SAP rolls out Joule Work and Joule Studio as 45,000 cloud customers use its AI

A new interface and a layered model of assistants and agents

SAP describes Joule as its portfolio-wide AI engagement layer, combining agentic capabilities with SAP business applications. The company frames this as a step toward what it calls the Autonomous Enterprise. In Q3, it expanded its portfolio of Joule Assistants and introduced dozens of specialized agents.

The front door is Joule Work, which SAP calls the new UI for AI. Users describe what they want to achieve, receive relevant insights, build app-less spaces personalized to their needs, and take action across connected business systems. When it is time to execute, Joule Work selects the right Joule Assistant for the job.

The assistants act as domain experts with knowledge of roles and processes. They orchestrate Joule Agents, which use business context and data, respect established authorizations and maintain audit trails. SAP summarizes the division of labor this way: people set the direction, assistants coordinate agents, and agents carry out work with oversight and governance.

SAP gives several examples. Billing teams can create invoices, identify anomalies and resolve posting errors with the Billing Assistant. Supply chain planners can detect critical shortages earlier and weigh service levels against inventory investment with the Supply Chain Planning Assistant. Maintenance teams can turn asset signals into coordinated maintenance action.

What Joule Work offers employees

Joule Work is available on desktop, in-app, web and mobile. SAP says it connects local and cloud environments and brings conversational AI closer to the files and tools employees use daily. Specific capabilities named in the announcement:

• Working with local files and folders in a secure sandbox environment
• Access to current information through integrated web search
• Connections to SAP and non-SAP applications through Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools and Agent-to-Agent (a2a) integrations
• Custom and corporate skills for repetitive tasks, such as creating presentations and summaries
• The SAP Knowledge Graph, which searches the business objects available to a user for deeper transactional and analytical queries when a skill is not enough

The spaces bring together insights, applications, assistants and agents for business workflows. SAP says this begins a journey toward generative UI that delivers a personalized experience to any end user. General availability of Joule Work is now underway in a phased approach.

Reinhausen, a company in electrical grid technologies, joined the Joule Work desktop early adopter program. Peter Wied, director of Complexity Management there, said: "What once required up to an hour of manual effort across our SAP S/4HANA environment is now accessible in seconds through natural language, fundamentally changing how our teams interact with business data."

Joule Studio: building and governing custom agents

Joule Studio, accessible through Joule Work, lets customers create their own agents and extend SAP standard agents with their own instructions. It has two builders. The agent builder creates agents that plan, reason and address business challenges across SAP and non-SAP systems. SAP says they can coordinate multi-step processes, invoke APIs, work with documents and collaborate with users or other agents, which helps with exceptions and workflows beyond predefined automation.

The skill builder covers reliable, reusable operations that run through Joule's conversational interface. Teams can create skills to retrieve data, execute system transactions and connect SAP and third-party applications using predefined logic. Joule can select and trigger relevant skills based on context.

New intent-based development draws on business context from SAP Signavio, SAP Knowledge Graph and SAP Domain Models. Developers who prefer code can work in their own IDE, Git repository and AI coding tools. SAP's estimated benefits include a 35% reduction in the time to build and deploy custom Joule Agents and a 10% reduction in the time to deploy custom Joule skills.

On pricing, the agent builder is available for free until December 2026, after which it becomes a premium AI feature. The skill builder is a base AI feature. General availability of Joule Studio is also rolling out in phases.

Warehouse automation company KNAPP used Joule Studio to build an assistant that helps workers identify and resolve problems without waiting for an expert. According to SAP, it reduced issue resolution times by about 90% and time spent on documentation and training by about 80%.

Governance tools and customer deployments

As agent counts grow, SAP argues that organizations need a clear view of their AI landscape. SAP AI Agent Hub provides a central inventory of SAP and non-SAP agents so teams can track and govern them. SAP Signavio agent mining and the Process Consulting Agent are meant to help customers find their biggest opportunities for agentic AI and act on them right away.

PwC is using the Billing Assistant to help identify potential issues earlier. Novartis has launched a pilot of the Sourcing Assistant. Christoph Buerki, head of Procurement at Novartis, said: "Agents bring consistency and speed to work that previously required a lot of manual effort and coordination." He expects 25% faster cycle times and a 35% uplift in FTE productivity.

What it means for SAP customers

For existing SAP users, the release points to AI that is embedded in business processes rather than offered as a separate chat tool, with authorizations and audit trails built into the design. The agent inventory and the governance features in Joule Studio target a likely next concern for large organizations: keeping track of many agents from different sources.

Cost planning matters too. The agent builder is free only until December 2026 and then becomes a premium feature, while the skill builder stays a base feature. Customer figures such as Novartis's are expectations, and the efficiency numbers for Joule Studio are SAP's own estimates. SAP notes that the roundup covers only AI offerings released since July 1, 2026, and that rollouts of Joule Work and Joule Studio are phased.