SAP unveils AI tools for business users & developers

SAP has unveiled a set of artificial intelligence products and updates for developers and business users, centred on additions to Joule Studio, Joule Work and the SAP Business AI Platform.

The changes are intended to help customers build, extend and manage AI agents across SAP systems and third-party environments from a single platform. SAP also introduced new governance tools, broader data context for those agents and an updated tabular AI model being used aboard the International Space Station.

At the centre of the update is SAP Business AI Platform, described as a common environment for building, contextualising and governing AI. Joule Studio, SAP's development environment for AI agents, now includes no-code and pro-code tools, plus access to more than 70 AI models.

Customers in an early adopter programme can also design and run n8n workflows in Joule Studio. The platform now includes new observability and administrative controls, giving developers and administrators visibility into agent behaviour, model usage and spending.

Joule Work, a related product, is receiving updates intended to help AI agents manage more complex business workflows. These include support for open protocols such as Agent2Agent and Model Context Protocol, as well as what SAP called agentic thinking features to plan and orchestrate multistep processes across enterprise systems.

Another part of the rollout focuses on governance. A new Enterprise AI Gateway will give customers a central way to manage AI traffic, including authentication, policy enforcement, routing, monitoring, usage tracking and auditing.

Updates to Joule Assistant, SAP AI Agent Hub and an AI Governance Assistant are also intended to help customers meet compliance requirements, including those linked to the EU AI Act. The aim is to address concerns around classification, compliance and operational guardrails as companies deploy AI more widely.

Data management is another strand of the strategy. SAP said Business Data Cloud and SAP Knowledge Graph provide business context and trusted data for AI agents, helping them reason across company-specific information.

A new Ontology Manager in SAP Business Data Cloud will let customers build ontologies across SAP and third-party data. By mapping relationships between data from different teams, systems and applications, SAP said, AI agents should be able to make more accurate decisions across a business.

SAP is also expanding its data platform partnerships, adding lakehouse support with Dremio, including support for Apache Iceberg and Apache Polaris, alongside a federated query engine aimed at enabling unified access to data without moving or copying it.

The company is also widening its work with Databricks, bringing Databricks data engineering and AI tools into SAP Business Data Cloud under the name SAP Databricks. A new SAP Application Data Foundation and an integration between Joule and Genie also form part of that effort.

The SAP Reltio solution will add multidomain master data management to SAP Business Data Cloud, combining customer, supplier and product records across SAP and non-SAP systems into reusable data products for applications and AI agents.

Space validation

Beyond the platform changes, SAP introduced a new version of its tabular foundation model, SAP-RPT-2.0. The model expands from classification and regression into anomaly and outlier detection, while also adding embedding-based analysis for structured data.

SAP also announced SAP-RPT-TS, a model aimed at forecasting time-indexed business metrics in SAP Integrated Business Planning without the need for custom machine learning work.

One of the most eye-catching elements of the announcement was the deployment of SAP-RPT on HPE Spaceborne Computer-2 aboard the International Space Station. The model is planned to run directly on the station to support anomaly triage, predict issues before failures escalate, reconstruct missing sensor values from historical data and generate mission health reports without sending data back to Earth for analysis.

"SAP TechEd has always been where builders shape what comes next," said Philipp Herzig, Chief Technology Officer at SAP. "This year, we are showing how we are moving from AI learning your business to running it. Joule Work is where you put your intent and get work done, in one experience across the entire SAP landscape and beyond. That is the shift we are delivering at scale. Everything underneath runs on SAP Business AI Platform, delivering faster time to value through out-of-the-box business understanding, higher accuracy, enterprise-readiness that is secure, governed and compliant from the first deployment, and a unique context layer built on over 50 years of process and industry expertise, encoded into every agent action. This is AI built where real work happens."

SAP said it does not share customer data to train or improve large language models, presenting that as part of its approach to data control and governance.

The company also highlighted partner announcements involving Intel, DocuSign, Parloa and Redwood as part of a wider effort to extend its AI-related software through outside providers.

On the space deployment, Herzig said: "The same trusted SAP-RPT model that powers global supply chains also can work in space. SAP's deep-rooted, proven expertise has led to the International Space Station's use of our tabular foundation model to predict potential mission-critical failures in orbit. With SAP-RPT and TabPFN from Prior Labs, we bring the unique capabilities of tabular AI into the enterprise and across every frontier."