How Joule Work and SAP Business AI Platform Are Powering the Next Generation of Business AI 

The stability and reliability of half the world’s electrical grid partly depend on equipment built and maintained by one company.

Reinhausen has been innovating for over 100 years, and its spirit of invention continues as demand for its products grows at a stunning 20% a year.

The company also innovates with AI. They use it within their products to create customer value and to automate manual processes for employees. And they are adding more automation to help them meet growing demand amid skilled labor shortages. Reinhausen’s expertise in AI innovation is among the reasons the company joined SAP’s early adopter program for Joule Work.

“The Joule Work desktop early adopter program has delivered more momentum in just a few months than we saw in all the years before,” said Peter Wied, director of Complexity Management at Reinhausen. “What once required up to an hour of manual effort across our SAP S/4HANA environment is now accessible in seconds through natural language, fundamentally changing how our teams interact with business data.”

AI that answers complex business questions while running agent-driven workflows at scale

Soon, all SAP customers will enjoy the benefits of Joule Work when it rolls out later this month. We built it because the promise of AI goes far beyond text generation and fact-finding. It can help people make better decisions, informed by their data, and get answers to complex questions. SAP Business AI Platform ensures those answers are all grounded in the context of how a specific business runs.

These are advantages companies can only get from SAP because SAP Business AI Platform encodes decades of process and industry knowledge right into our applications, knowledge graph, and Joule Work. The platform also combines best-in-class third-party models with SAP’s own foundation models for ABAP code generation and predictions on structured data, alongside SAP’s proprietary domain models, which are pre-trained on SAP’s code, data models, and business processes.

This means every AI interaction can draw on the model best suited for the task—whether that’s generating clean code, predicting a business outcome, or answering a process question—with the accuracy and cost-efficiency that business-critical work demands. And through SAP Business Data Cloud, Joule Work accesses all the data it needs from a single unified source that breaks down silos and unifies data across SAP and non-SAP sources.

Now, SAP Reltio is generally available in SAP Business Data Cloud. It helps organizations eliminate fragmented records with a single trusted view of customers, suppliers, products, and employees across SAP and non-SAP systems.

But we know sharper decisions and reliable business answers are only part of the equation. Organizations need AI to take action and coordinate work across all their business processes. Earlier this year, Deloitte surveyed more than 500 leaders and found 74% said they would redesign or rebuild almost half of their business processes around AI agents.

Through the SAP Autonomous Suite, SAP provides a library of reliable, ready-to-use Joule Agents across every business function, so companies can hit the ground running. And Joule Work brings the most powerful business AI orchestration engine in the industry to run those agentic workflows at scale.

Build and connect anything

Joule Work and the SAP Business AI Platform provide an out-of-the-box competitive advantage for the AI era, but every company has its own unique advantages that should be strategically extended. This is why Joule Work’s Develop capability provides access to Joule Studio, soon to be generally available.

In Joule Studio, customers can customize and build Joule Agents with tools that embed process context and semantically rich data. They can also connect third-party systems with open standards because Joule Studio leverages over 11,800 pre-built business accelerators. Joule Studio is more than five times faster than do-it-yourself options, according to benchmarking done by Constellation Research.

With Joule Studio, anyone can describe what they want to build in natural language, while developers can use pro-code tools all in the same environment. New agents are deployed directly into Joule Work and inherit SAP security and governance.

Warehouse automation company KNAPP used Joule Studio to build an assistant that helps workers identify and solve problems without waiting for an expert. Issue resolution times have dropped by about 90%, while documentation and training times fell by about 80%.

In our industry, AI is not the future anymore; it is already happening. And that is exactly what our AI delivery pilot demonstrates every day. Our partnership with SAP makes complexity simple. When a problem appears on the warehouse floor, SAP Business AI Platform helps us solve it in seconds.

Florian Aufegger, Senior SAP EWM Solution Consultant, KNAPP AG

As organizations build and deploy more agents, governance also has to evolve from compliance checkpoints to an integral part of the entire agent life cycle. Trust remains the biggest barrier to AI adoption for 71% of technology buyers, according to BCG. This is why SAP AI Agent Hub, now generally available, helps organizations govern every agent, LLM, and MCP server across SAP and non-SAP environments. New capabilities, including SAP Signavio Agent Mining, measure the outcomes every agent delivers and identify opportunities to further optimize those outcomes.

Start scaling AI, and your business outcomes, today

BCG’s latest research found that the companies farthest ahead scaling AI deliver 2.4 times the revenue growth and 2.8 times the EBITDA growth of those falling behind.

Our customers, Reinhausen and KNAPP, show what that looks like up close: an hour of manual work reduced to seconds, and problems on the warehouse floor solved without waiting for an expert. Our goal is to make results like these repeatable for every SAP customer.

If you want to see more, the new SAP Connect virtual sessions are now live, and SAP TechEd starts October 27, in person and online. You can also request a demo of Joule Work and SAP Business AI Platform.

Brenda Bown is chief marketing officer for SAP Business AI Platform and Joule.