See how the agent builder capability in Joule Studio, part of SAP Build, lets teams design, test, and govern AI agents on SAP BTP – connected to SAP data with enterprise guardrails.
In this SAP TechEd demo, we introduce new agent builder capabilities in Joule Studio, part of SAP Build – a guided way for business technologists and IT to create enterprise-ready AI agents faster on SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP). You’ll see how to define agent goals, add skills and policies with clicks (not complex code), and securely connect to SAP and non-SAP systems. The result: agents that automate multi-step tasks and write back to trusted SAP data, without compromising governance.
We walk through the end-to-end flow: configuring tools and data access, prompting with business context, and validating behavior with built-in testing and telemetry. You’ll learn how role-based permissions, audit trails, and policy controls help IT maintain oversight—while low-code building blocks help product owners, analysts, and citizen developers accelerate delivery alongside pro-code teams.
Whether you’re modernizing a backlog or piloting AI assistants in shared services, supply chain, or finance, this session shows a pragmatic path to measurable outcomes – keeping your core clean, your data protected, and your teams focused on higher-value work.
Speaker: Karishma Kapur, Demo Expert, SAP
00:02 – Create agent for Altinova in Joule Studio (vibe coding)
00:19 – Define instructions; credit data & external ratings; add SAP BDC data products
00:52 – Add system trigger for SAP S/4HANA with threshold for large inquiries
01:09 – Add background check via Perplexity (AI Foundation) & create web search tool
01:34 – Run the agent: checks new inquiry; results delivered to phone via SAP Work Zone/SAP Mobile Start
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As a global leader in enterprise applications and business AI, SAP stands at the nexus of business and technology. For over 50 years, organizations have trusted SAP to bring out their best by uniting business-critical operations spanning finance, procurement, HR, supply chain, and customer experience. For more information, visit: https://sap.to/605273of6
Explore the latest SAP Datasphere innovations from the October 2025 release—plus what’s coming at SAP TechEd!
The October 2025 release of SAP Datasphere brings a fresh wave of innovations that help business users simplify data management, streamline analytics, and prepare for what’s next. In this month’s episode of Top New Features, Klaus-Peter Sauer walks through key updates and previews what to expect at SAP TechEd 2025.
Discover how these new capabilities strengthen your data landscape and improve efficiency across your enterprise:
– Impact of Changes in the Source Objects of an Analytic Model – Understand how updates in source objects affect downstream analytics.
– Convert Data Flows into Replication and/or Transformation Flows – Simplify complex data integration scenarios.
– Technical User for Task Management via CLI – Improve automation and governance for data operations.
– SAP TechEd 2025 Preview – Get an inside look at what’s ahead for SAP Datasphere and SAP Business AI.
Whether you’re modernizing your data strategy or looking for quick wins in analytics performance, these features help you work smarter with a unified data foundation.
00:22 – Impact of Changes in the Source Objects of an Analytic Model
01:01 – Converting a Data Flow into in Replication and/or Transformation Flow
01:38 – Technical User to Manage Tasks via CLI
01:57 – SAP TechEd 2025
04:35 – Recap and next steps
To learn more about SAP Datasphere, visit: https://sap.to/60527GS38
Join our SAP Datasphere community to always stay up to date: https://sap.to/60547GS3E
Check out our product roadmap for SAP Datasphere: https://sap.to/60557GS31
Leadership knows, and the frustration is real: Though the organizations take on different digital initiatives, manual tasks still slow down many processes. Across industries, organizations are still dealing with scanning manual documents, such as invoices, contracts, and forms.
Transform your business with AI-powered document processing
According to a Gartner report, 70 to 80 percent of enterprise information lacks structure. This poses challenges for organizations that must unlock the potential and mitigate the risks of content to ensure data-driven decisions.
Take a simple, one-document example: It can cost up to $30 to process a single purchase order by hand. While this number seems small at first, it grows significantly when thousands of documents are processed every month over the years. And it doesn’t stop there—each manual processing increases the risk of errors and potential loss of hours on the mundane job, hence missed opportunities. This leads to a high cost of running “business as usual” and a drag on innovation.
SAP Document AI: rescue business process
Manually processing documents is not just error-prone; it is also slowing down the response to market shifts, dragging down the creativity of skilled workers, and posing real threats to businesses.
SAP Document AI enables efficient and agile paperless business processes. AI-powered solutions can speed up business document processing by up to 70 percent through automating the extraction, classification, and processing of data—imagine the boost in productivity, agility, and resilience.
This is not only theory. SAP Document AI is enabling leaders to deliver reliable answers because it is grounded in the comprehensive and up-to-date training data of actual quality certificates:
More than 180,000 annotated document pages
Over 105 million annotated characters
28 countries in the data set
More than half a billion unstructured documents processed each year
That is equivalent to approximately 8.5 years of manual information extraction and auditing, now available as a standard SAP cloud product.
Take De Agostini Publishing as an example. With SAP Document AI, the company is now saving around 500 hours per month, and more than 91 percent of purchase order-referred invoices are automatically processed. Read more about De Agostini here.
FRoSTA AG is one of the largest manufacturers of frozen foods in Europe. The company leveraged SAP Build Process Automation together with SAP Document AI, and it takes less than a minute to process an invoice from arrival to posting. Seventy percent of the invoices processed through automation are booked without any touch. What is even more interesting to note is that it took three months from project ideation to the go-live event. Read more about FRoSTA here.
More than 34,000 customers are already using SAP Business AI to transform the way they work.
From procurement and finance to HR and supply chain, SAP Document AI is changing how work gets done. It is natively embedded in SAP’s key platforms, making it easier for leaders to orchestrate truly intelligent workflows.
The road ahead: leading with certainty
Leaders know that change is the only constant. Digitizing more paper is not the future of document management. It’s about using unstructured data to our advantage. Looking at the road map, SAP Document AI will soon be able to handle even more types of documents. Enhancements such as vision-enabled information extraction, custom large language models (LLMs), and prompting are not too far off either.
Executive takeaway
Winning organizations do have one thing in common, and it is not the use of technology. They recognize that people drive business forward. By removing the manual burden, teams can be empowered to focus on what matters most: customers, strategy, and growth.
Leaders owe it to their teams to let them do what they do best, spending their time coming up with new ideas, making plans, and talking to customers. If employees are still buried in paperwork, it’s time to find out how much it really costs to wait. With SAP Document AI, companies can develop the kind of flexibility and strength that today’s markets need.
Learn more about the benefits and new possibilities for business with SAP Document AI.
Rashmi Kumari is a principal solution advisor at SAP.
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In today’s world of constant change, HR leaders are being asked to do more than ever before: anticipate skills shifts, personalize the employee experience, and navigate complex regulations—all while staying agile in the face of accelerating business transformation.
Unprecedented possibilities: Discover how new SAP SuccessFactors innovations power people and business connection
SAP SuccessFactorsHCMgives organizations the tools to lead with confidence. Part of the SAP Business Suite, SAP SuccessFactors brings together global core HR, AI-driven insights, and a unified skills foundation to connect people and processes, close skills gaps, simplify compliance, and build a workforce ready for what’s next.
With the second half 2025 (2H 2025) product release, we’re excited to introduce hundreds of new features and enhancements in SAP SuccessFactors, many enabled by AI. Together, these innovations help HR teams, business leaders, and employees work smarter, move faster, and stay future-ready.
Drive better people and business decisions
Data about people, skills, performance, and business outcomes exists everywhere, but without a clear view, it’s difficult to act. People Intelligence in SAP Business Data Cloud, now generally available, is designed to help organizations make better workforce decisions by unifying SAP and third-party data. Through intuitive dashboards, AI-assisted insights powered by Joule, and hundreds of HR metrics, leaders can now move from insights to action with unprecedented speed.
With pre-built use cases spanning critical areas like skills, compensation, recruiting, learning, performance, and succession, People Intelligence makes it easier to uncover trends, identify opportunities, and take action. By bringing together clean, centralized HR data and powerful AI, it equips HR and business leaders with the intelligence they need to drive meaningful workforce transformation.
Build a future-ready workforce
To stay competitive, organizations must continuously evolve alongside their people. This release introduces new innovations that align skills, performance, and development with future business needs.
We are excited that the Performance and Goals Agentin SAP SuccessFactors is now available. This agent empowers managers to lead consistent, high-impact performance conversations by analyzing employee data, such as performance goals, activities and achievements, and continuous feedback, to create tailored conversation prompts for each employee. Using Joule, managers receive AI-guided insights like goal progress summaries, key accomplishments, growth focus areas, and development recommendations. Users can ask follow-up questions to dive deeper into any of these areas.
Additionally, business rules integration in performance management support consistent and transparent performance reviews by automating feedback prompts and actions based on predefined conditions, such as dynamically exposing a comment field only when a rating condition is met.
Succession planning is also getting a boost with skills-based successor recommendations in SAP SuccessFactors Career and Talent Development,which analyzes skills, proficiency levels, and internal work experiences captured in employee growth portfolios to recommend potential successors who might have been overlooked using traditional metrics. And with the new person-based modelfor talent management, organizations can drive smarter talent decisions, faster reskilling, and greater workforce agility by unifying learning and talent data in a person-based view that follows employees across changing roles, teams, and assignments.
Enable agile and compliant HR
As regulations evolve and business needs shift, HR must stay both agile and compliant. This release introduces new capabilities to help teams adapt quickly while ensuring accuracy and trust.
The new SAP SuccessFactors Workforce Schedulingsolution,available to early adopters in January 2026, supports optimized shift planning in manufacturing and other production industries by aligning workforce skills and staffing levels with operational demand. Geofencing in SAP SuccessFactors Time Tracking helps prevent fraud and ensure compliance by defining work site locations and ranges to govern where employees can clock in and out. SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central simplifies U.S. leave management by connecting with FMLA service providers to automate leave deductions and improve tracking accuracy.
Across the suite, our updated home page delivers a more intuitive and personalized experience for users with streamlined navigation, targeted communications, and real-time insights across desktop and mobile.
Extend applications to easily adapt
As workforce expectations and business priorities evolve, flexibility is key. This release delivers new capabilities to help seamlessly connect and optimize HR processes, maximizing investments while supporting the changing needs of people and the organization.
SAP SuccessFactors Work Zone is now enhanced by Joule and generative AI to deliver faster access to information, improved self-service, and more informed decision-making. Joule streamlines tasks with role-based self-service, workflow automation, and real-time insights, while generative AI simplifies feedback, coaching, and goal updates with context-aware insights. Employees can also quickly find company-specific knowledge through Joule for accurate, relevant information when they need it.
Lead the future of HR
With the 2H 2025 release, SAP SuccessFactors HCM helps HR leaders navigate complexity with ease. By uniting global HR, AI-driven insights, and a unified skills foundation, organizations can make smarter decisions, develop future-ready talent, and stay agile in a rapidly changing world.
This week at SAP Connect, we introduced the next wave of business AI innovations to empower enterprises. We unveiled our newest Joule Agents, the concept of role-based AI assistants, and new embedded intelligence throughout SAP Business Suite.
Deep research AI and role-based assistants, coupled with SAP Business Suite innovations, take efficiency to new heights
To better understand the opportunity to produce returns on investment from AI, SAP commissioned new global research that was shared at SAP Connect. In partnership with Oxford Economics, we surveyed 1,600 executives in medium and large enterprises across eight countries.
We found that today, on average, organizations are benefiting from a 16 percent return on AI investments—a number they expect to nearly double within two years. In addition to impressive financial returns:
94% of business leaders say AI is improving innovation within their organizations
87% say AI is improving customer engagement
78% believe AI agents have the potential to transform their business operations
New deep research and AI assistants in Jouleexpand what is possible
These innovations were engineered based on what our customers tell us they need: to act quickly, simplify complexity, and unlock better, data-driven decisions across the lines of business and processes that matter. But most of all, our customers need AI that drives significant, measurable business outcomes.
To help every organization accelerate returns on investment from AI, at SAP Connect we announced powerful new capabilities for Joule, which makes business data and the entire SAP Business Suite immediately accessible through the power of a simple conversation. And because Joule is grounded in your company’s data, it understands context and delivers insights that are specific, actionable, and relevant to your business.
Deep research in Joule, announced at SAP Connect, is a new capability expands what people can do within the Joule interface. It goes beyond quick answers to deliver strategic analysis, reporting, and synthesis in a single, connected experience. It brings together internal SAP data and external intelligence so people can ask complex questions and receive comprehensive research and recommendations—without ever leaving Joule. The deep research capability in Joule will be available in beta this December.
We also unveiled the new concept of role-based AI assistants in Joule, built to partner with people in their specific roles. These assistants connect to the right Joule Agents for the job, removing guesswork so teams can unlock new levels of productivity and insight. Whether it’s a finance leader forecasting working capital, a recruiter evaluating headcount needs, or a planner adjusting inventory, AI assistants surface the right intelligence, at the right time, in the right context. In the background, Joule Agents get work done for you.
These innovations mark the next chapter in how people interact with enterprise systems, helping every role across an organization seamlessly move from inquiry to insight to action.
New Joule Agents autonomously get work done
To help enterprises further accelerate business results, we introduced 14 new Joule Agents at SAP Connect. They help people coordinate, decide, and execute tasks with greater precision. Joule Agents are embedded across core business processes in finance, HR, procurement, and supply chain, in a way that only SAP—with our deep expertise in these functions—can deliver.
For example, rather than navigating multiple systems or running countless manual checks to release an order, a production manager—a key role in the supply chain function—will be able to turn to our Production Planning and Operations Agent, planned for general availability in the Q1 2026. They can simply ask Joule to do it, safely and in real time. The agent will validate and release orders when conditions are met, accelerating production start times and shortening order-to-delivery cycles.
And starting December 2025, with the general availability of Joule Studio, now in beta release, customers will be able to create and deploy custom Joule skills and Joule Agents tailored to their unique business needs. Agent builder in Joule Studio is your command center for designing, building, and deploying enterprise-ready custom Joule Agents using the same powerful SAP technologies—including SAP Knowledge Graph for deep business context, SAP Business Data Cloud for comprehensive data access across SAP and non-SAP sources, and SAP’s central identity and authorization services to ensure responsible agent behavior. These capabilities empower every enterprise to extend, customize, and personalize SAP Business AI solutions.
New embedded intelligence across SAP applications
To help our customers move faster and make better decisions where work happens, we continue to bring intelligence directly into the applications they rely on every day. These embedded capabilities extend the same AI-driven guidance that powers Joule Agents into core SAP solutions, enhancing user workflows with context, clarity, and automation. We will have more than 400 of these AI use cases by the end of the year.
For example, in SAP Engagement Cloud, starting in February 2026, AI will orchestrate personalized interactions across HR, marketing, and service, bringing harmonized data, relevant context, and better business outcomes into every engagement. In the SAP Supply Chain Orchestrationsolution, planned for general release in the first half of 2026, AI will predict shortfalls and fulfillment risks, helping planners simulate and respond with speed and precision.
Additionally, the rebuilt SAP Ariba source-to-pay suite, arriving in February 2026, brings a modern, cloud-native experience to every stage of procurement. Embedded AI guides people with intelligent recommendations, accelerates contract reviews, and surfaces supplier insights in real time. By simplifying sourcing decisions and improving compliance, it helps procurement teams strengthen supplier relationships and capture more value, faster.
Governing AI with visibility and control
As our customers continue to adopt these AI innovations embedded across their functions, we know they need transparency into how it operates, what it influences, and the value it creates. That is why we provide tools to give them the visibility they need to deploy AI with confidence and scale it responsibly.
SAP LeanIX AI Agent Hub helps CIOs and business leaders see their entire AI agents landscape at a glance. From one dashboard, they can understand where agents are deployed, what processes they touch, and how agents are performing. This allows teams to evaluate effectiveness, identify redundancies, and manage AI like any other enterprise asset: aligned to outcomes, governed by policy, and continuously optimized.
Complementing that, agent mining in SAP Signavio gives organizations a powerful way to analyze how AI contributes to process performance. It reveals how AI agents decide and act, flags bottlenecks and non-compliance, and uncovers where automation adds value and how to fine-tune it for efficiency and impact. Together, these tools bring clarity to what has often been a black box: transforming governance from reactive oversight into proactive optimization.
What’s next for business AI
At SAP Connect, we also shared a view into what’s coming and how our innovations will continue to redefine enterprise productivity. For example, we’re developing an outcome-driven user interface that adapts to context in real time. Instead of navigating menus or searching for data, people will simply express what they want to achieve, and the system will guide them through the right actions, insights, and tools.
We’re also extending Joule Agents beyond software into the physical world—connecting your company’s business intelligence to robotics and industrial systems. This opens a new frontier for automation, combining state of the art electronics that utilize physical AI tools, such as computer vision and collision detection, with AI agents capable of reasoning through complex goals and planning multi-step workflows. Reserve your place at SAP TechEd this November to learn more.
Ready to start your AI journey?
We know AI is top of mind for most business leaders today. In fact, another finding from the research we commissioned with Oxford Economics is that 41 percent of tasks in global businesses will be supported by AI within two years—up from 25 percent today.
As you continue to explore what is possible with business AI, we’ll keep innovating to deliver systems that are intelligent by design, trusted in operation, and, most important, measurable in their impact.
For us, it’s all about what you hope to achieve. We’re proud to partner with you on your AI journey. If you’re ready to take the next step, here are three things you can do right now:
See how a mid-size bicycle manufacturer leverages SAP Business Technology Platform and AI to gain real-time supply chain visibility, automate risk detection, and optimize response to new tariffs.
Joule Agents analyze SAP Business Data Cloud and external data for early risk identification, suggest actionable mitigation strategies, and simulate financial impact. This helps teams make data-driven decisions and accelerate planning, even in volatile markets. This intelligent automation makes it easy to adapt, collaborate, and keep supply chains resilient and agile.
Learn more about Joule Agents:https://sap.to/6051fH6EP
0:00 – Integrated, Global Supply Chain Challenges
0:13 – New Tariffs and Immediate Risk
0:26 – AI-Driven Risk Alerts & Business Performance Review
0:48 – Automated Risk Analysis with SAP BTP & Data Cloud
1:10 – Mitigation Options and Planning Simulations
1:29 – Controller-Driven Adjustments & Final Decisions
1:43 – Collaboration with Supply Chain Team
In 1896, Teresa Marzetti and her husband Joseph, arrived in Columbus, Ohio, from Florence, Italy, and opened a small Italian restaurant. Marzetti’s Restaurant grew from a local favorite with students from Ohio State University into a four-star restaurant known, in particular, for its salad dressings.
The dressings were so well loved, customers could be seen leaving the restaurant with bottles of their favorites. By 1955, the restaurant’s upstairs kitchen had become a full-scale salad dressing factory and Marzetti dressings could be found in grocery stores throughout Ohio. Today, Marzetti produces many of the salad dressings, fruit and vegetable dips, frozen baked goods, and specialty brand items found on U.S. store shelves.
Liam Durbin, Marzetti’s Chief Information Officer, was brought onboard in December 2018 by Marzetti’s CEO, Dave Ciezinski, who had worked with Durbin previously at Heinz. Durbin was charged with replacing Marzetti’s legacy green-screen PRISM software, which had become outdated, with a modern ERP system.
After a competitive bidding process, SAP was chosen as the new ERP system. Durbin says SAP was selected in part because of its dominance in the consumer-packaged goods (CPG) industry, which aligned well with Marzetti’s business requirements.
Tailwind
The transformation project, known as Project Ascent to reflect its aspirational nature, received board approval within months of Durbin joining, and by April 2019 the company had begun hiring personnel for the project with Capgemini as the system integrator.
Durbin emphasized the strong support the project received from both the CEO and the board—support which he said “created a lot of tailwind” for a project they saw as crucial to ensure the company’s future success.
“The CEO and the board were clear that they wanted the ‘A players’ for the project, creating a dream team to ensure its success,” Durbin said, so they rented a new building to house the project team, providing separation from the main office and allowing the team to focus on the project. This approach ensured that the project team had the necessary resources and environment to work effectively and deliver the project on time, Durbin said.
The initial plan was to execute the project and move to SAP S/4HANA Cloud running on Microsoft Azure in four waves, but it eventually became six waves because of COVID-19. The pandemic forced the team to send everyone home, adding an extra year to the project timeline.
Explore the key features of our cloud ERP and how your entire business can benefit
To adapt, they created wave zero, which involved moving a facility in New Jersey—one of about 16 facilities overall—onto SAP from a technical perspective. “This allowed us to kick the tires and make sure the functionality worked,” Durbin said.
The project team also implemented SAP Trade Promotion Management during this extra time. Overall, the phased approach allowed the team to manage risks and ensure that each wave was successfully completed before moving on to the next. For example, wave one covered finance, trade, procurement, and customer support—“everything touching the customer,” Durbin said, adding that waves two, three, and four went pretty much as planned. “We chose to split wave four in two to de-risk it because it contained two large facilities,” he added.
Project Ascent is now considered complete, and over the past two years the IT team has focused on standing up the product organization and building relationships between product owners and department heads. The product owners, who were part of the project team, now work closely with their respective departments to prioritize and implement enhancements. Durbin said this structure ensures that the company continues to optimize and improve its ERP system, delivering ongoing value to the business.
Master data project and analytics
As part of the final wave, the team undertook a master data project to ensure data accuracy and consistency across the organization. By standardizing and cleaning the master data, the company improved its ability to make data-driven decisions and enhance overall business operations.
The company chose Microsoft for its analytics platform, which, Durbin said, “allowed us to keep the clean core so we now do most of our reporting and analytics on the Microsoft platform.”
He said one of the objectives of the project is to democratize access to data within the company. As part of this process, the team is trying to build a community of super users who can create reports themselves using Power BI and Power Platform, “so the democratization is underway,” he said while acknowledging that those employees in operations “are going to need some help.”
AI projects
The company already has several AI projects underway, including an accounts payable (AP) automation project using optical character recognition to streamline the process and reduce manual effort. “In addition to projects like AP automation, we are also very excited to see what AI capabilities SAP will be adding to its products,” Durbin said.
Looking back at the Project Ascent, he highlighted the importance of having a fully-staffed organizational change management team for SAP training and change management. He said the team played a crucial role in ensuring the project was rolled out on time and provided training and support to employees, helping users—some of whom had never used a computer mouse—adapt to the new system.
“The amount of work involved in training people on how to interact with SAP was a lot bigger than we thought because how technology has changed,” Durbin said, adding that another challenge has been recruitment. “As COVID-19 started to ebb and people were starting to go back into their jobs—and this condition still persists today—a lot of factories and manufacturing businesses have had difficulty hiring hourly workers again.”
“Some of the glamour of a well-paying manufacturing job has sort of gone away in America, and I think other companies, other countries as well, need to restore that,” he said. “So, we’ve had to deal with high turnover in some of our locations. Turnover is a wild card, and for the success of a project you just can’t understate it.”
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Learn how to set up EDI interfaces in SAP S/4HANA to automate the exchange of procurement documents like purchase orders, invoices, and order confirmations between buyers and suppliers.
