SAP Deploys Joule AI Agents Across Finance, HR and Supply Chain at Connect Conference

SAP is rolling out fresh Joule AI assistants spanning finance, spend management, human resources, customer experience, and supply chain operations this week at Connect in Las Vegas. The company is also launching SAP Pay, a payments service, and announced its intention to acquire TechWolf, a Belgian artificial intelligence platform that maps organizational work and skills.

The announcements represent SAP's shift from outlining its "Autonomous Enterprise" vision at its Sapphire conference earlier this year to demonstrating how those AI agents will function in real business environments. While Sapphire addresses IT leadership, Connect targets the business practitioners responsible for running finance, procurement, human resources, and supply chain functions on a daily basis.

Eric van Rossum, SAP's head of product marketing for applications and suite, explained the distinction: "Connect is all about making it real. We set the strategy at Sapphire. Now we need to come with the proof points, what that means for our customers, what it means when we have the products in our hands and so on."

SAP is hosting more than 20 hands-on labs where attendees can construct their own agents. Most of the newly introduced assistants will become available through early adopter programs and general availability releases between now and the first quarter of 2027.

TechWolf acquisition

SAP disclosed plans to acquire TechWolf, whose AI platform identifies work and skills across an organization. The company did not reveal financial terms. SAP anticipates closing the transaction in the fourth quarter, contingent on regulatory clearance.

Andreas De Neve, TechWolf's CEO and co-founder, stated: "Organizations everywhere are trying to figure out how AI is reshaping work, and what their workforce needs to look like because of it. We have spent eight years building the evidence layer to answer those questions. It's always been our mission to connect skills, tasks and work to help employers solve AI transformation, and joining SAP will allow us to extend that mission across a broader set of business context and larger scale. In this next chapter, we plan to build a world-class AI company."

Starting with finance

Organizations typically begin deploying AI assistants where they face the most acute operational challenges. Van Rossum noted that finance departments represent a significant area of focus. "We see a lot in the finance area, like financial close, billing reconciliation, and elements like that."

The Revenue Recognition Assistant guides finance teams through revenue configuration, calculation, and posting while classifying transactions according to IFRS 15 and US GAAP standards. A Disclosure Assistant streamlines the final stages of external financial report preparation, handling data collection, tagging, narrative drafting, and pre-publication verification. An Overhead Accounting Assistant enables controllers to modify cost allocation rules and execute bulk updates to cost and profit centers, thereby accelerating period-end processes.

The finance assistants introduced at Sapphire will receive dedicated agents for financial close, treasury, tax, billing, planning, and receivables functions. SAP intends to open early adopter programs for these new finance assistants in the first quarter of 2027.

An International Trade Assistant handles cross-border shipping by classifying products, preparing compliance documentation, and executing sanctions screening. According to SAP, early deployments have reduced product classification work by as much as half.

Van Rossum emphasized the stakes: "If you're going to do a financial close or if you're going to do statutory reporting or many of these items, there is just not a room for error."

SAP Pay

SAP is entering the payments sector with SAP Pay, a service built on its newly established Tereina subsidiary. Once an invoice receives approval in SAP Cloud ERP, SAP Pay processes the payment and reconciles it against the invoice or purchase order without requiring users to exit the ERP system.

For international transactions, companies can settle payments using stablecoins. The service is currently available in the United States and United Kingdom.

How SAP governs AI agents

Van Rossum characterized an agent as "to a certain degree is actually just an extension of the process in the back end."

Over five decades, SAP has embedded country-specific localization and regulatory requirements into its core applications, ranging from Brazil's Nota Fiscal electronic invoicing framework to varying AI regulations across Europe and the United States. "All of those things were always baked into our core applications, and that really gets inherited up to the agent as well."

SAP refers to this approach as governing agents "from the inside out." A forthcoming Governance Assistant, scheduled for the fourth quarter, integrates with governance, risk, and compliance tools already in use and identifies risk and control issues across systems, enabling compliance teams to conduct continuous monitoring rather than periodic reviews.

Beginning in the first quarter of 2027, the Access Governance and Security Assistant will subject AI agents to the same identity governance and access controls applied to human users.

Results from the supply chain

SAP is highlighting early customer results from supply chain deployments. The company is introducing new Joule Agents to supplement the six supply chain assistants demonstrated at Sapphire. These agents can interpret product designs and recipes, identify disruptions on production floors, and initiate maintenance requests.

A global natural ingredients manufacturer is employing the Logistics Assistant to respond when logistics operations encounter problems. A large biopharmaceutical organization uses the Supply Chain Planning Assistant to identify the root causes of planning issues and recommend solutions. Combined with automated performance monitoring, this arrangement creates a feedback mechanism that enables the company to progressively enhance planning autonomy.

Across the suite

Currently, most customers are beginning with isolated use cases. Van Rossum anticipates substantial improvements once agents coordinate across workflows spanning finance, spend management, customer operations, and human resources.

He explained the strategic advantage: "Optimizing one LoB, I think we're competing in a very narrow environment with best-of-breed, but our strength is really going to come from doing that from a cross-end-to-end perspective."

SAP CEO Christian Klein articulated a comparable perspective in the company's announcement, stating SAP is "helping organizations connect intelligence across every function to deliver trusted business outcomes."

To facilitate workflow integration, SAP now provides managed integrations connecting SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition with SAP Ariba and SAP Sales Cloud. Additional connections to SAP Taulia (this month), SAP Subscription Billing (November), and SAP SuccessFactors (by year's end) are forthcoming. SAP manages and maintains these integrations, and they are included in the cloud ERP subscription, eliminating the need for separate integration projects.

SAP Cloud ERP Private customers can already test a managed Joule integration through early adopter care, with general availability expected by year's end.

Van Rossum stated: "Spending any IT dollars on integration and stitching together products delivers very little value for our end customers." He added that SAP would prefer customers allocate those resources toward agentic AI and other transformation initiatives.

SAP is incorporating master data management technology from its Reltio acquisition into its AI platform through SAP Reltio, now generally available in SAP Business Data Cloud. When the same customer, supplier, product, or employee appears in different formats across SAP and non-SAP systems, SAP Reltio identifies which records correspond to each other and consolidates them into a unified profile, preventing Joule and its agents from processing conflicting information.

Measuring AI agent ROI

Van Rossum noted that customer discussions increasingly prioritize business outcomes rather than technology itself. Agents introduce costs that must be justified through efficiency gains, productivity improvements, or revenue generation. "This needs to lead to tangible business outcome and benefits."

To assist customers in demonstrating value, SAP collaborated with consulting partners and customers to establish benchmark key performance indicators for each assistant. The company is also introducing a value calculator that compares a customer's performance metrics against these benchmarks to identify where assistants could deliver benefits. SAP plans to eventually connect this tool with SAP Signavio for process analysis and the AI Agent Hub in SAP LeanIX for agent management.

In the first quarter of 2027, SAP Signavio will introduce enhanced agent mining, applying process mining techniques to workflows where multiple agents transfer work to one another. New AI insights in WalkMe will enable business leaders to inquire in natural language about where employees encounter obstacles, including with AI assistants, and WalkMe will generate a dashboard from real-time usage data to provide answers.

According to van Rossum, most customers are still navigating individual use cases. Over the coming year, SAP intends to enable assistants to transfer work to each other across finance, procurement, human resources, and supply chain operations, where the company believes its integrated suite provides advantages over specialized vendors.