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What you need to know
SAP and Anthropic are using MCP standards to enable Claude-powered agents to coordinate across its Business AI platform without custom integration code.
SAP Joule will route enriched queries to Claude for agentic task execution.
Anthropic and SAP will collaborate to develop industry-specific agents and workflows for regulated industries.
One of SAP’s key announcements at Sapphire 2026 was its partnership with Anthropic, which positions Claude as both a foundational model within the SAP Business AI Platform and as an extension of Joule, SAP’s AI assistant. This week, SAP CTO Philipp Herzig elaborated on how the integration will work in a blog post that outlined Claude’s role in enabling agentic workflows across SAP enterprise systems.
Herzig said the integration reflects SAP’s approach that “AI needs to be carefully integrated into business processes – in a way that maintains and strengthens processes that already work”.
“Our open platform ensures that we are closely connected to world-leading companies within our portfolio. Together with Anthropic, we are building something that is particularly valuable for our customers,” Christian Klein, CEO of SAP said. “The autonomous enterprise needs AI that is familiar with the business context and operates within the control mechanisms that companies rely on. And our partnership with Claude plays a key role in this”.
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Claude Integration Across SAP Business AI Platform
SAP plans to integrate Claude’s AI agent capabilities into the SAP Business AI Platform using MCP standards, enabling agents to coordinate across SAP S/4HANA, SAP SuccessFactors, SAP Ariba, and other connected systems
MCP is a standardized protocol that allows AI agents to communicate with different business systems, SAP or otherwise, without needing custom integration code for each one.
Instead of building separate connections between Claude and every SAP application, database, or third-party tool it might need to access, MCP provides a common language that any MCP-enabled system can understand. Once implemented, this would allow Claude to request customer data from SAP S/4HANA, pull employee records from SAP SuccessFactors, check inventory in a supply chain system, or trigger an approval workflow in SAP Ariba – all using the same protocol.
Step by step, agents retrieve the data they need, make updates where authorized, initiate approvals through existing workflows, and complete tasks across multiple systems.
Daniela Amodei, co-founder and President of Anthropic, said Claude was developed to support enterprise workflows including balance sheet closings, rerouting deliveries during order delays, and approving expense reports. “With Claude on the SAP Business AI Platform, these activities take place directly in the systems that companies already use – based on the trust and governance principles that SAP customers are accustomed to,” Amodei said.
How Claude and Joule Work Together in SAP Workflows
According to SAP Architecture Center documentation, Joule processes incoming user requests by analyzing three categories: the Scenario Catalog (metadata of all available scenarios, functions, and skills across SAP cloud applications), the Knowledge Catalog (SAP-owned and customer-owned knowledge), and user context and history including role-based permissions and chat history.
With Claude’s integration, SAP is adding Anthropic’s reasoning and agentic capabilities to this orchestration layer.
Claude-powered agents will be able to execute concrete actions for hundreds of thousands of SAP customers across finance, HR, procurement, and supply chain.
For example, a treasury manager could ask Joule to prepare a presentation for the CFO ahead of a meeting with a financial institution. Within minutes, Joule would deliver a completed presentation with current data, analysis, and notes on financial risks – tasks that previously required hours of manual effort.
SAP had announced extensive MCP support at TechEd 2025, giving AI agents access to SAP data from all business applications. SAP HANA Cloud added full MCP support in early 2026, giving Joule agents direct access to SAP’s database engine. All APIs and flows built into SAP Integration Suite and linked to third parties can be converted into an MCP tool, allowing Joule agents to communicate with those APIs via MCP.
Anthropic and SAP plan to collaborate strategically to develop custom agents and agent-supported workflows for key industries including public sector, healthcare, education, life sciences, and utilities, Herzig said.
What This Means for SAPinsiders
The functional boundaries between Joule and Claude remain unclear. When scoping Joule projects that involve agentic workflows, ask your SAP account team and SI partners to map out exactly which scenarios route to Claude versus other foundation models, and what that means for pricing, data residency, and audit trails. Understanding where agent execution happens — and what data each layer can access — matters significantly for governance, compliance, and cost modeling.
Cross-system agent workflows depend on MCP integration readiness. If your organization is designing AI workflows that need to pull context from ERP, CRM, procurement, HR, and third-party data sources, ask your SI or SAP account team how MCP connectivity is implemented, tested, and governed across heterogeneous environments. All APIs and flows in SAP Integration Suite can be converted into MCP tools, but “can be converted” is not the same as “are production-supported today” and that distinction matters when your business process depends on it.
Role-based access controls determine what agents can access, but not when human oversight happens. If Claude retrieves financial data, generates analysis, and flags risks automatically, where in your existing approval, audit, and compliance workflows does human review happen? The treasury manager example — Joule preparing a CFO presentation in minutes — is compelling, but it raises an operational question: can you actually audit and override agent actions the same way you would human actions? Clarifying that sequence before deploying agentic finance or procurement workflows will determine whether this accelerates trusted processes or introduces governance gaps you discover too late.
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