SAP’s Joule Promoted From Assistant to AI Agent

Humans expect to progress in their careers as they age, enjoying expanding roles with more autonomy. Apparently, that’s the same for AI tools as well. Joule, SAP’s generative AI assistant, is evolving from answering questions and helping find documents to proactively solving problems with the support of AI Agents, the vendor announced at Sapphire on May 20. In a session, SAP AI Product Incubation Lead Christian Karaschewitz took the time to demonstrate some of the scenarios that Joule the assistant and the agent will be able to handle.

Are AI agents really the productivity accelerator they are hyped to be? Karaschewitz depicts Agentic AI as offering the promise of decision augmentation, in addition to serving as a tool for productivity and automation. For SAP, these capabilities are still in the early stages for mission-critical applications. He added that Agentic AI productivity will be measured not just by time and task automation but also by decision quality that fosters better customer relationships and prioritization.

Joule’s New Agentic AI Capabilities

In a live demo, Karashewitz showcased a scenario where Joule acted as a cash collector—managing invoices, addressing customer disputes, and sending reminders while handling complex and repetitive tasks, such as resolving issues related to delayed shipments.

In this scenario, Joule, which is essentially the user interface powered by multiple AI agents collaborating, would receive and interpret the dispute email and generate a ticket. It would offer recommendations while also ensuring transparency within the SAP Enterprise Service Cloud system regarding the thought process, data sources, and reasoning trail that informed the recommendations.

Recommendations from Joule suggest canceling the invoice or compensating customers by crediting the shipping fees. Ultimately, a human makes the decision while the AI agent conducts research and narrows down options.

Restricting Access for AI Agents

This level of work, which comes very close to an actual decision, represents more autonomy than what Joule had as merely a generative AI assistant. What’s to prevent it from completing the ticket and taking the final action on its own, something it appears very capable of doing?

Karaschewitz stated that the AI agent can be assigned access control in the same way that a human may be limited to certain tasks and restricted from certain actions. This functions under the concept of “Principal Delegation,” where the AI agent operates within user permission boundaries, and read versus write access is clearly segmented. This ensures security, accountability, and human oversight. Actions such as sending an email to the customer require human approval.

As part of SAP’s Responsible AI framework, Joule and other AI products are governed by a three-pillar strategy that covers ethics, security, and compliance.

Joule’s Availability and Future Integrations

In addition to customer service and ticket-handling capabilities, SAP utilized Sapphire to introduce agents for applications in supply chain management, spend management, finance, and human capital management. While the generative AI assistant features of Joule are currently available at no cost to SAP customers with cloud-based offerings, the agent capabilities will incur an additional fee, according to Karaschewitz.

SAP and Microsoft are collaborating on a “deep integration” between Microsoft CoPilot and Joule. They also plan for broader third-party integrations, with Google Vertex currently under review.

Joule’s promotion from assistant to agent signifies a broader shift in AI, transitioning from automation to augmented decision-making and problem-solving. Nevertheless, it will be crucial for many organizations to ensure that Agentic AI remains human-centered in the end, which is where security and governance will play a significant role moving forward.

What This Means for SAPinsiders

• As SAPinsider VP and Research Director Robert Holland noted, Joule is currently available only for SAP’s cloud offerings. Therefore, to access the included Joule assistant features or the new AI agent use cases, SAPinsiders must be current customers of SAP S/4HANA Cloud or other cloud products.

• Companies interested in Agentic AI capabilities for their SAP systems should assess their own processes to determine if they align with SAP’s offered use cases before investing in the paid version of Joule.

• This is only the early stages of Joule and agentic AI, so any SAPinsiders are likely to be early adopters. With mainstage attention given to Joule at Sapphire, expect SAP to continue to make significant investments in the product.