“SAP is reinventing itself,” wrote PLM&ERP News in a commentary article just under a year ago. What was now said and shown during Sapphire 2025 was a testament to that. But it is not surprising that it is happening, instead what is most striking is how extremely fast it is happening. In the week at Sapphire 2025, SAP thus presented a series of news and collaborations with the generative AI assistant Joule as a central pillar. With an expanded network of Joule agents, which collaborate across systems and business areas, SAP is in short ushering in a new era for how companies can use AI.
“Joule is available wherever you work and delivers personal answers to everything needed to be more productive. Joule can follow its business users throughout the day – both inside and outside of SAP applications – to find data, deliver real-time insights and improve work processes,” said Klein, adding that Joule has an interactive action bar powered by WalkMe that studies user behavior across applications. This makes the assistant an always-on, proactive assistant; AI that can anticipate needs before they arise.
SAP Sweden CEO, Antti Soini, summed up: “We offer an ecosystem of collaborative agents that handle everything from customer experience and supply chain to expense management, finance and HR.”
Development of AI-powered Response Engines
More notable about Joule is what the partnership with Perplexity, which works with AI-powered response engines, has brought and will bring. This has sharpened Joule’s ability to use structured and unstructured data to solve complex business problems. For example, using Perplexity and SAP Knowledge Graph, Joule can now provide immediate and visually structured answers – such as charts and graphs – based on real-time business data within SAP workflows.
How can this work? For example, a user can ask the tool how recent external events may affect their business and get a forecast based on both current events and the company’s own business data. AI will integrate its powerful response engine capabilities into Joule. This allows Joule to combine the deep, contextual understanding of a company’s internal SAP data with the vast, unstructured knowledge of the public web, providing richer and more comprehensive answers to complex business questions.
Joule is “Undergoing Radical Cchange”
It is clear that Joule has acted as a catalyst for SAP’s development on the AI side, and as mentioned in the intro, it has happened fast. ARC Advisory analyst Colin Masson notes in a web comment: “SAP’s generative AI copilot, Joule, is undergoing a radical transformation. It’s no longer just an embedded assistant in SAP applications; it’s envisioned as the new generative user interface for everyone and everything,” Masson notes, pointing out that SAP has made SAP Joule more present in everything through the acquisition of WalkMe.
“The new ‘SAP Action Bar for Joule’ (GA Q3 2025) will follow users across both SAP and third-party applications, proactively offering insights and assistance based on context and user behavior. This is a game changer for breaking down application silos.”
Another important thing about Joule is that SAP is now consistently working on broad integration and continuous improvement: Not everything is ready, notes ARC Advisory’s Masson, but “Joule is deeply integrated across the entire SAP Business Suite (Ariba, Field Service Management, Fieldglass, Signavio, IBP, CX, Mobile Start, BDC components like Datasphere and Analytics Cloud) and BTP. Many customer-driven enhancements such as analytical insights, usage dashboards, streaming responses and contextual search are now generally available or coming soon.”
So, genereally, it’s about the rise of agents and with the overarching goal of automating the whole, “the entire enterprise or organization.” Which goes well beyond simple task automation and ushers in the evolution toward “proactive problem solving and process orchestration. These agents, orchestrated by Joule, are designed to reason and act,” writes Colin Masson.
AI Foundation and Developer Support
But there was much more on the news agenda, of course with Joule involved everywhere: SAP presented, for example, an expanded library of Joule agents that change business processes and workflows from the ground up. Powered by real-time data and managed by Joule, these agents work between systems and business areas to anticipate events, adapt and act completely on their own.
“With these AI agents, companies and organizations can continue to adapt in a rapidly changing world,” summed up Antti Soini.
More on the SAP Sapphire 2025 news agenda was the launch of a new operating system for AI development that changes how companies create, implement and expand AI solutions. AI Foundation gives developers a contact surface to build, extend and run customized AI solutions – and thus becomes the first operating system that works for Business AI in practice.
A new prompt optimizer, developed in collaboration with leading AI lab Not Diamond, also helps developers quickly create more effective AI commands (prompts) – reducing the time to complete complex tasks from days to minutes.
Data That Drives Smarter Decisions
SAP also introduced new intelligent applications for SAP Business Data Cloud, specifically tailored for selected business areas. These applications can continuously learn, simulate scenarios, and suggest actions based on business-critical data. It enables you to detect changes, optimize processes, anticipate needs, and collaborate with both people and AI assistants to achieve tangible, value-adding results.
For example, the People Intelligence app optimizes team performance by transforming employee and talent data into workforce insights and AI-driven recommendations.
Moreover, SAP said it is also collaborating with Palantir to facilitate mutual customers’ migration to the cloud and their modernization programs. Seamless connectivity between Palantir and SAP Business Data Cloud enables the creation of a common and comprehensive data foundation. Together, the companies will responsibly deliver results and support customers to quickly adapt to change and disruption.
Applications to Move to the Cloud Faster
SAP also introduced new SAP Business Suite package that makes it easier for customers to adopt SAP cloud solutions to address their business challenges. The packages include SAP Build, which enables organizations to tailor applications to their unique needs.
Finally, SAP introduced a new solution that helps customers move to the cloud faster. With Joule as a starting point and data from SAP solutions such as SAP Signavio and SAP LeanIX, the solution provides personalized guidance and actionable recommendations – tailored to the organization’s own transformation goals. It can help deliver up to 35 percent faster return on investment.
