SAP Demos an AI-Driven Enterprise
ORLANDO, FL — SAP painted a comprehensive picture of what an enterprise technology system deeply integrated with AI might look like at its annual SAP Sapphire Conference on Tuesday.
During its keynote presentations, the enterprise resource planning company demonstrated how its generative AI system, Joule, is accessible throughout its ecosystem and even beyond, allowing users and developers to use AI in other applications.
For instance, users can now leverage Joule to query application data using natural language, to automate form completion, or to access more information from within applications.
A Demo of the AI-Powered Enterprise
“Imagine having your own business AI assistant available in every application you use, be it SAP or on the web,” said Sarah Buerkle, SAP head of AI advocacy.
She demonstrated how Joule could manage a supply chain problem within a ticketing system such as ServiceNow. A Joule action bar provides information about how the ticket will impact the supply chain. In the example, Joule assessed an increased risk for disruption because the company had no backup supplier. It then suggested finding an alternative supplier, even recommending a specific company called Enertech.
“I recall that I recently met Enertech, and they sent me a better price offer via email. I should search my inbox, and thanks to Joule now being omnipresent, I can actually trigger this automatically and ask it for help,” Buerkle said. “Thanks to WalkMe, Joule is now able to pass this request onto Gemini, which takes me over to my Gmail inbox.”
WalkMe studies user behavior across applications and turns Joule into a proactive AI that can anticipate users’ needs before they arrive, the company stated. WalkMe, which SAP acquired in 2024, is an AI-powered digital adoption platform. It overlays existing applications to provide real-time, in-app support, step-by-step instructions and contextual help.
After finding the email, Joule helped generate a request for proposal, taking over in the background to pull information from the email and the SAP HANA system.
“All I need to do is quickly review that all looks good,” she said.
She then demonstrated creating a quick post about her live demo on LinkedIn to illustrate how Joule continued working in the background, prompting her with a notification when the supplier responded to the request for proposal (RFP).
“The next step is to issue a purchase order. Again, Joule helps me with that,” she said as the audience watched Joule auto-populate the purchase order. “This is being filled out dynamically. As you can see, information is coming in from the RFP, from the S/4 HANA system. It truly works like magic, and I can quickly review that [it] looks good. Let’s order, and our purchase order has been created.”
She then demonstrated how with one click, Joule navigated her back to the ServiceNow ticketing system and helped craft a response for the warehouse manager.
Automating With AI Agents
To support automating processes, SAP also rolled out an expanded library of AI agents in customer experience, supply chain management, spend management, finance and human capital management.
Among the agents the company said would be available in 2025 were:
- A quote creation and management agent, which transforms e-mail quote requests into ready-to-send quotes and orders;
- A catalog optimization agent, which maintains and optimizes product data;
- A maintenance planner agent, which performs reasoning using real-time data and suggests adjustments to maintenance schedules;
- A shop floor supervisor agent, which retrieves and reasons through disruption details, assesses impact, and recommends production rescheduling and orchestrates stock; and
- A field service dispatcher agent, which reasons through real-time resource-availability information to autonomously schedule and optimize service orders;
Philipp Herzig, SAP’s chief AI officer and chief technology officer, said the company has shipped more than 200 generative AI scenarios that are embedded in applications and platform services, adding they were on track to deliver 400 AI scenarios by the end of the year.
Joule is also available in SAP’s developer platform, Build.
SAP and Perplexity Partner
SAP CEO Christian Klein announced that SAP is also partnering with the AI-powered search engine Perplexity to enable its AI to provide answers from external public information sources on the web.
“Imagine you are reading the latest news online about tariffs, and you want to understand what does this means for my business in a specific country,” Kleins said. “Joule will be able to think through your questions, find your business data with a specific country understands that data correlates it with the external information on tariffs, to give you the answer you need.”
Perplexity co-founder and CEO Aravind Srinivas joined Klein on stage and explained that while SAP has a lot of structured data, Perplexity focuses on unstructured data.
“People who are at work need answers. They need them fast, and most importantly, they need to be able to trust them,” Srinivas said. “Our joint customers, what they should expect is making better decisions in all aspects of their work. That’s what we hope to achieve.”
