Christian Klein opened the keynote with a question that hung in the room for the rest of the week: “Will SAP be a software company in the future?”
Ninety minutes later, he closed by asking Joule to summarize what had just been announced. Joule’s answer was – “SAP is becoming a business AI company.”
That framing set the tone for the conversations that followed at Sapphire 2026.
We walked into Orlando with a clear sense of where SAP was heading. The customer conversations we have been part of over the past eighteen months have pointed in the same direction. What Sapphire confirmed was the pace and the scale: 50+ Joule Assistants, 200+ specialized agents, two major acquisitions, a €100 million partner fund, and the launch of the SAP Business AI Platform positioned as capabilities shipping now rather than next year’s roadmap.
Here is what stood out to us, and how we are reading it.
The Autonomous Enterprise Architecture
For three years, SAP talked about AI agents in keynote demos. This year, SAP built the system to actually run them.
That system is called the Autonomous Enterprise, and it has three parts:
- The SAP Business AI Platform is the foundation. It holds the data, the rules, and the AI engines that everything else depends on.
- The SAP Autonomous Suite is the middle layer. This is where AI agents do the actual work, making decisions and moving processes forward.
- Joule Work is what users see and use. Instead of clicking through SAP screens, people just tell Joule what they need, and Joule sorts out the rest.
The Business AI Platform itself is a merger. SAP BTP, SAP Business Data Cloud, and SAP AI Foundation used to be three separate products that customers had to stitch together. Now they live in one place.
Inside it sit two new pieces: the Knowledge Graph and the SAP Domain Models. These are the business sense that AI agents need to make good decisions. Without them, an agent sees the word “invoice” as just another record. With them, the agent knows that an invoice should match a goods receipt and a purchase order before it can be paid, because that is how procurement actually works.
This is the platform partners and customers will build on for the next decade. Our BTP and Business Data Cloud teams have been working in this direction for the past two years, which is why our customer conversations at Sapphire skipped past “what is this” and went straight to the real questions: how do we deploy it, how do we govern it, and what do we do first?
Joule Work
Joule has moved from copilot to primary interface.
Joule Work is one engagement layer across web, mobile, and desktop, with voice coming through the LiveKit partnership. It supports MCP and A2A protocols, so it works with Microsoft Copilot, Salesforce Agentforce, and ServiceNow alongside SAP. Users describe what they need. The work routes itself across applications and agents.
Enterprise software is moving from screen navigation to outcomes. The way teams design, deploy, and adopt SAP applications will need to change with it — and that change is a project in itself, not a configuration step.
Hybrid landscapes
The most important part in the keynote was an admission: most enterprises are not arriving at a clean, cloud-native estate in the next few quarters. Many are mid-migration. Many will run hybrid landscapes for years.
SAP’s response reflected that reality. A meaningful portion of the new assistants and agents have been built to operate across cloud, on-premises, and older ERP environments. The migration tooling itself now incorporates agents, with SAP citing reductions in migration effort of more than 35 percent. The new partnerships with Palantir and Accenture extend this capability into the more complex transformation scenarios that traditionally take the longest to deliver.
This is the same approach our Migration Factory practice has taken with customers for several years: phased, low-risk modernization that respects what is already running in production. Sapphire 2026 has now placed that approach at the center of the ecosystem strategy.
Partner ecosystem
Two announcements at Sapphire deserve more attention than they have received in the broader coverage.
The first is the €100 million partner fund dedicated to agent development. The second is that Joule Studio 2.0 is now generally available at no cost through the end of the year. Considered together, SAP is making a specific request of its partner community: build agents on this platform, begin that work now, and SAP will help fund the effort. The SAP AI Agent Hub, scheduled for release in Q3 2026, will serve as the marketplace through which those agents reach customers, and more than 680 partner submissions have already been logged.
Team Crave InfoTech at SAP Sapphire, 2026
The next eighteen months will reward the partners who have already been treating agents as an ongoing program rather than as a one-off project. That has been our position from the outset, and it is reflected in the intellectual property behind CoreAssess.AI and AccessHub.ai, as well as in the agent design work we have been delivering through our Clean Core engagements.
Customer Conversations
The discussions on the Sapphire floor had a different focus this year.
A year ago, a significant portion of the conversation centred on what agentic AI could do in principle. This year, customers arrived with specific use cases already in mind. A finance team was looking at how an AI agent could reason about payment terms across a complex receivables portfolio. A procurement lead wanted to understand the practical path to deploying supplier-risk agents within an existing sourcing process. A manufacturing CIO was working through how the Clean Core principle fits within the new SAP Business AI Platform architecture.
The executive workshop we hosted alongside the main event focused on the three priorities customers returned to most often: simplifying the middleware sprawl that has accumulated over time, choosing AI use cases that produce measurable business outcomes rather than attempting all of them at once, and establishing a Clean Core position before agents are deployed into production. The sessions were well attended, and the follow-up conversations have continued well past the close of the event.
A few moments from the keynote are worth recording here. Jeremy Barnum – Chief Financial Officer of JPMorgan Chase, spoke on stage about identifying and correcting ledger errors before they are posted to the ledger. H&M demonstrated an AI-powered in-store concierge running live during the session. And Christian Klein closed the keynote with the line that SAP is evolving from being a software company to becoming a business AI company.
Three Priorities for the Next 12 Months
- Sequence the foundation work before introducing agents
The launch of the SAP Business AI Platform changes the order in which planning decisions should be made. Integrations, master data, and access controls need to be in a stable and standardized state before any AI agents are introduced into the production environment.
A Clean Core assessment is a structured review of how far an SAP system has drifted from its standard configuration and how prepared it is to adopt new capabilities such as agents. In many organizations, this review has been treated as a medium-term consideration. Given the pace SAP has now set, it should be moved to the top of the next quarter’s plan. In most of the customer engagements we are leading at the moment, the Clean Core conversation is where the work begins.
- Establishthe context layer before deploying agents
The Joule Assistants announced at Sapphire are already shipping, but their performance will depend almost entirely on the information sitting beneath them. An agent that does not understand a company’s product catalogue, supplier base, or operating processes will produce generic responses. An agent that has been grounded in that context will produce outputs that hold up in real business decisions.
The most important preparation, therefore, is to put the underlying data, business rules, and process logic in order before the agents are turned on. This is the work our BTP, integration, and Digital Supply Chain practices have been delivering to customers for several years, and it is what determines whether an agent rollout creates measurable value.
- Treat agents as an ongoing program rather than a one-time project
SAP has committed €100 million to partner-led agent development, made Joule Studio 2.0 generally available at no cost through the end of the year, and confirmed plans for the SAP AI Agent Hub marketplace. The build path for partners and customers is well defined.
It is equally important to recognize that agents do not follow a deploy-once-and-conclude pattern. They require continuous improvement, governance, and renewal as the underlying business evolves. The organizations that will see the strongest outcomes are those whose partners remain engaged across the full lifecycle. We have operated on that long-term model for close to two decades, and it continues to shape the way we structure customer engagements today.
We left Orlando with our roadmap reinforced and our view of the next twelve months sharper than when we arrived. If SAP is on your agenda for the year ahead, we welcome the conversation.
