Companies do not have to be restructured from the ground up to be able to adapt to artificial intelligence (AI). Instead, AI must be carefully integrated into business processes – in a way that maintains and strengthens the processes that are already working.
SAP and Anthropic have announced an expansion of their collaboration to provide companies with cutting-edge AI solutions. Claude, Anthropic's AI model for logical reasoning and agent-based functions, will be integrated into SAP's AI-supported solution portfolio, which already includes Joule and Joule Agents.
As announced at this year's SAP Sapphire customer conference, Anthropic and SAP will jointly integrate Claude's AI agent capabilities into the new SAP Business AI Platform. The goal is to advance SAP's vision for the autonomous enterprise in the age of agent-based AI. SAP has more than 50 years of experience in the area of business applications and the associated processes, data and fundamentals for corporate management. This know-how comes into play as part of the collaboration.
The cooperation fits into SAP's AI concept, which enables the support of any model through an open ecosystem. This gives customers more options and flexibility to respond to ever-changing AI requirements. By linking Claude directly to the SAP Business AI Platform, AI agents will be able to complete tasks from quarterly closes, to answering complex employee questions, to vacation requests, to rerouting during supplier delivery of orders. Coordination takes place via SAP S/4HANA, the SAP SuccessFactors and SAP Ariba solutions as well as other systems based on Model Context Protocol standards (MCP).
“Our open platform ensures that we are closely connected to the world's leading companies within our portfolio. Together with Anthropic, we are building something that is particularly valuable for our customers,” said Christian Klein, CEO of SAP SE. “The autonomous enterprise requires AI that understands the business context and operates within the controls that companies rely on. And our partnership with Claude plays an important role in this.”
“We developed Claude to support companies' work processes, such as closing balance sheets, rerouting orders during delivery in case of delays, or approving expense reports, to name a few,” said Daniela Amodei, co-founder and president of Anthropic. “With Claude on the SAP Business AI Platform, these activities take place directly in the systems companies already use – based on the trust and governance principles that SAP customers have come to expect.”
Claude provides agent-based functionality and connectivity to Joule
Joule from SAP is an AI assistant that helps teams make more informed decisions faster by embedding contextual and safer AI directly into SAP business processes and third-party system workflows. SAP is now extending Claude's capabilities to Joule and plans to integrate Anthropic's powerful AI agent capabilities into the new SAP Business AI Platform.
With Claude's tighter integration and access to Anthropic's Frontier models, SAP customers will be able to benefit from the following additional agent-based capabilities, among others:
- Better derivation of insights for complex tasks. Using Claude, agents can take action for hundreds of thousands of SAP customers in finance, human resources, procurement, and supply chain. Agents access the SAP Business AI Platform via Claude. This enables them to understand the business context based on SAP data, make more informed decisions and work confidently within established processes. For example, a treasury manager might ask Joule to prepare a presentation for the CFO at a meeting with a financial institution. Within a few minutes, he receives a finished presentation with current data and analyzes as well as information about financial risks. Tasks that previously took hours of manual effort can now be completed in minutes.
- Agent-based AI that understands business context. Claude works with business context from SAP's corporate systems as well as other tools connected via MCP. Step by step, data is retrieved, updates are made, approvals are initiated and tasks are processed. Anthropic and SAP will strategically collaborate to develop custom agents and agent-assisted workflows in SAP. This allows processes to be optimized for important industries such as the public sector, healthcare and education, life sciences and utilities. It combines SAP's expertise in enterprise applications and AI with Claude's AI agent capabilities and reasoning capabilities.
Integrate AI into the systems businesses rely on
As AI increasingly no longer just performs an advisory function, but also acts, trust is crucial – especially within companies and in regulated industries. Anthropic embeds secure, reliable AI into the processes businesses rely on. When AI in an SAP customer's environment adjusts an order, triggers a workflow, or makes a recommendation, it does so within the same controls that govern human decisions: the approval processes, policies, and compliance structures already built into SAP solutions.
Anthropic and SAP plan to implement this concept together by combining Claude with the reach and scalability of SAP. Companies can move beyond the experimental phase and implement these features in their core business processes.
Philipp Herzig is CTO and member of the Extended Board of SAP SE.
