What's New: Personal and Organizational Knowledge in SAP Joule for Consultants

We've introduced a set of capabilities that let consultants and consulting organizations enrich SAP Joule with customer-specific content across three complementary approaches. Critically — none of these files are ever used to train the underlying LLM. Your content stays yours.

• File upload at prompt level
• File upload at Expert Workspace
• Custom Knowledge Grounding

1. File Upload — Quick Context at the Prompt Level

The simplest way to give Joule relevant context is to upload a file directly within a conversation.

• Scope: User level, single conversation
• How it works: Upload a file at the prompt level and Joule uses it as context for that session
• Storage: SAP Joule for Consultants managed storage; files are automatically deleted after 7 days
• Data type: PDF, TXT, WORD, Images

This is ideal for ad-hoc tasks — analyzing a client's as-is process document, reviewing a project charter, or grounding a response in a specific contract or specification. These are typically files you have at hand: living documents that are being actively revised, drafts, client-specific outputs that change from engagement to engagement. No setup required, no permanence needed.

2. File Upload at Expert Workspace — Persistent Context for Your Focus Area

For consultants who repeatedly work in a specific domain or with a recurring client, the Expert Workspace takes file upload a step further. Details in SAP Help.

• Scope: User level / Expert level
• How it works: Files are uploaded directly into an Expert Workspace, making them persistently available across conversations within that workspace
• Data type: PDF, TXT, WORD, Images

Think of an Expert Workspace as your specialized “cockpit” for a given area of work — whether that's S/4HANA Finance, SAP SuccessFactors, or a specific customer engagement. Files you upload here might change more frequently than organizational standards — evolving project artifacts, updated configuration specs, or a client's latest process documentation. You're in control of when to swap them out.

3. Custom Knowledge Grounding — Enterprise-Scale, Admin-Managed

For consulting organizations that want to make standardized knowledge available across their entire team, Custom Knowledge Grounding is the answer.

• Scope: Tenant/Instance level — available across every conversation (admin-controlled on/off)
• Connects to: SharePoint, Amazon S3, SAP Build Work Zone
• Storage: Managed in AI Core by the customer — no automatic deletion
• Support data types and data repository: Details in this Document Grounding SAP Help page.

What Makes a Good Document for Custom Knowledge Grounding?

Since admins control the sync cycle and this content underpins every conversation on the tenant, it's worth being intentional about what you put there. Here are the best practices we recommend:

Choose documents with real operational knowledge:

• Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) and process descriptions
• Configuration guides and technical standards
• Customizations and extension documentation
• Internal business rules
• Troubleshooting steps and known-issue resolutions

These are the materials that will meaningfully influence Joule's answers — not general SAP documentation (which Joule already knows), but the things that are specific to your organization or delivery methodology.

Structure content for best retrieval performance:

Keep documents modular and scoped. Smaller, topic-specific files index better than large all-in-one documents. Instead of uploading one 200-page User Manual, break it apart:

• “User Role Setup Guide”
• “Custom Fields Documentation”
• “Approval Workflow Rules”

Each file becomes a more precise retrieval unit, which means Joule can surface the right answer with higher accuracy.

Keep documents clean. Avoid:

• Scanned images and “image-only” PDFs — text cannot be extracted from these
• Watermarks and boilerplate legal pages — they add noise without signal
• Redundant or duplicated content across files — this dilutes retrieval quality

The underlying principle: cleaner text → better embeddings → more accurate retrieval. Investing a little effort in document hygiene before upload pays dividends in every single Joule response that draws on that content.

Matching the Right Approach to the Right Content

A practical way to think about it: each method has a natural content “temperature.”

Privacy and Trust: A Non-Negotiable

One principle cuts across all approaches: files uploaded via any of these methods are never used to train the LLM. Your client data, your intellectual property, your methodology — none of it feeds back into model training. We follow SAP AI Ethics and as FAQ below of this site “SAP stands by the security of customer data and does not share customer data with other vendors for the purpose of training or improving their large language models (LLMs) or image models.”, and we at SAP know how important it matters deeply to consulting organizations operating under strict data governance requirements.