don’t need thousands of agents; they need to get agentic AI up and running with a set of secure, governed agents that help them do specific use cases,” she said.
