At SAP Connect, we announced new and enhanced Joule Assistants for SAP Customer Experience, expanded SAP Order Management Services for complex B2B environments, and the general availability of SAP Commerce Cloud, cloud ERP edition.
These announcements build on the Autonomous Customer Experience strategy we introduced at SAP Sapphire. That premise is straightforward: AI must understand customer intent, make context-aware decisions, and execute within business guardrails. Following through on a customer commitment requires AI grounded in real-time, enterprise-wide business data, with a deep understanding of the processes needed to orchestrate work from intent to outcome.
A quote needs accurate pricing and terms. An order depends on inventory, credit, payment, and fulfillment. A service interaction requires information about the customer, the product, and the commitments the company has already made.
Customers generally do not see this operational complexity. They experience whether the company followed through.
Joule Assistants move from providing answers to driving business outcomes
Many AI tools can reason about what should happen next and recommend actions. But executing complex enterprise processes requires more than that.
AI needs to understand the live state of the business, including customer commitments, products, pricing, agreements, orders, payments, policies, and operational constraints. It must then navigate the approvals, exceptions, and cross-application steps required to act. Without that grounding, proposed actions may appear reasonable but can be inappropriate, infeasible, or break down in execution.
This is the direction behind the latest Joule Assistant innovations. New and enhanced Joule Assistants for SAP Customer Experience combine role-specific intelligence with business and process context across marketing, commerce, sales, service, finance, operations, and compensation, helping users move from understanding what should happen to getting the work done.
The innovations apply this approach to moments where fragmented context, manual steps, and handoffs can slow the customer experience.
- Campaign Assistant and Content Assistant help teams move from campaign ideas to execution faster by reducing the effort required to plan, create, refine, and activate marketing campaigns.
- Shopping Assistant makes product discovery easier and more relevant to what the customer is trying to accomplish.
- Quoting Assistant brings customer, pricing, and commercial context together so sellers can prepare quotes faster and spend less time assembling information across systems.
- Service Planning and Operations Assistant translates service demand into coordinated plans, reducing the manual work required to align people, resources, and customer commitments.
- Incentive Compensation Assistant and Recurring Receivables Assistant bring the same intelligence to critical processes behind the customer experience, helping resolve questions, reduce administrative work, and keep compensation and payment workflows moving.
The goal is not to add another conversational interface. It is to move work forward by bringing together the business context, process knowledge, and controls required to act.
Human judgment remains important where decisions require approval, oversight, or exception handling. Within defined guardrails, AI can assemble context, determine and execute appropriate actions, and escalate when human intervention is needed.
SAP Order Management Services coordinates execution across ERP landscapes
Order management becomes more difficult when an order crosses ERP systems, legal entities, plants, distribution centers, and business units.
Each transition can introduce different information about pricing, inventory, credit, fulfillment status, or ownership of the next action. Consolidating every ERP system before improving order execution is not always a practical starting point.
SAP is expanding SAP Order Management Services to provide highly scalable, resilient, real-time omnichannel order orchestration across SAP S/4HANA and other ERP systems.
Built on a cloud-native, event-driven architecture, SAP Order Management Services coordinates order execution across channels, systems, business units, and third-party partners without requiring organizations to consolidate their ERP landscapes first.
The expanded capabilities provide a common layer for validating orders, checking inventory across locations, coordinating transactions between business units, and monitoring progress through fulfillment.
This gives organizations greater flexibility to add, remove, and experiment across channels, while enabling the order management layer to detect disruptions, trigger exception workflows, and keep execution aligned with the original customer commitment.
In complex enterprise landscapes, this combination of scale, flexibility, and reliable integration helps businesses deliver consistent omnichannel experiences while improving operational efficiency.
Complete business context across the customer journey
Customer intent enters the business long before an order reaches a fulfillment system. It begins when a customer discovers a product, engages with a campaign, requests a quote, or starts a purchase journey.
To deliver on that intent, customer-facing interactions must remain connected to the pricing, inventory, ordering, fulfillment, and financial systems that support them.
SAP Commerce Cloud, cloud ERP edition, is now generally available. First introduced at SAP Sapphire, the edition allows midsize and growing companies to extend SAP Cloud ERP with commerce capabilities that use ERP data for pricing, availability, orders, invoices, and other transactional processes.
For more than a decade, SAP Commerce Cloud has supported some of the world’s largest and most complex digital commerce environments. With SAP Commerce Cloud, cloud ERP edition, we are extending that approach to companies that want a more standardized, SAP-managed path to ERP-connected commerce.
By using SAP Cloud ERP as the system of record, organizations can connect digital commerce with pricing, ordering, fulfillment, and financial processes without building and maintaining those connections independently. The result is a faster path to value, lower operational complexity, and an ERP-aligned commerce model designed to scale as the business grows.
The same principle applies as customer interactions move across teams. A new native connection between SAP Engagement Cloud, enterprise edition, and SAP Sales Cloud synchronizes contact and company information while bringing relevant engagement signals directly into sales workflows. Instead of reconstructing customer context, sellers can continue conversations with a clearer understanding of prior engagement.
Customer experience depends on execution
AI can understand customer intent, make context-aware decisions, and act within defined guardrails. The harder question is whether the business can carry that action across the systems, teams, and processes responsible for delivery.
The innovations announced at SAP Connect address different parts of that challenge. Joule Assistants bring business and process context into the flow of work and help execute the next step. SAP Order Management Services orchestrates orders across complex ERP landscapes. SAP Commerce Cloud, cloud ERP edition, connects digital commerce directly with ERP pricing, availability, ordering, fulfillment, and financial processes.
Together, they advance a common principle: Autonomous Customer Experience depends on connecting customer-facing intelligence with the operational context and processes required to act.
Customers ultimately do not experience recommendations, models, or workflows. They experience whether the business followed through and delivered.
As AI begins to act on behalf of the business, the quality of that follow-through will depend on the business context, process knowledge, and operational reality behind every action.
Additional information on the SAP Connect announcements, including availability details and product-specific innovations, is available in the SAP Connect Innovation News Guide.
Balaji Balasubramanian is president and chief product officer of SAP CX.