What is Joule Work, and what does it mean for you? What do the new Joule Work engagement layer experiences mean for existing application experiences? How can you try it out? Read on to get an overview of Joule Work and answers to these questions.
What is Joule Work?
Joule Work provides an AI-based user experience that transforms how work happens. With Joule work, people express what they want to accomplish, and Joule surfaces the right insights, automates routine work, and coordinates AI agents across systems to achieve it – all in one dynamic workspace. It acts as an engagement layer that spans across SAP products and beyond, and coexists with current experiences provided by pre-defined application UIs.
It represents a new way of interacting with business systems, since it provides:
- One single place where a user can get tasks done, rather than the traditional app-centric interaction model, where users need to navigate to different applications or even to different products.
- An intent-driven, situational experience, where users state their intents in natural language and the system builds on the fly accordingly, taking the current business and user context (the current situation) into account: fetching data, triggering AI agents, and visualizing the outcome appropriately.
Figure 1: Joule Work experiences: Conversations, Spaces, and Develop. Alt Text: The image shows 3 screenshots, one each for the three experiences. The top of the image has a heading “Joule Work”, above a row with five attributes: Dynamic, Proactive, Agentic, Intent-based, Omnipresent.
Joule Work provides these experiences:
- Conversations: this experience allows people to express intent and explore what they want to accomplish through dialogue with Joule. It is an AI-powered chat supporting role-based intents, multiple conversation threads, with type-ahead, auto-suggestions and multi-facetted types of responses (text, tables, charts etc.). Joule brings together guidance and outcomes from across SAP and third-party systems. Conversations can also act as an entry point to Spaces for more complex workflows.
- Spaces: provides flexible AI-generated spaces that dynamically adapt content based on user intent and context, for dealing with simple as well as complex tasks and issues. Each space is composed in real time to bring the right data, tools, and context together for a specific goal, allowing people to work in an environment that adapts to their present goal, instead of navigating applications and their pre-defined UIs.
- Develop: this experience is provided by Joule Studio, enabling developers to vibe-code, test and deploy AI agents, applications, and automations across SAP and third-party systems. Joule Work provides a convenient entry point to Joule Studio for developers and business users alike, giving them an AI-powered user experience for pro-code and low-code tools.
To get a better idea of these experiences, have a look at Joule Work in action:
Joule Work mobile app
The Joule Work mobile app provides Joule Work Conversations and Spaces for mobile phones and tablets. Figure 2 shows some examples.
Find out more here.
What are the benefits for businesses and their users?
Businesses expect that the new AI/agentic, intent-driven way of working that is taking hold across the industry is ushering in a new era of user interaction and user experience, that will bring them gains in productivity and data quality, along with better business insights and outcomes, while saving training costs and reducing user-support costs.
Joule Work from SAP has an ingrained understanding of the customer’s business processes: hence it is best placed to deliver on the above promise. It can provide experiences that bring together the right data and services from across our applications to guide users from initial intent to a successful outcome.
It helps users get their work done faster, more easily, and with better outcomes, by:
- Providing one place to get their work done, so they don’t have to navigate to many different applications and products, and don’t have to navigate through layers of application UIs, thus reducing the number of clicks and interactions significantly.
- Allowing users to state their intent in natural language with a conversational interface, then triggering the relevant actions to achieve their intent, and showing the outcome(s) in a personalized way, tailored to the user’s needs.
Which target groups of users and use cases is Joule Work meant for?
Business and technical users. The goal is to help all our customer’s SAP users get their work done more easily, focusing on outcomes, so it is not limited to specific target groups.
The Joule Work Develop experience is provided by Joule Studio. Find out more about the new version of Joule Studio in this news article:
What does this mean for existing UIs and SAP Fiori apps?
Existing SAP products and applications built with SAP’s UI technology stack, as well as other apps in our portfolio, will continue to progress with their roadmap and planned product strategy. Joule Work has no impact on existing UIs, instead it complements them. Customers will continue to get the benefits from existing applications and their investment is protected.
Joule Work provides an additional option for users to interact with the system. Wherever they find that it helps them get tasks done more easily and/or with better outcomes, they are likely to do those tasks with Joule Work. Wherever they feel that their familiar, pre-defined applications are better suited to a task, they will continue using them.
This means that SAP delivers two kinds of experiences:
- Application experiences (from SAP Cloud ERP, SAP SuccessFactors, SAP Analytics Cloud, etc.): SAP and customer-built transactional and analytical application experiences.
- Engagement layer experiences (Joule Work experiences): AI-native, agentic, and generative experiences that help users interact with and orchestrate work across those applications.
Our users are used to application UIs and pre-defined navigation paths, how to manage the transition?
The existing product home pages and cross-product entry points such as SAP Build Work Zone and Joule Work mobile app (formerly called SAP Mobile Start) continue to be available for providing pre-defined as well as customer-defined pages and navigation menus. Similarly, the existing applications continue to be available, with their application experiences.
Users working in the web browser can open Joule Work from Joule and hence start getting familiar with the new way of working. Since the new experience co-exists with the current experience it will be easy for users to adapt and adopt. We expect the transition to be user-led, in that they will choose whichever experience helps them get specific tasks done more easily and/or with better outcomes.
If users are already familiar with popular consumer applications such as ChatGPT, Google Gemini or Claude Sonnet, then they will be able to build on this to leverage the next generation user experience provided by Joule Work, with the new ways of interacting.
Does it complement or does it replace existing solutions such as SAP Start, SAP Build Work Zone, and SAP Mobile Start?
It complements them. The existing solutions allow customer administrators to pre-define layouts, content and navigation options, which helps users access applications and information using familiar pages, menus and links. It makes it easy for them to understand the site and feel comfortable using it in their daily work. This is something that benefits all users but is especially helpful for users new to the system to get started quickly and get familiar with their work environment.
SAP Mobile Start has been rebranded to Joule Work mobile app, accompanied by a new app icon and an updated user experience. For customers previously accessing Joule within SAP Mobile Start, the Joule entry point has transitioned from the diamond in the header bar to a full-screen interface to be accessed via the tab bar. All core functionality and features remain unchanged, ensuring continuity for both customers and end users with no disruption to existing workflows. In addition to the core functionality, it provides the Joule Work engagement layer experience for mobile devices. Find out more here:
For SAP Cloud ERP Private: would we need to go to SAP Fiori (implement SAP Fiori launchpad), or can we skip it and go to Joule Work directly?
You would need to implement the SAP Fiori launchpad for Joule Work to work with SAP Cloud ERP Private: they use the navigation and authorization information defined by customers in the SAP Fiori launchpad to access the system. Also, Joule only runs in the browser on desktops and is launched from the launchpad. Similarly, if users navigate from Joule Work to applications, this navigation will be to browser-based applications running in the launchpad.
How can partners and customers extend standard SAP functionality for Joule Work – as a key user or as a developer?
The established programming model for creating extensions continues to be valid. Joule Work accesses OData services and their meta-data (amongst others) and hence will also access extensions or custom OData services that have been developed according to the SAP BTP Developer’s Guide.
Using Joule Studio or SAP Build is the way to build extensions and agents, for Joule Work as well as for pre-defined applications.
If you are building new applications, follow the SAP BTP Developer’s Guide, and use Joule Studio or SAP Build. You can build agents on top of the APIs you create, and Joule Work will access the OData services and meta-data of your new applications. The Fiori apps you create using SAPUI5 / SAP Fiori elements will allow users to use your new functionality using apps with pre-defined UIs, an experience that they are familiar with. Also, users can use these UIs to confirm that what was done by Joule Work is indeed correct and hence build trust in it.
What is available today (Sapphire 2026)
As described above, this first version of Joule Work provides Conversations, Spaces, and Develop, with the Joule Work Develop experience being provided by Joule Studio. The Sapphire scope:
- Supports integration to SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition and SAP SuccessFactors.
- Supports exactly one SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, you cannot connect to more than one.
- Does not support document grounding in Joule.
How can customers get Joule Work, and what are the pre-requisites?
If you are interested, you can sign up to the limited Early Adopter Care (EAC) program. The pre-requisites for this at the time of writing are as follows:
- Joule needs to be SAP-managed.
- New SAP-managed Joule instances are supported
- Existing customers with customer-managed Joule would need to transition to SAP-managed Joule.
- Available only in specific regions: USA and EU.
Final words
I hope you are as excited as I am about the huge potential these Joule Work experiences have for helping our users get their work done faster and more easily, with better outcomes. It will be interesting to observe how people in various roles adopt this new way of working, and how fast they adopt: for which tasks do users prefer to use Joule Work, for which ones do they continue to prefer application experiences – and why?
If you want to dig a bit deeper, have a look at how we are designing these new experiences, and see how we are evolving the SAP Design System for AI-driven UX:
