A simple question about an order used to be a source of frustration and a waste of time and money.

The employees of LC Waikikia global fashion retailer with tens of thousands of employees, had to navigate multiple systems to piece together data from sales and procurement. Sometimes it took up to ten minutes to answer a single question.

Today they just ask Joule. What once took ten minutes is now done in about three seconds. As a result, operational efficiency was increased by 70 percent and the manual error rate was reduced by 50 percent.

Using the functions in Joule Studio developed LC Waikiki in cooperation with SAP and NTT DATA Business Solutions a customized AI-powered user experience that dynamically interprets user requests, applies role-based context, performs the necessary queries, and connects data across systems to provide a single, comprehensive view. There is then a direct link to the corresponding transaction.

At SAP, stories like these inspire our vision for the company, where AI revolutionizes the way people and processes work – people set the direction, AI implements everything. We refer to this vision as “the autonomous enterprise.”

In the autonomous enterprise, decisions are based on real-time information. Workflows are fully automated, and AI proactively improves every function and enables employees to perform at their best.

The autonomous company also offers trustworthy AI with complete control – for even greater performance. Putting this into reality is crucial for companies' success, as AI now underlies all work processes. She is increasingly involved in decisions with financial, operational and regulatory implications.

Joules: a central control center for the entire company

In the autonomous enterprise, Joule Work, presented at SAP Sapphire, represents the next step on the path to interacting with end-to-end business processes and executing them. Joule Work is a dynamic workspace that adapts to intentions, keeps employees focused on results, and delegates execution to AI.

Joule Work eliminates the need to manually coordinate workflows across multiple applications and interfaces. Instead, you can tell Joule the results you want. Joule assistants with role and process context coordinate teams of Joule agents to surface the right insights and automate routine tasks across departments and systems. Static, non-networked systems are replaced by workspaces that bring together information and menus from different systems in real time – tailored to your individual requirements.

The Joule Work desktop app, which runs locally and can interact with local files and applications, and a web client are available through the SAP Early Adopter Care program. It is expected to be generally available during 2026. The Joule Work mobile app, an evolution of SAP Mobile Start, is generally available.

We also announced that Joule's two-way agent-to-agent (A2A) capabilities will be generally available in the fourth quarter, allowing third-party agents to securely collaborate with Joule agents and act in enterprise processes. This extends interoperability in both directions across SAP and non-SAP environments. Agents built in Joule Studio natively support A2A protocols, enabling interoperability and scalability to run multiple agents.

SAP Autonomous Suite: the operational core of the company of tomorrow

While Joule Work supports every single person to achieve their best performance and contribute optimally, the SAP Autonomous Suite changes the way entire company functions or “autonomous areas” work.

SAP Autonomous Suite includes five areas: Finance, Spend Management, Supply Chain, Human Capital Management and Customer Experience. These areas work together as a single system, allowing workflows and agents to run cross-functionally and without fragmentation into separate tools, data, or decisions. This approach allows AI to make recommendations that fully reflect your operational reality.

As part of SAP's integrated suite of business applications and industry-leading business data, AI in the autonomous enterprise is based on the specific requirements of how core business functions actually work. It is in this fundamental context for revolutionary AI results that SAP's outstanding experience comes into play. For decades, our customers have trusted us to carry out their most important functions. With the SAP Autonomous Suite, our in-depth knowledge of business processes flows into your AI. In addition, there is data context and operational guidelines so that AI can be used effectively and reliably in companies.

Every company is unique. Over time, specific ways of working have developed in your company. The rules, workflows and how systems react to unexpected events arise from these, e.g. B. a failed transaction, so that processes are not interrupted. In the autonomous enterprise, AI achieves its greatest potential when it respects these boundaries and turns your unique ways of working into a real advantage.

At SAP Sapphire, we presented new Joule assistants and Joule agents, which cover all areas of the autonomous company and are intended to help companies control results in a targeted manner instead of just managing work tasks. These new assistants and agents will be rolled out from the first half of 2026, with availability across the portfolio increasingly expanding throughout the year.

SAP Business AI Platform: the foundation for the autonomous enterprise

SAP Business AI Platform transforms the vision of human-led, AI-powered business operations into something tangible that companies can develop and implement. The platform helps companies move from pure experimentation with AI to real-world use by rooting agents and applications in real business context that controls everything at the enterprise level.

The focus is Joule Studioa fully managed environment where companies can build and manage the entire lifecycle of AI agents, applications, extensions and workflows. Intent-based development capabilities allow employees to describe what they need in natural language. A Joule agent then generates structured requirements, specifications, code and test artifacts based on SAP process and data context.

Developers can work in their familiar tools, including VS Code and MCP-enabled toolchains, and their favorite agent frameworks such as LangGraph, AutoGen and LlamaIndex use.

Through close integration with SAP Knowledge Graph, SAP Business Data Cloud and the new SAP Domain Models trained with SAP code, customer data, metadata and business processes, Joule agents draw conclusions from real enterprise data with rich semantics rather than general knowledge. SAP Domain Models are available through the Early Adopter Care program. They are expected to be generally available in the third quarter of 2026.

Speed ​​and governance are integrated into the SAP Business AI Platform, so there is no longer any need to make compromises. At SAP, we believe that corporate governance, including approval flows, compliance processes, identity management and the ability to audit decisions, must be incorporated into the implementation, updating and scaling of AI. The Joule Studio runtime provides a secure, productive, fully managed agent deployment environment that helps organizations meet compliance standards and reduce infrastructure complexity.

SAP AI Agent Hub also provides a vendor-independent operations center to discover, capture and control SAP and non-SAP AI agents and MCP servers across the organization. By integrating with SAP Signavio and SAP LeanIX Governance and architectural transparency are integrated into the development process.

SAP AI Agent Hub uses enterprise-wide process intelligence to continuously track where AI agents add value and can proactively identify where they add even more value, because we believe that AI must remain reliably responsible for results in addition to productive time. SAP AI Agent Hub is generally available. Additional features are planned throughout 2026.

Every company can solve problems with AI

We are making the autonomous enterprise a reality because at SAP we believe that companies of all sizes need much more than just slightly better AI models or the latest additional solutions. You deserve to be able to achieve AI-powered results that increase innovation, sales and margins.

The Autonomous Enterprise turns our vision into reality: AI powered by your data, connected across your key processes, and controlled according to how your business works.

Brenda Bown is Chief Marketing Officer of Business AI at SAP.