A simple question about a purchase order used to cause frustration, burn time, and waste money.

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.

In the NHL, decisions off the ice are just as critical as the plays on it. From trades to contracts to long-term planning, each front office is responsible for shaping its team’s future while keeping pace with a fast-moving, competitive League. Just as in business, success depends on turning data into informed, timely decisions that drive results.

Founded in 1917, the National Hockey League (NHL) is comprised of 32 Clubs located across North America. It serves a global fan base of nearly 700 million annual spectators across in-arena, broadcast, and digital channels. With millions of fans worldwide watching and Clubs fighting for any edge they can find, the NHL needed a future-focused way to manage critical decisions shaping the game.

To develop, maintain, and grow a roster within the salary cap system’s guidelines is no small undertaking, especially given the numerous variables that change in real time. While instituting the salary cap helps maintain evenly balanced teams that deliver thrilling games, it also contributes to a complex front-office balancing act, where every potential trade or player acquisition poses a mind-numbing array of opportunities and complications, short and long term.

Across the League, Clubs develop their own roster-management approaches, each using different tools and resources. No matter the variations among the solutions, they were mainly labor-intensive, disconnected systems, which meant that teams did not necessarily have access to real-time data, let alone reliable data, or an efficient means to access and analyze the data they did have.

The NHL, however, had a vision—a unified system that would consolidate player and League data into one platform accessible to all Clubs.

The SAP-NHL Front Office App for iPad delivers on that vision by providing a centralized view of the League, down to the team level, and drilling further into player data, enabling front offices to make more informed, real-time decisions with greater accuracy and efficiency.

First steps: consolidation and collaboration

Before the League could make that vision a reality, several obstacles needed to be resolved, starting with what Chris Foster, VP of Digital Business Development at the NHL, described as the League’s primary pain point: disconnected, legacy data management systems. Pascal Bornet, AI and automation expert, applauded this approach, advising organizations to “start with the friction points.”

Phase one, Foster explained, was “really updating our backend,” consolidating all the League’s data, from contract to salary information, and combining it with player statistics and video clips on SAP HANA Cloud.

Armed with a new database that would provide a seamless, fully connected single source of information for every NHL Club, the League was ready for its next challenge: creating a digital front-office solution that would meet the needs of 32 entirely different front offices, each with their own systems, priorities, “use cases, day-to-day responsibilities, and current challenges with data or workflows,” Foster explained.

The key to developing the League’s new application, Foster said, was leveraging “design-thinking principles” and “authentic user feedback” to create a single solution that would offer real added value to each user, from GMs to analysts to administrators, on each NHL team.

A power play digital solution

That disciplined, user-centered approach, combined with the NHL’s diligent attention to data consolidation, enabled the League to launch its SAP-NHL Front Office App for iPad in record time. While not mandatory, the app quickly proved its value and was rapidly adopted by all 32 Clubs. 

The app has already transformed day-to-day operations for Clubs, thanks to its ability to seamlessly access and interpret a single, reliable, and interconnected source of information on three different levels. The broadest level, the league view, offers data across the entire NHL, including current and projected salary caps for each club, off-season scenarios, and draft pick conditions; the team view breaks down the contracts of each player on the roster and provides visual cues for free agents or injured players; and the player view displays bios, contract PDFs, no-trade clauses, waiver status, performance bonuses, and even video clips of game highlights for every player in the League.

As Bornet said, “It’s about the right data, instantly and everywhere.” By rethinking the process first and prioritizing user needs, the League created a foundation for change—one that keeps “humans firmly in command” and uses technology to “amplify judgment, not replace it,” Bornet added.

Foster attributed the new app’s resounding success to the processing power of SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP), which enables club-specific customizations and allows for real-time calculations to fuel mission-critical decision-making.

Playing the long game

The NHL and SAP have a long-standing technology partnership that has powered several League-wide innovations, including NHL.com/Stats, the SAP-NHL Coaching Insights App, and NHL Venue Metrics. The Front Office App builds on this foundation and represents the next phase of the League’s digital transformation.

While the Front Office App is currently helping each NHL Club shape its team’s future, the League is continuing to look ahead. “This is a project with a multi-year road map,” Foster said.

As the NHL continues its innovation journey, it will remain laser-focused on user experience. Foster advised those looking to undertake their own digital transformation to take a page from the NHL’s playbook: “Let go of preconceived notions and realign your priorities according to user feedback. Be adaptable. Be fluid.” And get excited, because “the possibilities really are limitless.”

That same approach, Bornet added, “applies far beyond Hockey.” The NHL’s emphasis on identifying friction points and applying user-first design offers a practical template for any organization managing complex constraints and real-time decisions. Across industries, the challenge is the same: “too much data, too many variables, and decisions that can’t wait.” The real breakthrough, he noted, “isn’t the technology itself—it’s a mindset shift,” from “adding AI” to “removing cognitive friction,” and from “building for power users” to “designing for actual users.”

Explore the episode, focused on the customer journey

Learn more about how the NHL engineered a game-changing, League-wide digital transformation:

• Thought leadership podcast: Foster and Bornet talk with Thulium CEO Tamara McCleary about the untapped power of data, when it’s reliable, connected, and accessible, and how the NHL went from inspiration to iteration with the end users being essential to the transformation.

• Practitioners’ video: Foster talks with me about the process of creating a mobile app that meets the needs of 32 distinct front offices, each with their own systems, use cases, day-to-day responsibilities, and priorities.

For five seasons on demand, visit url.sap/btpcustomerconversations.

Do you have ideas for topics or technologies we should cover, or would you like to be a guest on the show? We’d love to hear from you. E-mail us.

Timo Elliott is vice president and global innovation advocate for SAP BTP at SAP.