At SAP Connect, SAP Expands Joule Across Every Line of Business

At SAP Connect on October 6, SAP presented Joule Work, a new set of Joule Assistants, and SAP Business AI Platform as the working parts of what it calls the Autonomous Enterprise. SAP’s innovation news guide shows that general availability for the new capabilities begins in October and continues through the first quarter of 2027. Several finance assistants reach only SAP’s Early Adopter Care program in that window.

An analysis by Robert Holland, Chief Research Officer at SAPinsider, covers the full assistant roster and SAP’s new payments service, SAP Pay.

How Joule Work and Joule Assistants Divide the Work

Joule Work is a natural-language interface that lets employees ask questions and complete work across SAP and third-party data. SAP grounds its answers in SAP Knowledge Graph, which the company says maps more than 7 million data fields. The customer rollout is just beginning. SAP reports that 110,000 of its own employees use Joule Work and that it has measured 20% productivity gains internally across finance, HR, and procurement.

Joule Assistants handle execution. They carry out operational steps inside business workflows using a company’s existing data, authorizations, and audit trails, and customers set how much autonomy each assistant has. SAP is also bringing outside data and tools into those workflows. A partnership with Moody’s will place supplier risk data in SAP Ariba Supplier Lifecycle and Performance, and an expanded partnership with ORO Labs adds procurement orchestration across mixed system environments.

When the New Capabilities Become Available

SAP’s release describes most capabilities in the present tense. The innovation guide assigns them these dates:

• Generally available now: SAP Pay in the US and UK, SAP Reltio, and the S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition integrations with SAP Ariba and SAP Sales Cloud.
• Generally available in Q4 2026: The supply chain agents, the International Trade and Governance Assistants, and Moody’s supplier risk data in SAP Ariba.
• Generally available in Q1 2027: The customer experience assistants and the Spend Analytics Assistant.
• Early Adopter Care in Q1 2027: The Revenue Recognition, Disclosure, and other new finance assistants.

The quantified results so far come from early use. SAP says early deployments of the International Trade Assistant have cut trade classification effort by up to 50%. It does not name the customers.

What Early Customers Report

The customers SAP named at the event are at different stages, from pilots to measured results. Both customers reporting results run SAP S/4HANA.

Luca Dell’Orletta, global head of IT innovation and enterprise architecture at Nestlé, said the company’s S/4HANA transformation across 140 countries created the consistent processes and trusted data that let the Accounts Receivable Assistant prioritize collections work by risk and recommend next steps.

Peter Wied, director of complexity management at Maschinenfabrik Reinhausen, reported results from the Joule Work desktop early adopter program. He said work that once took up to an hour in the company’s S/4HANA environment “is now accessible in seconds through natural language.”

Other customers are earlier in the process. Novartis is piloting a Joule Sourcing Assistant it co-developed with SAP. CONA Services credited SAP’s dedicated team with helping it become Joule ready sooner than it could have managed alone, a sign that readiness can depend on hands-on vendor support.

What This Means for SAPinsiders

• Sequence AI plans by SAP’s stated dates. Separate what is available now, such as Joule Work’s initial rollout, from capabilities due in Q4 2026 and the finance assistants entering Early Adopter Care in Q1 2027. Teams gain a realistic timeline and avoid building business cases on capabilities that have not shipped.
• Set autonomy levels before assistants execute work. Joule Assistants act within a company’s existing authorizations and audit trails, and customers decide how much autonomy each one has. Teams that review those authorizations process by process before activation gain control over what assistants can change.
• Assess S/4HANA and data readiness first. Both customers reporting results run S/4HANA, and Nestlé ties its results to consistent processes and trusted data. Teams that check their core and data early, and plan for SAP support as CONA did, gain a shorter path to their first results.