AI agents mark the next era of AI and a quantum leap in business productivity. They stand ready to address one of the biggest roadblocks to your business growth and competitive agility — friction in true collaboration across end-to-end processes.

Every day, your people spend too much time aligning data, decisions, and actions across functional silos. AI agents can help bridge these silos, so that core processes run flawlessly and the entire organization operates more efficiently.

However, capturing this opportunity is not about creating lots and lots of siloed agents across the enterprise that help reinforce more functional independent tasks. Instead, it’s about having the right agents, grounded in the correct business context and data, that can work together, supporting human collaboration and improving end-to-end processes.

At SAP, we have been investing heavily to deliver the full promise of AI agents. From the start, we’ve architected SAP Business AI with a Suite-first principle that ensures an integrated AI strategy that brings exceptionally more value with every skill, feature, or scenario added to our portfolio of applications and platform.

Joule, our generative AI copilot, provides one seamless integrated experience across the suite, providing a unified user interface across all business functions and more than 1,300 skills to perform work across the organization. You can ask any question or present any business problem, and Joule will work across every part of your business to solve it like no other solution in the market.

These investments set a strong foundation for realizing our vision for Joule agents — a vision we first shared at SAP Sapphire in 2024. Joule agents are uniquely capable of working together and with business users in various roles to execute complex cross-functional processes with speed and reliability.

With today’s announcement of SAP Business Data Cloud, the foundation for Joule agents becomes even stronger, because AI agents are only as powerful as the data in which they are grounded.

SAP Business Data Cloud equips Joule agents with a single trusted data layer that breaks down data silos, unifying data across SAP and non-SAP sources. With SAP Business Data Cloud, Joule agents access the most complete and context-rich data sets, allowing them to reason more deeply and act with more insight to solve problems.

SAP Knowledge Graph, previously announced at SAP TechEd in 2024, serves as the semantic bridge between Joule agents and SAP Business Data Cloud. SAP Knowledge Graph reveals the connections between data and processes, helping Joule agents find all the most relevant data to ground their decisions and actions.

While knowledge graphs are not a new concept, combining them with new advanced technologies makes them extremely powerful. SAP Knowledge Graph is rapidly advancing to make SAP’s unique 50-plus years of business process expertise available to Joule agents. This process grounding further enables Joule agents to be aware of the context in which they operate and, therefore, to solve more challenging problems that involve multi-step processes spanning supply chain, procurement, finance, and more.

All these innovations turn our long-held AI agent vision into a reality, with more innovation to come, faster. Today, we announced the availability of a collection of ready-to-use Joule agents across finance, service, and sales, with more across the SAP Business Suite portfolio in 2025.

The announcement includes the planned first quarter availability of a cash collection Joule agent previewed at SAP TechEd in 2024. The cash collection agent will analyze disputes and work across finance, customer service, and operations to validate details and recommend resolutions. This Joule agent exemplifies the full promise of agentic AI — delivering new levels of operational efficiency by working cross-functionally to complete a complex, multi-step process that usually takes hours in just a few seconds.

Today’s announcement also includes new ready-to-use Joule agents that advance efficiency across multi-step sales and service tasks. This includes a Q&A agent that continuously monitors opportunities and customer cases, proactively spotting questions and surfacing relevant answers from approved knowledge sources; a knowledge creation agent that automatically identifies novel case resolutions and creates structured knowledge articles that scale expertise across your organization; and a case classification agent that understands case context — for example, recognizing a tax-related inquiry even if the word “tax” isn’t mentioned — and correctly routes the case to the correct team.

This class of functionally focused Joule agents will become part of Joule’s collaborative agent architecture, making them available to team with other Joule agents to solve problems across cross-functional processes. For example, when the case classification agent identifies a customer billing dispute, it can route it to the cash collection agent, autonomously kicking off the dispute resolution multi-agent workflow. Through such agent teamwork, a dispute can not only be resolved in seconds but also within seconds of its receipt, further increasing process efficiency and delighting customers with unmatched response time.

In addition, SAP also previewed a custom agent builder capability for Joule studio in SAP Build. The new agent builder will make it simple for users such as citizen developers to create custom agents for their company’s unique business needs. A guided no-code workflow, informed by SAP’s business process expertise, helps ground custom AI agents in business processes and data, allowing them to solve problems through autonomous actions across a customer’s SAP and non-SAP applications. With the unique foundation provided by Joule, Joule agents, SAP Business Data Cloud, and SAP Knowledge Graph, the agent builder enables organizations to build powerful custom AI agents.

With Joule agents, Joule is not just an AI copilot, but becomes an AI orchestrator across all your organization. Joule can now adaptively assemble and orchestrate teams of agents — including out-of-the-box as well as customer’s custom-built AI agents — from multiple business functions to perform complex end-to-end processes. With Joule agents, teams work more seamlessly, work moves faster, and businesses operate more efficiently.