SAP rolls out Joule Work and launches SAP Pay at SAP Connect

Joule Work starts its customer rollout

According to SAP, Joule Work lets employees interact with SAP solutions in their own language and complete work across SAP and third-party data. The interface is grounded in business context from SAP Knowledge Graph, which maps more than 7 million data fields.

SAP says Joule Work is already live with 110,000 of its own employees, and that the company sees 20% productivity gains across finance, HR and procurement. A select group of customers is also using it in their own environments.

Peter Wied of Maschinenfabrik Reinhausen, a customer in the early adopter program, said that work which once required up to an hour of manual effort across the company's SAP S/4HANA environment is now accessible in seconds through natural language.

Christian Klein, CEO of SAP SE, said: "The Autonomous Enterprise has arrived."

Joule Assistants take on operational work

Where a query is not enough, SAP says Joule Assistants execute operational work directly within business workflows, using established data, authorizations and audit trails. Customers control the level of autonomy. Through the Agent2Agent protocol, Joule can also connect with third-party AI and agents.

SAP described use cases across SAP Autonomous Suite:

• Finance: controllers can automate revenue recognition, disclosures and trade compliance. Early deployments of the International Trade Assistant reduced trade classification effort by up to 50%, according to SAP.
• Supply chain: planners can turn multi-hour disruptions into one-click resolutions across planning, manufacturing and logistics.
• HR: leaders can determine the best way to close workforce gaps, and employees can make benefits choices tailored to their needs.
• Procurement: decision-makers can identify savings opportunities against peer benchmarks and manage the full contingent workforce life cycle.
• Customer experience: organizations can turn customer engagement into sales opportunities with AI-powered campaigns, quoting and customer workflows.

Customers named by SAP include Novartis, which has launched a pilot of the Joule Sourcing Assistant, Nestlé, which uses the Accounts Receivable Assistant, and PwC, which uses the Billing Assistant. PwC and SAP are extending their collaboration into new areas of joint AI innovation.

A platform for building and governing agents

SAP Business AI Platform is positioned as one place to build, contextualize and govern AI across SAP and third-party environments. With Joule Studio, business users and developers can build and extend skills and agents, from no-code to pro-code workflows, choosing from more than 70 AI models. SAP Business Data Cloud and SAP Knowledge Graph ground those agents in business data and context.

On governance, SAP AI Agent Hub in SAP LeanIX solutions provides a central inventory of enterprise agents. SAP says its governance architecture is independently ISO/IEC 42001-certified. Its Business Transformation Management portfolio, including SAP Signavio, SAP LeanIX and SAP WalkMe, is meant to help analyze processes, govern applications and agents, and drive adoption.

SAP Pay and new partners

SAP announced it is entering the payments market with SAP Pay, powered by Tereina, an SAP company. Embedded in SAP Cloud ERP, it executes and reconciles payments within the same workflow when an invoice is due. SAP says this reduces manual file handling and external processing dependencies while giving customers greater control.

A new partnership with Moody's Corporation is designed to embed Moody's supplier risk monitoring data into SAP Ariba Supplier Lifecycle and Performance. Procurement teams would get continuously updated insights into supplier financial health, operational risk and regulatory status, and Joule Agents could flag risk signals and surface alternatives before disruption hits.

An expanded partnership with ORO Labs brings SAP Ariba Procurement Orchestration by ORO Labs to SAP customers as a solution extension. It is a purpose-built orchestration layer connecting procurement workflows end to end across heterogeneous enterprise environments.

What it means for customers

For SAP customers, the announcements point to AI that acts inside existing workflows rather than only answering questions, with controls over autonomy and audit trails. Most of the results cited, such as the 20% productivity gain and the up to 50% reduction in trade classification effort, come from SAP's own use or early deployments, so independent results across wider customer bases remain to be seen. Rollout of Joule Work is only beginning, with a select group of customers using it so far.