A simple question about a purchase order used to cause frustration, burn time, and waste money.
SAP Sapphire in 2026: Advancing the Autonomous Enterprise
Employees at LC Waikiki, a global fashion retailer with tens of thousands of employees, had to navigate multiple systems to piece together data across sales and procurement. Answering a single question could take up to 10 minutes.
Today, they just ask Joule. What used to take 10 minutes now takes about three seconds, driving a 70% increase in operational efficiency and a 50% reduction in manual errors.
Using capabilities in Joule Studio, LC Waikiki partnered with SAP and NTT DATA Business Solutions to build a custom AI-driven experience that dynamically interprets user requests, applies role-based context, performs the necessary queries, and connects data across systems to present a complete view in one place. It then links people directly to the relevant transaction.
At SAP, stories like these inspire our vision for the enterprise in which AI transforms how people and processes work—one where people set the direction and AI executes. We call it the the Autonomous Enterprise.
In the Autonomous Enterprise, decisions are grounded in real-time intelligence, workflows are automated end-to-end, and AI proactively improves every function while empowering people to do their best work.
The Autonomous Enterprise also provides fully governed AI you can trust, so you can achieve more. Making this a reality for companies is critical because AI is now essential to how all work gets done. It is increasingly involved in decisions that carry financial, operational, and regulatory consequences.
Joule: One place to direct the entire business
In the Autonomous Enterprise, Joule Work, announced at SAP Sapphire, is the next step in the evolution of how people engage with and execute end-to-end business processes. Joule Work is a dynamic workspace that adapts to intent, keeps people focused on outcomes, and delegates execution to AI.
Through Joule Work, you can say goodbye to manually coordinating work across multiple applications and interfaces. Instead, tell Joule what you want to accomplish. Joule Assistants with role and process context will coordinate teams of Joule Agents to surface the right insights and automate routine work across departments and systems. Rather than static, disjointed systems, you get workspaces that pull together information and menus from various systems that fit your specific needs, in real time.
Joule Work is available now to customers in the SAP Early Adopter Care program. SAP Early Adopter Care program for the Joule Work desktop app is planned for Q2 2026; general availability for both is planned for H2 2026. The Joule Work mobile app is generally available now.
We also announced that Joule’s bi-directional Agent-to-Agent (A2A) capabilities will be generally available in Q4, enabling third-party agents to securely call on Joule Agents and act within enterprise processes, extending interoperability in both directions across SAP and non-SAP environments. Agents built in Joule Studio will natively support A2A protocols, enabling interoperability and scalability for multi-agent execution.
SAP Autonomous Suite: The operational core of the modern enterprise
While Joule Work empowers every individual to do their best work and expand their impact, the SAP Autonomous Suite transforms how entire business functions, or “autonomous domains,” work.
SAP Autonomous Suite spans five domains: finance, spend, supply chain, human capital management, and customer experience. These domains will operate as a single system, so workflows and agents run across functions without fragmenting into separate tools, separate data, or separate decisions. This approach allows AI recommendations to reflect your full operating reality.
With SAP’s integrated suite of business applications and industry-leading business data, AI in the Autonomous Enterprise is grounded in the specifics of how key business functions actually work. This foundational context for transformative AI outcomes is where SAP’s unique experience comes in. For decades, we have been trusted to run our customers’ most important functions. SAP Autonomous Suite infuses our deep knowledge of business processes into your AI, along with the data context and operational guardrails it needs to be truly effective and reliable at enterprise scale.
Each organization is also unique. Over time, your business has defined how your work gets done. These are the rules, workflows, and how systems respond when something unexpected happens, like a failed transaction, so processes don’t break. In the Autonomous Enterprise, AI delivers its greatest value by respecting these boundaries, turning your unique ways of working into a true advantage.
At SAP Sapphire, we announced new Joule Assistants and Joule Agents, spanning the domains of the Autonomous Enterprise, to help organizations move from managing work to directing outcomes. These new assistants and agents will roll out through the end of this year.
SAP Business AI Platform: The foundation of the Autonomous Enterprise
The SAP Business AI Platform turns the vision of human-led, AI-driven business operations into something enterprises can build and run. It enables them to move from AI experimentation to execution by grounding agents and applications in real business context that governs it all at enterprise scale.
At the center is Joule Studio, a fully managed environment that empowers enterprises to build and manage the full lifecycle of AI agents, applications, extensions, and workflows. Intent-based development capabilities allow people to describe what they need in natural language. A Joule Agent then generates structured requirements, specifications, code, and test artifacts grounded in SAP process and data context.
Developers can work within the tools they already use, including VS Code and MCP-enabled toolchains, and choose their preferred agent frameworks, such as LangGraph, AutoGen, and LlamaIndex.
Through deep integration with the SAP Knowledge Graph, SAP Business Data Cloud—and the new SAP Domain Models trained on SAP code, customer data, metadata, and business processes—Joule Agents reason over real, semantically rich enterprise data rather than generic knowledge. SAP Domain Models are available through the SAP Early Adopter Care program, with general availability planned for Q3 2026.
Speed and governance, no longer a tradeoff, are built into the SAP Business AI Platform. At SAP, we believe that corporate governance—including approval flows, compliance processes, identity management, and the ability to audit decision-making—must carry into how AI is deployed, updated, and scaled. Joule Studio runtime provides a secure, production-ready, fully managed environment for deploying agents, helping organizations meet compliance standards while reducing infrastructure complexity.
An enhanced SAP AI Agent Hub also provides a vendor-agnostic command center to discover, inventory, and govern SAP and non-SAP AI agents and MCP servers across the enterprise. Integration with SAP Signavio and SAP LeanIX further embeds governance and architecture transparency into the development process.
The SAP AI Agent Hub leverages enterprise-wide process intelligence to continuously track where AI agents are creating value and can proactively surface where they can deliver even more, because we believe AI needs to remain accountable for outcomes in addition to uptime. SAP AI Agent Hub is generally available, with additional capabilities rolling out through 2026. See release timelines in the SAP Sapphire Innovation News Guide.
Empowering everyone to solve business challenges with AI
We are making the Autonomous Enterprise a reality because at SAP, we believe that companies of all sizes need far more than marginally better AI models or the latest bolt-on solutions. They deserve AI-driven outcomes that increase innovation, revenue, and margins.
The Autonomous Enterprise is what brings our vision to life: AI grounded in your data, connected across your most important processes, and governed to fit how your business runs.
Brenda Bown is chief marketing officer for SAP Business AI.
SAP Sapphire in 2026: Discover our bold new vision for how businesses will run from now on
