Welcome to the Cloud Wars Minute — your daily cloud news and commentary show. Each episode provides insights and perspectives around the “reimagination machine” that is the cloud.
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In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I explore SAP’s innovative strategy of integrating its Joule copilot with AI-driven agents, and how this approach differs from competitors like Salesforce and Oracle.
Highlights
00:13 — SAP has jumped into the agent wars, and it’s got a different strategy from Salesforce, Oracle, Workday, and others. SAP’s plan is to fuse Joule with its new agent capability. SAP believes that for customers, the big value will come from the combination of copilot capabilities in Joule and also some of these new agents.
01:26 — We’ve seen the great potential that’s coming from these agents, and if you look at SAP in particular, with its incredibly broad range of applications, the possibility for these agents to have a very broad, significant, and coordinated impact across the enterprise is huge. SAP referred to Agent Joule, this super-agent, as “autonomous” and “collaborative.”
02:22 — SAP also said it was going to have a lot of benchmarks for certain processes that these agents will be overseeing, managing, and enhancing, so that a customer would be able to look at these benchmarks and say, “Hey, of all these different metrics I could use, I’m really interested in cost. I want to focus on that. What’s the best way I can keep my costs down?”
03:31 — I spoke late last week with Walter Sun, senior vice president and global head of AI. Sun said, “Think of it like going to a concert. The agents are the orchestra, Joule is the conductor, and human beings are the composers who write the music and sort of set out the big picture of what they want to happen here.”
04:17 — While it’s clear that all the major companies — everybody in the Cloud Wars Top 10 —want to get into the agent business, the way in which they’re doing it has a lot of differentiation. There are many ways for customers to be able to pick and choose across these different approaches and find the one that is best for them.
04:37 — You might find that customers are using multiple agent strategies depending on the outcome they want to achieve and the business issue they’re trying to address. I’m glad to see SAP get into the agent wars in a big way. As always, I believe the customers are going to be the big winners in this battle.
