SAP has announced a series of AI innovations at its annual SAP TechEd conference, expanding its portfolio for developers. The enhancements to Joule Studio and Joule Work, as well as the SAP Business AI Platform – including SAP's latest tabular foundation model – offer new tools to build and extend AI agents.
SAP said its strategy is to advance the development and adoption of agentic AI by providing richer business and data context for agents, and governance controls to manage their use across organisations.
Philipp Herzig, CTO of SAP SE, said the SAP Business AI Platform, along with SAP Knowledge Graph, SAP Business Data Cloud, Joule Studio, Joule Work and agentic orchestration and integration capabilities, is now generally available.
“This entire platform is now generally available with all its capabilities, starting at the top with Joule Work, available on every device, every computer, in every browser. Joule Work is where you put your intent and get work done, in one experience across the entire SAP landscape and beyond. That is the shift we are delivering at scale. Everything underneath runs on SAP Business AI Platform.”
Asked how SAP connects with external AI agents entering the market and supports customers already using agents from other vendors, Herzig said the company follows an open strategy.
“Customers say that if SAP provides an agent in the core domains where they have SAP, there’s no need to build and own one. There are tons of agents out there, and we have made sure, via our agent gateway, that there is full interoperability. Our AI agent hub allows you to discover the agents, SAP agents and non-SAP agents, and you can document them and make them compliant.”
Herzig also addressed vendor lock-in and the challenges organisations face when using AI models from different vendors, discussing SAP’s approach to letting customers select models for specific use cases.
He said that tailoring a use case for optimisation inevitably brings some lock-in, but that model switchability remains viable for organisations keeping their AI use cases fairly generic.
AI to serve autonomous enterprise operations
Florian Kunzke, global director of AI strategy at SAP, echoed Herzig’s view that the company is moving from AI that learns how a business operates to AI that runs it, with the objective of mobilising AI to serve autonomous enterprise operations.
He said SAP’s AI strategy continues to evolve, particularly from a user interface and user experience point of view, with agents embedded in its technology suite.
Kunzke said Joule Work and Joule Studio, alongside SAP Knowledge Graph – which provides a structured semantic foundation for Joule – are central to SAP’s AI strategy. The company aims to help organisations become autonomous enterprises while addressing challenges such as the impact of geopolitical tensions on supply chains, the need to improve productivity through AI investment, and the requirement to generate ROI.
He cited McKinsey’s State of AI in 2026: On the road to ROI research, released in August 2026. According to the research, 80% of respondents said AI had improved individual productivity, while 50% said it helped them make better decisions.
However, he stressed the need for perspective on how AI is being adopted and used across organisations. “It is important to distinguish between what happens at organisational level and what happens at individual level. There is a gap, and that is what SAP is looking to address,” said Kunzke.
He also acknowledged that shadow AI, rogue AI, cyber security threats and the maturity of digital infrastructure continue to affect AI adoption. However, he added that SAP is confident its technology empowers customers to select the right AI for a job, as well as the necessary level of control.
“You can improve what you are able to observe and measure. With agentic solutions and processes, and the adoption of these processes, the question is what to aim for in terms of governance, what tools will the organisation need. It makes sense to have tools be as close as possible to the applications being used.”
Independent AI expert Johan Steyn, founder of AIforBusiness.net, said the shift to agentic AI marks an inflexion point. "AI strategy stops being about which tools you buy and becomes about how you orchestrate and govern agents," he said. "Capability is becoming abundant; governance is the scarce advantage."
Latest tabular AI model
SAP announced its latest tabular AI model, SAP-RPT-2.0, which will expand beyond classification and regression to support anomaly and outlier detection, and richer AI-powered analysis through embeddings.
According to SAP, these native, multi-table capabilities will further reduce manual engineering while delivering faster, deeper insights from structured data.
In partnership with HPE, SAP also announced plans to deploy SAP-RPT-2.0 on the HPE Spaceborne Computer-2 aboard the International Space Station (ISS) in 2027.
The model is scheduled to run directly on the ISS to support anomaly triage, predict potential problems before failures escalate, reconstruct missing sensor values using historical data, and generate mission-health reports for astronauts and ground teams.
Herzig added: “The same trusted SAP-RPT model that powers global supply chains can also work in space. SAP’s deep-rooted, proven expertise has led to the International Space Station’s use of our tabular foundation model to predict potential mission-critical failures in orbit. With SAP-RPT and TabPFN from Prior Labs, we bring the unique capabilities of tabular AI into the enterprise and across every frontier.”
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