Sapphire 2026: SAP heralds dawn of ‘autonomous enterprise’

Christian Klein, SAP’s chief executive officer, led with a picture of a three-eared unicorn during the opening keynote at SAP’s global Sapphire event in Orlando.

In the main press statement for the event, he added some context: “For the mission-critical processes of our customers, ‘almost right’ just isn’t good enough.

“By uniting SAP Business AI Platform with SAP Autonomous Suite, we anchor AI agents in the business processes, data and governance so they can deliver accurate, compliant and secure outcomes, unlocking new sources of revenue and meaningful cost savings.”

The no-frills keynote was balanced across the supplier’s top team. Philipp Herzig, chief technology officer; Muhammad Alam, executive board member responsible for product engineering; and Sebastian Steinhaeuser, chief operating officer carried what came across as a collective argument.

They were also joined onstage by SAP customers JP Morgan Chase, with its chief financial officer, Jeremy Barnum; H&M, with its chief digital and information officer, Ellen Svanström; and partner representative Rob Fisher, global head of advisory.

What the supplier styles as an Autonomous Enterprise includes an AI platform for, avowedly, building, contextualising and governing agents. This is said to add up to an “autonomous suite that executes core business operations and a new user experience” that obviates the need to switch applications, or even be in them.

The so-called autonomous suite will deploy more than 50 Joule Assistants across the gamut of business applications, covering finance, supply chain, procurement, human capital management and customer experience. Joule has been SAP’s term for its generative AI technology since September 2023.

These assistants will, it is said, automate end-to-end processes. One example the supplier gave is an Autonomous Close Assistant that can, it is claimed, compress the financial close process from weeks to days by automating journal entries, reconciliation and error resolution.

The company said it will bring its Business Technology Platform (BTP) and its Business Data Cloud under the banner of its SAP Business AI Platform as a single, governed environment. BTP is SAP’s platform-as-a-service product that has provided a development and runtime environment for building cloud-based enterprise applications.

An SAP Knowledge Graph system, which is said to give AI agents a map of business entities, processes and relationships across a customer’s SAP landscape, will add specific business context, according to the supplier.

SAP is also launching Joule Studio as what it describes as its AI-first system for building enterprise agents, applications and agentic workflows.