SAP has reinforced its leadership in enterprise innovation at this year’s SAP Sapphire, unveiling major advancements across its AI-driven portfolio. At the center of its innovation strategy is SAP Business AI, now deployed by more than 34,000 customers, with over 230 embedded AI scenarios already live.
On April 22, SAP CEO Christian Klein, announcing the Q1-2025 financial result, said: “Our AI-powered portfolio enables companies to navigate supply chain disruptions in over 130 countries and to unlock efficiencies with agility and speed.”
Looking ahead, SAP plans to expand to over 400 AI scenarios by the end of 2025, supported by more than 1,600 Joule skills. This continued investment highlights SAP’s commitment to delivering scalable, real-time business value through AI. Joule — SAP’s generative AI copilot — and Joule Agents are increasingly central to this vision, offering intuitive, context-aware automation across SAP applications.
All of these innovations are built on the AI Foundation within SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP), the technical core enabling seamless AI integration and adaptability across industries.
With forecasts indicating that 20 percent of sales functions may soon be automated and 30 percent of Fortune 500 companies expected to operate via AI-only channels by 2028, SAP’s focus is clear: to ensure customers are equipped to lead in an AI-first world.
SAP is driving innovation through Joule, a transformative AI-powered user interface that reshapes how customers interact with enterprise systems. By integrating natural language capabilities, Joule enables users to access information, streamline workflows, and execute tasks effortlessly — whether via desktop, mobile, or across languages.
Key Innovations and Customer Benefits:
Conversational, Context-Aware UI: Joule acts as a smart, intuitive interface that allows users to ask business questions in natural language and receive accurate, contextual responses across SAP and non-SAP applications. This makes enterprise software more accessible, especially for non-technical users.
Omnipresent AI Assistant: With integration via WalkMe, Joule is expanding beyond the SAP ecosystem. It can follow users across platforms, interpret context, and trigger actions, making it a proactive, always-available assistant embedded in daily workflows.
Customizable AI Skills: Customers can build their own Joule skills to automate routine, rule-based tasks — like data entry or purchase order creation — driven by user intent. This empowers teams to save time and focus on high-value work.
Advanced Answer Engine with Perplexity: Through collaboration with Perplexity, SAP enhances Joule’s ability to deliver trusted, real-time answers by blending structured SAP data with real-world, unstructured insights — elevating decision-making power.
Joule Agents: Reason and Act: A new generation of AI agents within Joule can autonomously reason, coordinate, and act on tasks — like managing financial accruals or environmental compliance—through self-constructed workflows. Human oversight remains integral, ensuring trust and control.
AI Agent Hub in SAP LeanIX: Launching in Q4 2025, this hub will allow customers to discover, govern, and align AI agents to business processes. With clear governance and compliance tracking, enterprises can confidently scale automation while maintaining ethical standards.
SAP Brings AI to the Physical World
A standout innovation is SAP’s collaboration with NEURA Robotics and NVIDIA, bringing SAP Business AI into the physical realm. Through integration with NEURA’s cognitive robots — ranging from autonomous mobile robots to humanoids — Joule Agents can now execute real-world tasks like adaptive manufacturing, predictive maintenance, compliance monitoring, and autonomous inventory replenishment.
The NVIDIA Omniverse Blueprint enables companies to test these intelligent robots in virtual digital twins before physical deployment, ensuring safety, efficiency, and scalability.
AI Foundation: The Core of SAP’s AI Strategy
SAP introduced AI Foundation as the operating system for its AI strategy, offering more than 150 capabilities for building, running, and scaling AI solutions. Developers now benefit from centralized access to tools such as Joule Studio, generative AI hub, SAP Document AI, and the SAP Knowledge Graph, which grounds AI responses in a customer’s business context.
AI Foundation supports leading AI models, including GPT-4.1, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, and Gemini 2.5 Pro, as well as self-hosted models from Mistral, Cohere, and Meta, giving customers greater sovereignty over their AI choices. SAP’s partner Deloitte also announced Zora AI, a suite of prebuilt agentic AI solutions integrated with SAP BTP, enabling intelligent automation of complex finance and tax tasks.
Say Goodbye to Prompt Engineering
SAP eliminated a major barrier to AI adoption: prompt engineering. With the new prompt optimizer, built with Not Diamond, SAP automates the conversion of prompts when switching models — reducing migration time from days to minutes. This unlocks a multi-model future, allowing enterprises to use the best AI model for their needs without being locked in.
Joule Studio Gets More Powerful
SAP also introduced low-code/no-code enhancements to Joule Studio, including a skill builder and agent builder (coming in Q3 and Q4 2025, respectively), enabling developers to build and deploy custom AI agents faster and with less effort.
SAP Document AI Revolutionizes Document Processing
Rebranded from Document Information Extraction, SAP Document AI now offers intelligent automation of document processing natively within SAP applications. It processes both structured and unstructured documents, reducing manual work and improving accuracy. Features like instant learning allow the system to correct extraction errors on the fly without retraining.
Customers like Serax already report a 33 percent reduction in manual effort using SAP Document AI. A new Premium Plus edition, launching later in 2025, will enhance integration and automation across the SAP portfolio.
Partner-Led AI Innovations
Cohere Integration in Generative AI Hub
SAP is expanding its collaboration with Cohere to integrate enterprise-grade generative AI models directly into the SAP ecosystem. Starting with Cohere’s Rerank model and expanding to the Command and Embed models, SAP aims to give customers greater flexibility in selecting AI tools that align with their unique business needs. These models will be part of the generative AI hub in SAP AI Core, alongside offerings from SAP and other third-party providers.
Vianai’s hila for CFO-Focused Conversational Analytics
Vianai Systems’ hila, an AI-powered conversational analytics tool, is designed to engage executives—especially in the office of the CFO — by enabling intelligent interrogation of transactional systems. SAP is exploring how hila can complement existing platforms like Joule and the “just ask” feature in SAP Business Data Cloud. The collaboration aims to enhance precision and usability in cross-system queries, including non-SAP environments.
SAP and AWS Launch AI Co-Innovation Program
SAP and AWS have jointly launched an AI co-innovation initiative to accelerate the development of industry-specific generative AI applications. This program provides access to Amazon Bedrock via SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP), along with technical resources and funding credits. The focus is on helping customers address real-world challenges — such as predicting the impact of extreme weather events or improving financial forecasting — with secure, scalable AI solutions.
Strategic AI Investments
SAP.iO Fund Backs Nova Intelligence
Through its SAP.iO investment arm, SAP is supporting Nova Intelligence, a startup developing AI agents that modernize legacy custom ABAP code into cloud-compliant applications. These agents use iterative testing and refinement to ensure accurate, production-ready code, simplifying digital transformation for customers with long-standing SAP environments.
AI in Sustainability
AI-Powered Enhancements in SAP’s Sustainability Portfolio
New AI capabilities are being added to the SAP Sustainability portfolio to improve how businesses manage environmental, health, and safety (EHS) processes, as well as product compliance. These tools will help automate data preparation, optimize risk and cost management, and support sustainability initiatives. Beta availability is scheduled for August 2025.
Rajani Baburajan
