Just moments after highlighting the greatest quarterly financial results in SAP’s legendary 53-year history, CEO Christian Klein teased what might be the company’s most-ambitious product launch ever as SAP plans to jump into the red-hot data-cloud category to fuel a sharply expanding portfolio of Joule AI agents.
As I described last week in “SAP Crushes Q4 as Total Cloud Backlog Soars 43% to $65.8 Billion,” SAP is dramatically outperforming all of the other major enterprise-apps vendors. And with the announcements it intends to make at its Feb. 13 “Business Unleashed” event, Klein is looking to unveil a slate of data and AI products and services that will make it simpler and faster for customers to harness the full power of their data and drive tangible ROI and business outcomes with agentic AI.
On SAP’s Oct. 28 Q4 earnings call, Klein teased the new innovations in a narrative that connected thorny data and tech challenges that have bedeviled businesses for decades with the bracing possibilities and opportunities that AI agents seem fully capable of handling.
“In addition, I can’t wait to launch a game-changing innovation very soon that will give us a great boost in the data and AI space,” Klein said at the end of his opening remarks on the earnings call.
“Today, many companies spend up to 50% of their IT budget on data and analytics. But despite all that investment, many companies still fall short of realizing the potential of their data. All too often, data is locked in silos or stuck in so-called data swarms without any business context,” Klein said, resulting in fragmented — and frustrating — views of what’s happening across their organizations.
And while those data limitations and shortcomings have always been a drag on businesses and the IT organizations charged with overcoming them, those challenges are taking on even greater significance today because their continued presence will sharply limit the contributions that AI agents can make.
“Companies have no complete view of their business that way and without access to high-quality data, AI agents stay far below their potential as well,” Klein said, tossing in the old truism about “garbage in, garbage out.”
“We will address these challenges in the data and AI space with one of the biggest innovations SAP has ever delivered,” Klein said.
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“We will harmonize structured and unstructured data, as well as SAP and non-SAP data — always with the relevant semantics,” which will in turn “make AI agents much more powerful.”
At the top of the stack for SAP’s new vision is Joule, originally launched 15 months ago as an AI assistant but subsequently overhauled by SAP to become an autonomous agent.
“Joule will become the super-orchestrator of these agents, carrying out complete tasks autonomously on an end-to-end basis while also taking over significant workloads from humans,” Klein said.
SAP’s primary data offering is currently Datasphere, which the company has described as a business-data fabric. I expect SAP will position the new offering to be unveiled at the Feb. 13 right up against Salesforce’s Data Cloud, which Marc Benioff has described as not only the fastest-growing product in the company’s history but also an absolutely indispensable ingredient powering the company’s Agentforce services that Benioff says represent the future of how business will operate in the near future.
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