SAP Business AI

SAP Business AI is a suite of artificial intelligence capabilities integrated directly into SAP’s enterprise software solutions and business processes. It is designed to automate and optimize processes, enhance decision-making, boost productivity, and improve customer experiences. Unlike generic AI tools, SAP Business AI is purpose-built for business processes, grounded in enterprise data, and infused into existing workflows.

SAP Business AI is delivered through three main layers

Joule, the AI-Powered Copilot: This generative AI assistant is integrated into SAP solutions across various business-relevant processes like HR, finance, supply chain, purchasing, and sales. It allows users to interact with business systems using natural language for navigation, information retrieval, and even completing transactions. Joule is designed to be omnipresent, available across cloud applications, and offers both out-of-the-box functionality and extensibility.
Embedded AI Capabilities: These are AI technologies integrated directly into various SAP products and services. They automate routine tasks, generate insights, improve user experience, and optimize processes without requiring separate setup or integration efforts. Over 400 embedded AI use cases are planned by the end of 2025.
AI Foundation on SAP BTP: This is a comprehensive set of integrated AI capabilities and services designed for developers to build, extend, and run custom AI solutions at scale. It offers ready-to-use AI services, AI workload management, generative AI management (Generative AI Hub), and tools to leverage business data and context (SAP HANA Cloud, SAP Datasphere). It serves as the backbone for SAP’s embedded AI capabilities and provides tools for domain-specific agents.

SAP Joule: Your AI Copilot

Joule is SAP’s AI-powered copilot, designed to transform how businesses interact with their systems by enabling natural language interactions and delivering proactive, contextualized insights. It is positioned as a core digital assistant across SAP’s cloud portfolio and beyond, aiming to make every user experience simpler and more intelligent.

Features and Capabilities of SAP Joule:

AI-Powered Assistant: Joule is an AI assistant, often referred to as a co-pilot, that allows users to interact with their business systems using plain, natural language, much like talking to a colleague. It is specifically designed to understand business language and the context of user actions within SAP systems.
Generative AI Foundation: It is powered by generative AI and large language models (LLMs) that are specifically fine-tuned for enterprise scenarios and the complexities of SAP environments.
Deep Integration: Joule is embedded directly into SAP cloud applications across various lines of business, including HR (SAP SuccessFactors), finance (SAP S/4HANA), supply chain, procurement (SAP Ariba), sales, and customer experience. It also integrates with SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) as its central nervous system for integration and intelligent technologies.
Cross-System Orchestration: Joule’s reach extends beyond SAP systems, capable of accessing and interacting with third-party applications and data sources like Salesforce, Microsoft 365, ServiceNow, SharePoint, and Google Workspace, acting as a true enterprise assistant.
Joule Agents: These are purpose-built AI systems that can autonomously plan, reflect, and execute multi-step business tasks across various systems, moving beyond mere recommendations or suggestions. They are grounded in SAP’s unique business expertise, Knowledge Graph, and business data cloud, allowing them to connect data, decisions, and actions across the business.
Joule Studio: Available in SAP Build, Joule Studio is a low-code tool that empowers organizations to create and deploy custom Joule agents and skills, extending Joule’s capabilities to specific company workflows and integrating with non-SAP systems. It offers guided no-code workflows and integrates with SAP Knowledge Graph for process and data grounding.
Responsible AI: SAP builds Joule adhering to its “Relevant, Reliable, and Responsible” AI approach, which includes strict ethical guidelines, data privacy, data protection, and cybersecurity standards. User data is not used to train public AI models.

Embedded AI: Driving Efficiency with SAP

Embedded AI refers to Artificial Intelligence capabilities that are directly integrated or “baked in” to existing SAP applications and business processes, rather than being standalone tools. It is a core part of SAP’s overall AI strategy, working in conjunction with Joule (the AI copilot) and AI Foundation (the platform for custom AI solutions). This approach aims to reshape how businesses operate by transforming everyday tasks into efficient, streamlined processes that save time and reduce human error. Embedded AI applies machine learning, statistical reasoning, or pattern detection within the existing flow of tasks to make processes react more usefully to context.

Embedded AI delivers a wide range of advantages across various business functions and user roles:

Increased Productivity and Efficiency: Automates routine tasks, freeing employees to focus on higher-value, creative, and strategic activities. Streamlines processes and reduces manual effort and human errors. Can reduce data processing time by up to 65% and improve model deployment efficiency by 40%. Enables faster task completion, with some tasks seeing improvements of 50-70%. Reduces time spent on manual transactions by approximately 15% through additional insight.
Improved Decision-Making: Provides data-driven insights and intelligent recommendations in real-time, enabling faster, more accurate, and more informed decisions. Unlocks insights that were previously hidden by analyzing patterns and suggesting actions.
Cost Savings: Optimizes processes and reduces errors, leading to substantial cost reductions across various business functions. Helps lower IT costs by automating error resolution and optimizing infrastructure.
Enhanced User Experience: Makes daily tasks more intuitive and streamlined, especially for new users. Operates in the background, making workdays smoother without added complexity, and is accessible to both technical and non-technical users.
Data Governance and Security: Improves data governance by reducing data copies and maintaining consistent security policies. Ensures that AI operates within SAP’s trusted infrastructure, adhering to ethical guidelines, data privacy, and security standards, and user data is not used to train public AI models.
Proactive Capabilities: Transforms reactive processes into proactive endeavors through predictive analytics, forecasting potential issues before they materialize. Enables automated actions without human intervention, such as scheduling maintenance when risk thresholds are exceeded.

SAP AI Foundation: All-in-One Platform

SAP AI Foundation is SAP’s comprehensive and unified AI platform, serving as an all-in-one toolkit for developers. It is positioned as the backbone and operating system for all SAP AI technologies and the leading AI platform for SAP. Its primary purpose is to enable the building, extending, and running of custom AI solutions and agents at scale across the SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP).

The AI Foundation encompasses several crucial components that empower developers and businesses:

AI Services These are pre-trained AI models ready for immediate use, covering a broad spectrum of business use cases.
AI Workload Management This includes tools such as: SAP AI Core, which allows for the cost-efficient and privacy-compliant deployment and integration of AI models at scale within SAP applications. It supports executing pipelines, serving inference requests, and productizing AI content for the SAP BTP marketplace. SAP AI Launchpad, which provides a transparent interface for managing AI models, connecting to multiple AI runtimes, centralizing AI lifecycle management, and monitoring model performance for retraining as needed.
Generative AI Management The Generative AI Hub is a key feature, providing instant access to a wide array of Large Language Models (LLMs) from various providers like Azure OpenAI, Google Gemini, and AWS Bedrock, as well as open-source models. It offers essential tools for prompt engineering, experimentation, and managing prompt history in a secure and trusted environment.
Business Data & Context AI Foundation leverages SAP HANA Cloud’s vector engine and similarity search, along with SAP Datasphere, to ground AI models with unique business data and context. It integrates with the SAP Knowledge Graph to provide rich contextual insights.
Foundation Models SAP collaborates with leading general-purpose AI vendors and LLM providers. It plans to fine-tune generic LLMs using anonymized SAP data and develop proprietary foundation models specifically designed with an inherent understanding of business processes and SAP data.
Joule Studio This is a capability within SAP Build that provides powerful and intuitive low-code tools for organizations to create and deploy custom Joule skills and AI agents tailored to their specific business needs.

Use Cases of SAP Business AI

Navigational Assistance Helps users find the right reports or screens, and navigate across SAP and even non-SAP connected applications, making processes intuitive, especially for new users.
Real-time Financial Insights Provides immediate data-driven insights to optimize profitability and support decision-making.
Predictive Stock Shortages Can predict stock shortages.
Financial Close Process Assists in resolving errors during the financial close process.
Intelligent data extraction for documents such as invoices, payables, and payment notes, reducing manual effort and costs.
Matching employees to projects based on skills, reducing staffing time and effort.
AI-assisted labor demand planning to forecast workload needs in warehouses.
AI-assisted process modeler for creating business process model and notation diagrams from text descriptions.
Custom AI Solutions and Agents Developers can create bespoke AI agents and solutions using tools like Joule Studio and the Generative AI Hub, tailored for specific business needs.
Generating SQL statements from natural language for database administration tasks in SAP HANA Cloud.
Providing AI-assisted content generation for catalogs and natural language search in SAP Datasphere for business descriptions, KPIs, and data discovery.
Supporting code generation and optimization for ABAP and SAP Build Code developers through Joule for developers.