SAP Seeks To Differentiate Itself With AI Governance

At SAP Connect in Las Vegas, SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) explained to its customers and potential customers why they should choose SAP as their partner for Agentic AI to drive the autonomous enterprise. SAP is the largest global provider of enterprise applications.

SAP’s agentic framework is known as Joule: “Joule Assistants” help streamline work, and the larger agentic framework is called “Joule Work.” Assistants can be asked why something happened, used to analyze and suggest solutions, and, in the future, customers may even trust them to execute tasks. Novartis, for example, co-developed and recently launched a pilot of SAP’s Joule Sourcing Assistant. Their vision is for AI agents to handle the manual heavy lifting, enabling sourcing professionals to focus on strategy and supplier engagement.

Wall Street is looking for progress on the AI front from SAP. In August, UBS downgraded the enterprise software giant from Buy to Neutral, citing a glaring gap between the company’s grand AI ambitions and its slow rollout of actual deliverables. While SAP may have over promised, they are not behind other supply chain software companies I cover.

Since SAP Sapphire in May, SAP has developed 20 assistants. These assistants are role-driven and deeply embedded in a process workflow. They coordinate multiple agents to do their work. Assistants span procurement, supply chain, finance, customer experience, human resources, and Industry AI.

Industry AI is necessary because different industries can have very different processes and measures of success. A logistics service provider works very differently than a chemical manufacturer.

One beta customer I talked to complained about the slow development of their supply chain agents. SAP is co-developing the agents with them, which they can try out for free in the short run. In the longer run, SAP will charge for the usage, but those charges are not yet clear.

The Knowledge Graph is Key to Business Value

AI Governance is a Differentiator