SAP Expands Joule Into Agentic Work Layer as Autonomous Enterprise Goes Live

Manoj Swaminathan, SAP’s president and chief product officer of Autonomous Suite, told SiliconANGLE in an interview that autonomous enterprise will be a journey rather than a switch customers flip on. “When we talk about autonomous enterprise, we realize that it’s going to be a journey for the customer, and it’s not something you draw a line to say starting tomorrow will be autonomous just because you now have these agents and assistants,” Swaminathan said.

Joule debuted in 2023 and has become SAP’s autonomous workhorse. SAP announced multiple upgrades at the event, positioning Joule as an automation, productivity and development tool that acts as a conversational interface for customers and works alongside apps. Swaminathan said autonomy does not mean handing every task to agents and letting them go. It means giving humans tools to observe, describe and trust agents before delegating processes to them, and to control, govern and understand how agents work with data, apps and enterprise context before agents are released. Transparency and auditability of agent activity are part of the model. “First principle is it’s AI on apps as opposed to AI in apps,” he said.

Joule Work provides the framework to bring AI assistants into customer workflows and allows autonomy to work with both SAP and non-SAP applications, according to SAP. A user already sees AI agents working within apps, such as opening a word processor for an agent-written memo or an email program for an agent to look up past conversations. SAP’s aim is for an agent to understand enterprise resource planning and connect finance documents and email conversations without requiring users to jump between them. Swaminathan gave the example of total corporate spend. Rather than treating the question as belonging to one application, Joule could determine that answering it requires information from ERP, travel and expense systems and procurement platforms, then combine those records and present one business answer.

The interface system is called Joule Desktop. SAP said it lives where the customer does with their apps and draws on the same enterprise information. It provides an intelligent layer that performs work-related duties rather than binding users to in-application resources. “Joule is no longer a natural language chat client for us; it is a full-screen experience,” Swaminathan said.

With general availability, Joule will receive updated agents for finance, supply chain, spend, workforce/customer experience, and other industry specializations across the autonomous suite, SAP said. Customers will have access to agents with domain expertise, knowledge and business acumen that can touch enterprise data.

Swaminathan said enterprise customers bring their data and cloud lakehouses, while SAP organizes that data and provides a structured knowledge graph. He said general-purpose models and agents from OpenAI Group PBC and Anthropic PBC cannot provide this when simply placed on top of enterprise data. ERP data, processes, semantics, policies and relationships all matter, which he described as SAP’s “secret sauce.” SAP is not alone in the trend: Salesforce Inc. and ServiceNow Inc. are also pushing toward headless applications, context layers and agentic control planes, according to the report. Enterprise AI is becoming less about adding copilots to applications and more about building an intelligent layer on top of the customer experience.

Swaminathan stressed that SAP customers can declare intent; the agent decides which systems to involve and then gets the work done. The human stays in the loop and retains governance, auditability and transparency. Agents are treated like employees in the system, including security, systems of record and execution. They sit as another layer on top of the old application interface and act as intelligent conversational tools on behalf of humans. “Autonomous enterprise is not a vision anymore,” Swaminathan said. “It is real, with general availability in October.”

SAP will continue using AI units as the primary commercial monetization for these capabilities, according to SiliconANGLE. The model will be primarily consumption-based rather than purely subscription-based, the report said.

Editor’s Summary

SAP is making its Autonomous Enterprise architecture generally available this month with Joule Work and Joule Desktop, extending Joule into an agentic layer that can work across SAP and non-SAP applications. The company says the approach keeps humans in control with governance, auditability and transparency while agents handle workflow tasks, and it will monetize the capabilities primarily through consumption-based AI units.