One year after launching its Joule AI assistant, SAP is fusing Joule with a new wave of “autonomous” and “collaborative” agents, a product strategy that runs counter to Salesforce’s contention that agents will displace assistants and Oracle’s belief that agents are the future of enterprise apps.
Among a slew of wide-ranging product announcements disclosed at its TechEd event today, SAP said it intends to “transform” Joule with agents created not only by SAP but also by its partners and customers via enhancements to the SAP Build platform for developers.
It’s also certainly worth noting that in describing these new capabilities for Joule, SAP used very specifically the term “workflows,” which I believe reveals its intentions to begin going up against ServiceNow, the creator of the workflow category under CEO Bill McDermott, who before joining ServiceNow five years ago spent 10 years leading SAP.
In the SAP TechEd press release, the section describing the Joule-centric approach to helping customers harness the power of AI agents includes this excerpt:
“SAP announces that it will infuse Joule, its generative AI copilot, with multiple autonomous AI agents that will combine their unique expertise across business functions to collaboratively accomplish complex workflows. Available in Q4 2024, these AI agents will help organizations unlock massive productivity gains by breaking down silos and freeing workers to collaborate on areas where human ingenuity thrives.”
SAP clearly has high hopes for this imminent wave of Joule innovation, as chief AI officer Philipp Herzig predicted that the Joule-orchestrated collaborative AI agents “will push us into the next era of enterprise productivity.”
In laying out the ability for the new and improved Joule-plus-agents to drive excellent business outcomes for customers, SAP will no doubt emphasize the end-to-end reach of its applications, which gives those agents the ability to tie together and enhance interactions across a customer’s entire enterprise.
Here are a few other points from the SAP announcement that I believe will help customers get a better sense of how SAP’s agent strategy differs from those of Salesforce, Oracle, and others:
- “These AI agents will help organizations unlock massive productivity gains by breaking down silos and freeing workers to collaborate on areas where human ingenuity thrives.”
- “Unlike solutions supported by lone AI agents that are only trained to perform one type of task, Joule will perform much more complex workflows by bringing multiple specialized AI agents together in a way that lets them each perform their expert business processes — such as in supply chain, procurement, or finance — and adapt their strategies to achieve their collective objective.”
- SAP introduced two specific financial-services use cases for “out-of-the-box autonomous agents”: for managing disputes, the autonomous Joule agents will “analyze and resolve a range of dispute resolution scenarios, including incorrect and missing invoices, unapplied credits, and denied or duplicate payments;” and for financial accounting, the agents can “streamline key financial processes by automating tasks such as bill payments, invoice processing, and ledger updates,” addressing any inconsistencies in the process.
- Starting in Q1, SAP will roll out new capabilities in SAP Build enabling developers to build autonomous Joule agents.
In a briefing late last week, I asked SAP senior VP and global head of AI Walter Sun to share the company’s thinking in fusing Joule and the new agent capabilities.
“Salesforce says agents will replace copilots, but we think copilots and agents are perfect complements for each other,” Sun said.
SAP is creating benchmarks for various processes that the Joule agents will be managing, Sun said, and Joule will be able to use those benchmarks to advise customers about ways to improve metrics on costs or on quality issues or others.
“The way I look at it is that the agents are the musicians, and Joule is the conductor, and humans are the composers who write the music,” Sun said.
