SAP CEO Klein: This is a breakthrough moment for business AI

Reporting from SAP Connect 2026 in Las Vegas this week, we learn that the German softwarehaus has been working to put the autonomous enterprise (that increasingly real, but still somewhat emergent and embryonic notion of an organisation with deeply embedded business context-aware agentic services running through it) finally to work for real. It is doing so by driving Joule Work, Joule Assistants and SAP Business AI Platform forward to help enable business operations in all verticals to turn business AI into trusted outcomes, across every core business function and the workflows within. Big statements and big words there, so how does SAP think it can pull this off? Automation demonstrations Among the core missions for SAP Connect this year is the company’s willingness to provide what it promises are verifiable showcase demonstrations that illustrate how Joule Work and Joule Assistants generate value for customers across every line of business. Let’s just stop and define those branded products. SAP Joule Work – is described as a foundational capability within SAP’s AI suite that orchestrates complex business workflows, automates cross-functional tasks, and manages end-to-end operational processes autonomously across enterprise applications. SAP Joule Assistants – this technology can be explained as role-based digital co-pilots embedded directly into SAP systems that help users interact with their core functions through natural language as they surface what SAP likes to call “contextual insights”, with the aim of accelerating routine daily tasks. Christian Klein, CEO of SAP calls it “a breakthrough moment for business AI” in real terms. “The Autonomous Enterprise has arrived,” said Klein. “With Joule and SAP Autonomous Suite, built on SAP Business AI Platform, we’re helping organisations like Novartis, Nestlé and PwC connect intelligence across every function to deliver trusted business outcomes.” At SAP Connect, these customers shared how the Autonomous Enterprise is already driving measurable value across their businesses. Christoph Buerki, head of procurement, Novartis (a Swiss pharmaceutical company developing innovative medicines and therapies) attended SAP Connect 2026 to explain how his team co-developed and recently launched a pilot of SAP’s Joule Sourcing Assistant. “Our vision is for AI agents to handle the manual heavy lifting, enabling sourcing professionals to focus on strategy, supplier engagement and value creation,” said Buerki. Jill Notz, chief accounting officer & business services leader at PwC, shared how she and her team think the SAP Billing Assistant will transform billing operations across its professional services business, flagging anomalies and resolving posting errors before invoices go out. A new AI user interface SAP further stated that its SAP Autonomous Enterprise Scales Up Joule Work is beginning its customer rollout as a new AI user interface that lets workers interact with SAP services in their own language and complete work across SAP and third-party data. Grounded in business context drawn from SAP Knowledge Graph (an enterprise data architecture component that models complex business entities, relationships, and context to fuel what the company calls “groundable AI” across SAP systems), which maps more than 7 million data fields. At SAP and inside SAP , Joule Work is already live with 110,000 employees, with the company seeing 20% productivity gains across finance, HR and procurement. A select group of customers also is using Joule Work in their business environments. Customers control the autonomy When a query is not enough, Joule Assistants execute operational work directly within business workflows, using established data, authorisations and audit trails. Customers control the level of autonomy. Underlining an adherence to openness here, SAP confirms that its approach is also open: through the Agent2Agent protocol, and Joule can connect with third-party AI and agents, bringing governed business context into broader AI workflows. At SAP Connect, SAP showcased how these capabilities generate outcomes across SAP Autonomous Suite: In finance, controllers can automate revenue recognition, disclosures and trade compliance, with early deployments of the International Trade Assistant reducing trade classification effort by up to 50%. In supply chain, planners can turn multi-hour disruptions into one-click resolutions across planning, manufacturing and logistics. In HR, leaders can determine the best way to close workforce gaps, while employees can make smarter benefits choices tailored to their needs. In procurement, decision makers can identify savings opportunities against peer benchmarks and manage the full contingent workforce lifecycle. In customer experience, organisations can turn customer engagement into sales opportunities with AI-powered campaigns, quoting and customer workflows. Across industries, SAP is collaborating with customers to apply AI to specialised industry processes, helping organisations in manufacturing, retail, commodity trading and asset-intensive industries improve decision-making, automate routine actions and build more resilient operations. The company promises that SAP Business AI Platform gives organisations “one place to build, contextualise and govern AI” across SAP and third-party environments. Tuning into Joule Studio With Joule Studio, business users and developers can build and extend skills and agents from no-code to pro-code workflows, choosing from more than 70 AI models. SAP Business Data Cloud and SAP Knowledge Graph ground those agents in trusted business data and context, helping organizations select the right model for each use case and better manage AI value and consumption. “Our Joule journey is not about deploying another AI tool; it’s about helping us work differently across finance. We are bringing SAP Joule into core business processes, including master data analysis, where we can now look across millions of records in seconds, and empower our teams to innovate through Joule Studio,” said Michalene Schechter, global finance and procurement lead & SAP platform architect for global IT at Accenture. Schechter’s team is also getting ready to deploy its first Joule Studio agent for treasury bank fee analysis. She says that she is “excited” by what the team is seeing in the Early Adopter Care programme, which will help them scale these capabilities across the business. “At the same time, we’re building a shared intelligence foundation that gives both our people and agents access to the same trusted data, context and knowledge. This will help agents execute more tasks unique to our business, with people in the lead,” added Michalene Schechter. This notion of the shared intelligence platform is (arguably, very) important as we move out of the prototyping phase with agentic services and really start to embed them in live operational workflows where humans (remember them?) will naturally feel more comfortable next to agents if there is open, transparent and democratically shared intelligence. “SAP-managed governance helps organisations scale AI with transparency, accountability and control. AI Agent Hub in SAP LeanIX solutions provides a central inventory of enterprise agents, while SAP’s independently ISO/IEC 42001-certified governance architecture supports regulatory requirements, established authorisations and auditable AI operations,” noted SAP in a press statement. To help organisations adopt AI at scale, SAP’s Business Transformation Management portfolio, including SAP Signavio, SAP LeanIX and SAP WalkMe solutions, provides the toolchain to analyse processes, govern applications and agents, and drive adoption across the enterprise. Embedded Payments to Cloud ERP SAP also announced that it is entering the payments market with SAP Pay, powered by Tereina, an SAP company. Embedded directly in SAP Cloud ERP, SAP Pay executes and reconciles payments within the same workflow when an invoice is due, reducing manual file handling and external processing dependencies, while giving customers greater control. Christian Klein, CEO of SAP: Now is a breakthrough moment for business AI. SAP is extending the Autonomous Enterprise beyond SAP’s own application portfolio through new partnerships that bring specialised intelligence directly into SAP workflows. A new partnership between SAP and Moody’s Corporation is designed to embed Moody’s supplier risk monitoring data into SAP Ariba Supplier Lifecycle and Performance. This gives procurement teams continuously updated insights into supplier financial health, operational risk and regulatory status at the point of decision. Organisations will be able to move from periodic risk reviews toward continuous monitoring, enabling Joule Agents to flag supplier risk signals and surface alternatives before disruption affects the business. Appropriately, SAP concluded its announcements this year by saying, in full, that press release materials were “created with the assistance of artificial intelligence”, but that they were then reviewed by the editorial team. What should developers think next? Software application developers coding with, at, on or perhaps even through SAP’s platform might now think about moving their mindset onward from writing static transaction logic to building agentic, context-aware micro-services. The company is clearly (like all enterprise software vendors) now pushing SAP’s “Autonomous Enterprise” message as hard as possible; this means code will no longer operate in isolated silos; it must be designed to expose deterministic tools and data models directly to autonomous agents like Joule Assistants and Joule Work. Developers might also think about architecting for context more directly i.e., grounding agents requires structuring data against the SAP Knowledge Graph. Code must also now “explicitly define relationships and authorisations across standard schema fields” as a responsibility.