At TechEd 2024, SAP introduced a collaborative AI agent that extends the capabilities of First Officer Joule.
Currently, Joule focuses solely on single tasks that support employees’ daily work. For example, capture data, extract insights, and answer questions.
However, multiple AI agents will soon be available within Joule. They work together to automate complete processes across various SAP systems and departments.
Joule’s AI agents may require human supervision, but do not necessarily require human involvement.
Muhammad Alam, SAP Product Engineering, member of the Board of Directors of SAP SE, suggested that innovations like this will bring about significant changes in the way humans and AI collaborate. he said:
Leveraging SAP’s unparalleled business and technology expertise, the AI innovations presented at TechEd forge new partnerships between humans and AI to transform the modern business landscape.
In fact, SAP is very excited to see Joule integrated even deeper into its portfolio. The tech giant even suggested that collaborative AI agents could support up to 80% of the most commonly used business tasks.
For example, consider all the cross-functional tasks involved in resolving payment disputes. These may include sending back and forth emails, cleaning up erroneous or missing invoices, assessing rejected or duplicate payments, and more. Joule may soon be able to handle all of this.
To enable this, SAP has also released the Knowledge Graph solution. This positions co-pilots based on business context and captures data across SAP applications.
Using this consistent data set, Joule has the potential to help brands get ahead of problems by discovering emerging issues and starting the process of resolving them through collaboration before they become more serious. There is.
Additionally, they can connect the dots in the data, identify trends, and potentially suggest new ways of working that different company teams have not previously considered.
So, Joule not only automates tasks, but also provides additional brains in the room to help come up with new solutions for the AI agent to execute.
Given that the large enterprises that SAP typically works with handle large volumes of transactions, communications, and complex supply chains, having this brain and behind-the-scenes problem-solving teams helps keep the ship sailing smoothly. Continuing to do so can be a game-changer. changer.
After all, while the first version of Copilot enhanced human tasks and helped employees work a little faster, this next generation of Joule could completely change the way businesses operate. there is.
Ultimately, we may usher in the era of autonomous enterprises.
What makes Joule different from its competitors?
Various other enterprise software vendors plan to release autonomous AI agents that better automate customer experience, resource management, and supply chain tasks.
But Joule aims to bridge these silos. It is designed to work like an all-star team of agents across SAP’s broad ecosystem to solve complex and complex problems.
Moreover, it is built on mountains of data and aims to understand not just what companies do, but why they do it.
It may sound like something out of a science fiction novel. However, SAP is building towards this and expects to release the first AI agent for Joule by the end of the year.
As SAP moves closer to this vision, it could make cloud transformation more appealing.
After all, many companies still resist migrating to SAP because they have made significant customizations to their on-premises systems over the years. These legacy platforms are also deeply integrated into various workflows and across the supply chain.
Currently, the only way to replace such environments is through the myriad of SaaS applications, which poses challenges in terms of overhead and integration. It’s a tough process.
Nevertheless, Joule and its AI agent can change this by providing an intelligent interface layer that ties it all together, allowing end users to avoid much of the behind-the-scenes complexity. Masu.
As SAP ramps up its innovation, it may release a proven case study of Joule doing just that.
However, without these, the potential costs and risks of an ERP transformation project can prove difficult to justify.
Next steps for SAP
SAP may provide a central point for organizational data, but companies end up working across many more applications.
So, to prepare for the future, tech giants should consider supporting Joule’s extended application model rather than being tied to SAP data alone.
The $1.5 billion acquisition of digital adaptation platform (DAP) WalkMe suggests that SAP is already considering this.
The platform provides a bird’s-eye view of the entire enterprise technology stack, identifying inefficiencies, recommending fixes, and providing automation opportunities.
In the future, this could help teams activate Joule beyond SAP environments. If the vendor can put it all together, it’s an interesting prospect.
