Welcome to the SAP Business AI product updates for the first quarter of 2026. Although I'm new to the role of Chief AI Officer, the goal remains the same: support our customers so they can derive real value from AI.

joulesour new user experience, is gaining momentum and is driving improvements for our customers. Customers are already increasing the efficiency of their customer serviceimprove Development processes, accelerate the implementation of projects and much more.

SAP Business AI for IT and developers

Joule Studio code editor and Joule Studio CLI

Building on the transformative capabilities of Joule Studio Low-Code, SAP is expanding the Joule Studio family with two powerful new offerings that go where developers work: the Joule Studio code editor, an extension of the Visual Studio Code IDE, and the Joule Studio CLI, a versatile command-line interface. Together, these tools provide a unified, AI-powered development experience that covers the full spectrum of Joule's development personae and preferences.

• Joule Studio's code editor brings the intelligence of Joule directly to Visual Studio Code, the world's most popular development environment, empowering pro code developers with AI-led scaffolding, contextual code generation, intelligent recommendations, and seamless integration with Joule, without leaving their preferred IDE.
• The Joule Studio CLI extends this power to the terminal, enabling development and DevOps teams to automate project creation, manage configurations, perform deployments, and orchestrate CI/CD workflows via scriptable command-line commands – ideal for headless environments, automation pipelines, and teams that value command-line speed and precision.

You can find detailed information here.

Joules with SAP Datasphere

General availability

Data professionals working in SAP Datasphere can now complete information, navigation and transaction-related tasks through a natural conversation with Joule. Whether they are inquiring about how to use specific features, getting details about an SAP Datasphere instance, or changing system settings such as language settings, users receive instant answers with direct references to product documentation. Joule can even perform tasks directly from the conversation without requiring any interaction with the standard interface. This direct execution reduces reliance on internal IT support and enables faster, more intuitive navigation across the platform.

You can find detailed information here.

SAP Document AI, extensions

Evidence-level confidence
Customers now set confidence intervals for fields in the for function Schemas firmly. When customers edit field settings, they can define their own low, medium, and high confidence thresholds. These custom settings are reflected in the extraction results displayed for the relevant fields on the receipt detail screen. See Settings for fields and View and edit documents to be checked.

Advanced transportation management
Customers can now use the transports feature to export and import channels and workflows. See Supported objects.

New schemas: business partners and delivery note for WM
The Embedded Edition and Premium Edition service plans now also support the standard document type “Business Partner Document”. You can find a list of supported document types at Supported document types (Embedded Edition and Premium Edition). Getting started with SAP Document AI, Embedded edition and Workspace.

Extensions for the Generative AI Hub in AI Foundation

Metadata
Customers can now manage metadata for documents, collections, and chunks created using the Vector API to enable advanced filtering and organization of their content. For more information, see Metadata.

Fetch API
Customers can aggregate and organize search results across multiple data repositories using the retrieval API's post-processing capabilities. For more information, see Retrieval search.

Prompt optimizations
Custom metrics are supported in prompt optimizations, allowing customers to define and optimize prompts based on their specific scoring criteria. Only LLM-as-a-Judge metrics with numeric or Boolean output types can be used in optimization tasks. For more information, see Create custom metric and Create configuration for prompt optimizations. Customers can provide separate test and training datasets for prompt optimization. For more information, see Create configuration for prompt optimization.

Prompt registry
The Prompt Registry now enables customers to declaratively create and manage orchestration configurations, allowing them to version and track complex AI workflows along with their prompts for better governance and reproducibility. For more information, see Create orchestration configuration (mandatory).

Secret keys
Customers can now enter generic secret keys using a form instead of JSON. When document grounding is enabled, the form appears in the dialog box Add generic secret key displayed. You can select the type of document repository via a drop-down menu. Depending on the selection, the remaining fields adapt dynamically so that they can complete the data. Some fields are already prefilled. If you prefer to work directly with JSON, you can switch to the code view by clicking on the  symbol. For more information, see Add secret key.

Newly available models
New models are supported, including OpenAI GPT 5.2, Gemini 3.0 Pro, Perplexity Deep Research, and Anthropic Claude Opus 4.6. Learn more about new and deprecated models can be found in the SAP Note. Try Generative AI Hub free for 30 days.

SAP Joule for Developers, ABAP AI functions, extensions

With the new ABAP AI capabilities, developers can expect 20 percent time and effort savings when writing ABAP/JAVA code, 25 percent savings when testing ABAP/JAVA code, and 4.4 percent faster time to value.

Starting this quarter, developers can now easily generate ABAP unit tests for:

• Public, protected and private methods of global ABAP classes
• Public methods of local classes within global class pools

See Test generation.

In addition, developers can interact with the documentation in the SAP Help Portal via the documentation chat and receive contextual answers and links to relevant documentation. This feature increases productivity by providing quick access to related documentation directly in the development environment. See Documentation Chat.

Finally, developers can now receive AI-supported explanations of their ATC findings and their code in the “Analyze in-house developments/Migrate in-house developments” app. See Analyze in-house developments and Working with the Explain function.

You can find detailed information here.

Jonathan von Rüden is Chief AI Officer at SAP SE.

*Disclaimer: This article describes the expected benefits for companies. All calculations are estimates based on SAP customer case studies, SAP benchmarks and other research. Actual benefits may vary and may be affected by additional factors not considered in this article. The information is provided without warranty of any kind, either express or implied. SAP assumes no responsibility for any damages associated with the use of this article. On the side https://www.sap.com/legal-notice Please see “Legal Notice” for the terms of use, disclaimers, mandatory disclosures and restrictions applicable to this material.