By 
SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) has announced Joule, a natural-language, generative AI copilot that will transform the way business runs.
Joule will be embedded throughout SAP’s cloud enterprise portfolio, delivering proactive and contextualized insights from across the breadth and depth of SAP solutions and third-party sources.
RELATED: SAP GROW launched to accelerate SMBs’ cloud adoption across South Africa
By quickly sorting through and contextualising data from multiple systems to surface smarter insights, Joule helps people get work done faster and drive better business outcomes in a secure, compliant way. Joule delivers on SAP’s proven track record of revolutionary technology that drives real results.
“With almost 300 million enterprise users around the world working regularly with cloud solutions from SAP, Joule has the power to redefine the way businesses – and the people who power them – work,” said Christian Klein, CEO and member of the Executive Board of SAP SE. “Joule draws on SAP’s unique position at the nexus of business and technology and builds on our relevant, reliable, responsible approach to Business AI. Joule will know what you mean, not just what you say.”
Joule will be embedded into SAP applications from HR to finance, supply chain, procurement and customer experience, as well as into SAP Business Technology Platform. Joule transforms the SAP user experience – it’s like tapping your smartest colleague on the shoulder. Employees simply ask a question or frame a problem in plain language and receive intelligent answers drawn from the wealth of business data across the SAP portfolio and third-party sources, retaining context.
Imagine, for example, a manufacturer asking Joule for help understanding sales performance better. Joule can identify underperforming regions, link to other data sets that reveal a supply chain issue, and automatically connect to the supply chain system to offer potential fixes for the manufacturer’s review. Joule will continuously deliver new scenarios for all SAP solutions. For example, in HR it will help write unbiased job descriptions and generate relevant interview questions.
“As generative AI moves on from the initial hype, the work to ensure measurable return on investment begins,” said Phil Carter, Group Vice President, Worldwide Thought Leadership Research, IDC. “SAP understands that generative AI will eventually become part of the fabric of everyday life and work and is taking the time to build a business copilot that focuses on generating responses based on real-world scenarios – and to put in place the necessary guardrails to ensure it’s also responsible.”
Joule will be available with SAP SuccessFactors solutions and the SAP Start site later this year, and with SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition early next year. SAP Customer Experience and SAP Ariba solutions along with SAP Business Technology Platform will follow, with many other updates across the SAP portfolio to be announced at the SuccessConnect event on October 2–4, the SAP Spend Connect Live event on October 9–11, the SAP Customer Experience LIVE event on October 25 and the SAP TechEd conference on November 2–3.
Joule builds on and enhances existing SAP Business AI offerings. More than 26,000 SAP cloud customers have access to SAP Business AI across multiple scenarios and partner solutions. SAP’s comprehensive strategy to build an enterprise AI ecosystem of the future also includes direct investments, such as those announced in July with Aleph Alpha, Anthropic and Cohere, as well as third-party partnerships including those with Microsoft, Google Cloud and IBM announced in May. Sapphire Ventures LLC, a global software venture capital firm, is backed by SAP and is dedicating over US$1 billion to fund AI-powered enterprise technology startups.
