SAP Puts the Autonomous Enterprise to Work

Joule Work, Joule Assistants and SAP Business AI Platform help organizations turn business AI into trusted outcomes across every core function.

LAS VEGAS, Oct. 6, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) today showcased the Autonomous Enterprise in action at SAP Connect, demonstrating how Joule Work and Joule Assistants generate value for customers across every line of business.

"This is a breakthrough moment for business AI," said Christian Klein, CEO of SAP SE. "The Autonomous Enterprise has arrived. With Joule and SAP Autonomous Suite, built on SAP Business AI Platform, we're helping organizations like Novartis, Morgan Foods, Nestlé and PwC connect intelligence across every function to deliver trusted business outcomes."

At SAP Connect, these customers shared how the Autonomous Enterprise is already driving measurable value across their businesses.

• "We've co-developed and recently launched a pilot of SAP's Joule Sourcing Assistant," said Christoph Buerki, Head of Procurement, Novartis. "Our vision is for AI agents to handle the manual heavy lifting, enabling sourcing professionals to focus on strategy, supplier engagement and value creation."

• "At Morgan Foods, we're already putting the pieces in place for agentic adoption, especially through our technical foundation. The biggest shift will be moving from reactive to predictive, where agents can connect demand signals, inventory levels and supplier status faster than ever before," said Steve Hankins, Chief Financial Officer, Morgan Foods, "Our superpower will come from people on top of agents. Our approximately ~1,000 employees are what make our supply chains work – the technology helps make them even better."
• "Our SAP S/4HANA transformation across 140 countries is creating a connected digital core with consistent processes, trusted data and greater visibility across markets and functions. With that foundation, Joule and the Accounts Receivable Assistant can automatically prioritize collections work based on risk and business context, recommend the next best action and help our finance teams respond faster to change," said Luca Dell'Orletta, Global Head IT Innovation & Enterprise Architecture, Nestlé.
• "In professional services, billing can be one of the more error-prone processes, with accuracy playing an important role in the client experience. SAP's Billing Assistant brings greater intelligence to this critical process, helping identify potential issues earlier so our people can deliver better client outcomes and build stronger relationships," said Jill Notz, Chief Accounting Officer, Controller, Business Services Leader, PwC. Building on the success of the Billing Assistant, PwC and SAP are extending their collaboration into new areas of joint AI innovation.

SAP's Autonomous Enterprise Scales Up

Joule Work is beginning its customer rollout as a new AI user interface that lets employees interact with SAP solutions in their own language and complete work across SAP and third-party data. Grounded in business context from SAP Knowledge Graph, which maps more than 7 million data fields, Joule provides information users can rely on. At SAP, Joule Work is already live with 110,000 employees, with the company seeing 20% productivity gains across finance, HR and procurement. A select group of customers also is using Joule Work in their business environments.

• "After 28 years as an SAP customer, partnering with SAP on our AI journey and the Joule Work Desktop early adopter program has delivered more momentum in just a few months than we saw in all the years before," said Peter Wied, Director of Complexity Management, Maschinenfabrik Reinhausen. "What once required up to an hour of manual effort across our S/4HANA environment is now accessible in seconds through natural language – fundamentally changing how our teams interact with business data."
• "The dedicated team has been phenomenal. Their proactive communication, focus on accelerating architecture activation, rapid remediation of defects, and overall support have enabled us to become Joule ready much sooner than would have been possible had we needed to navigate these challenges on our own," said Keith Smith, SAP Platform Architect, CONA Services. "The CONA team is excited about the progress made to date and looks forward to exploring and testing Joule's capabilities in greater depth over the coming months as we continue our adoption journey."

When a query is not enough, Joule Assistants execute operational work directly within business workflows, using established data, authorizations and audit trails. Customers control the level of autonomy. SAP's approach is also open: through the Agent2Agent protocol, Joule can connect with third-party AI and agents, bringing governed business context into broader AI workflows.

At SAP Connect, SAP showcased how these capabilities generate outcomes across SAP Autonomous Suite:

• In finance, controllers can automate revenue recognition, disclosures and trade compliance, with early deployments of the International Trade Assistant reducing trade classification effort by up to 50%.  
• In supply chain, planners can turn multi-hour disruptions into one-click resolutions across planning, manufacturing and logistics.
• In HR, leaders can determine the best way to close workforce gaps, while employees can make smarter benefits choices tailored to their needs.
• In procurement, decision makers can identify savings opportunities against peer benchmarks and manage the full contingent workforce lifecycle.
• In customer experience, organizations can turn customer engagement into sales opportunities with AI-powered campaigns, quoting and customer workflows.
• Across industries, SAP is collaborating with customers to apply AI to specialized industry processes, helping organizations in manufacturing, retail, commodity trading and asset-intensive industries improve decision-making, automate routine actions and build more resilient operations.

The Platform Powering Business AI You Can Trust

SAP Business AI Platform gives organizations one place to build, contextualize and govern AI across SAP and third-party environments. With Joule Studio, business users and developers can build and extend skills and agents from no-code to pro-code workflows, choosing from more than 70 AI models. SAP Business Data Cloud and SAP Knowledge Graph ground those agents in trusted business data and context, helping organizations select the right model for each use case and better manage AI value and consumption.

SAP-managed governance helps organizations scale AI with transparency, accountability and control. AI Agent Hub in SAP LeanIX solutions provides a central inventory of enterprise agents, while SAP's independently ISO/IEC 42001-certified governance architecture supports regulatory requirements, established authorizations and auditable AI operations.

To help organizations adopt AI at scale, SAP's Business Transformation Management portfolio, including SAP Signavio, SAP LeanIX and SAP WalkMe solutions, provides the toolchain to analyze processes, govern applications and agents, and drive adoption across the enterprise.

SAP Brings Embedded Payments to Cloud ERP

SAP also announced that it is entering the payments market with SAP Pay, powered by Tereina, an SAP company. Embedded directly in SAP Cloud ERP, SAP Pay executes and reconciles payments within the same workflow when an invoice is due, reducing manual file handling and external processing dependencies, while giving customers greater control.

Partners Expand the Reach of Autonomous Business

SAP is extending the Autonomous Enterprise beyond SAP's own application portfolio through new partnerships that bring specialized intelligence directly into SAP workflows.

A new partnership between SAP and Moody's Corporation is designed to embed Moody's supplier risk monitoring data into SAP Ariba Supplier Lifecycle and Performance. This gives procurement teams continuously updated insights into supplier financial health, operational risk and regulatory status at the point of decision. Organizations will be able to move from periodic risk reviews toward continuous monitoring, enabling Joule Agents to flag supplier risk signals and surface alternatives before disruption affects the business.

An expanded partnership with ORO Labs brings procurement orchestration to SAP customers as a solution extension. SAP Ariba Procurement Orchestration by ORO Labs is a purpose-built orchestration layer that connects procurement workflows end to end across heterogeneous enterprise environments, giving business users a seamless experience for intake, actions and visibility.

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About SAP
As a global leader in enterprise applications and business AI, SAP (NYSE:SAP) stands at the nexus of business and technology. For over 50 years, organizations have trusted SAP to bring out their best by uniting business-critical operations spanning finance, procurement, HR, supply chain, and customer experience. For more information, visit www.sap.com.

This press release was created with the assistance of artificial intelligence and has been reviewed by the editorial team.

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