Let’s give you a little bit of an overview, not just what Joule is, but also its respective capabilities and how to get started with Joule directly. The Photo below is a summary of all hot subjects in Business AI and Joule.
So with this, I am sharing my screen and I would like to take one step back here and take a look at the overall strategy of SAP in terms of business AI and where Joule fits within that.
So within SAP, we obviously have three major components when it comes to business AI, one being the AI foundation.
I’ll speak to that in a second. You can see this here in the middle part. Then we have our embedded AI capabilities, but then also apologies for that.
But then we also do have a tool at the very top. So a tool we are positioning as our generative AI co-pilot across the SAP Cloud application landscape.
And you can interact with it by a natural language. It’s embedded in your respective SAP Cloud applications. And you as a customer, you can decide how you want to provision tools. And within Joule, we have just recently introduced the concept around agents and agentic capabilities.
And these are autonomous entities, essentially we call agents within the Joule user experience, which are based on business processes, business personas, based on specific applications and can basically drive much more complex tasks collaborate with each other and come back with results also partially in the absence of a user, by always keeping the user in the loop to ensure there is transparent overview and orchestration.
So these respective agents we are offering across our sap cloud applications in CX, our customer experience within analytics, within finance as for Hana. success factors in as HR agents, etc. And by end of the year, we are planning to introduce around 40 agents. And all of this is also sitting on top of the native tool capabilities.
But then we also have embedded AI capabilities, which are sitting across our SAP Cloud applications within the financial management, supply chain management, et cetera. And for many regards, our respective customers are not even aware that there is actually AI at work in the background, but it’s supporting our customers in their daily work, in their daily business processes.
And then we have the AI foundation as an extensibility layer We call this also the operating system of all our AI strategy. And it’s including platform based on business technology platform, which supports customers to build their own custom applications, their own extensibility, their own leverage existing models, large language models, and so on.
via our AI ecosystem partnerships and investments. And here we are partnering together with the latest and greatest technology companies out there like AWS, like Google Cloud, like Meta, Microsoft, and so on to ensure whatever is now coming out in the market in terms of large language models is directly being positioned within our generative AI hub in our AI foundation and can be accessed by our customers. so they can build their own capabilities. We are also leveraging this platform for our own capabilities, for the orchestration of Joule, for the architecture of Joule, but also for our embedded AI foundation.
So you as a customer can decide if you want to deploy Joule into one specific application you have licensed as a customer or in several of them. So it doesn’t really matter for a customer or for a user where they are in the flow of work. So a user can be in S4HANA directly interacting with success factors, can be in Ariba interacting with Conquer, etc., Joule is natively embedded in the respective chat UI via an iframe, basically overlaying in the respective SAP application and providing this cross user experience across these different SAP applications, always in a consistent way.
And Joule also provides out of the box capabilities provided by our respective SAP Cloud applications.
So S4HANA, SuccessFactors, Ariba, all of them are delivering these out-of-the-box capabilities. And as of today, we already have over 1,900 individual tool skills, which is growing also rapidly.
And we are also in process to explore how we also leverage MCP servers, SAP Knowledge Graph, to give Joule even more access to the SAP customer tenant and SAP landscape.
But there are also a bunch of individual topics we are driving in details. And this session is not meant to go into all of this in details, but obviously besides our standard Joule for business, we are also offering Joule for consultants.
So supporting our customers in their digital transformation, supporting our technology partners, helping our customers in their digital transformation, providing direct insights into the SAP documentation, et cetera. But then we are also offering tool for developers embedded in our ABAP developer tools and supporting code generation, ABAP unit testing, code explanation, and so on.
Another topic is obviously then Joule for Business, but then there’s also the dedicated integration with WalkMe. So WalkMe is a company SAP just has acquired a couple of months ago. I think it was already last year, end of last year. And here we are leveraging WalkMe now under the hood of Joule to enable Joule to become available on any web application essentially in the world. So this will now very soon hit a release date as an early adopter care program. And then we also have Joule Extensibility as part of Joule Studio.
So Joule Studio is also our extensibility platform embedded in AI Foundation, as you’ve seen previously, as part of SAP Build and business technology platform. And this enables our customers to build their own Joule skills. So this is already generally available. But then also by end of Q4, we are planning to enable customers to build their own agents via Joule Studio and the Joule Agent Builder.
Then we have Business Answer Engine providing our customers then direct access into the web search powered by Perplexity and our great partnership with Perplexity. And this all in an enterprise secure and contextual way, supporting also Joule for mobile, So we are not delivering a dedicated Joule app, native mobile app, but embedding Joule within our existing SAP mobile apps like SAP Mobile Start, Conquer, et cetera, in the future.
Then we have Joule and Microsoft 365 Copilot. So we are supporting or we are showing you more about this integration shortly. But Copilot in Joule, will become available in the next weeks to come, actually. And Joule in Copilot is already generally available as of today.
We support AI-assisted document grounding, so you as a customer can upload your own HR policies, travel policies, etc. you want to share with your organization, with your customers. And you can upload these documents via dedicated and customer-owned Microsoft SharePoint, connecting directly to Joule via the business technology platform, and therefore let your users ask questions upon these respective documents.
You have two agents, something I’ve addressed in the beginning. So this is a big, big topic we are currently prioritizing and tool agents asset will support these individual agents sitting in this respective business processes, applications, supporting our users in the daily work.
And then we also supporting multi-language within tools, supporting over 11 languages as of today with many more to come in the near future.
Question: Is the Joule skills are enabled by default or if there is a list of Joule skills that are available versus need to be activated?
Answer: As soon as you connect your, for example, SuccessFactor system to Joule, then all these skills are activated. Of course, Joule also learns about your system. So assuming you are not using the goal management in SuccessFactors, Joule will recognize that and it will disable these skills. Only if it’s active and the user has the access, then Joule will automatically And right away, a follow-up question.
Question: We saw you browsing around the application, leveraging Joule from there. Is there an overlap of Joule and embedded AI capabilities? Answer: Again, embedded AI, we use that term when we talk about the AI features that are available in the cloud applications today. So assuming in SuccessFactors, there’s a goal description AI that helps you writing goals better. And sure, we can remote control or trigger this, but the actual interaction then is passed through to the embedded AI. So they work together. And the embedded AI, of course, specializes on a specific task, while Joule is this generic assistant. And of course, there might be here a bit of overlap, and you might be able to use Joule for one or the other. But typically, Joule then simply augments or controls the embedded AI. And then, I mean, we saw you navigating through S/4HANA.
Question: How can Joule read the data from that application? Is there a cloud connector or an API? How does that work?
Answer: The tool is typically Joule is typically working with API calls. So you see it in here. So in S4HANA private cloud, indeed, a cloud connector is in between and cloud connector is used. And Joule always calls backend data via API access on behalf of the business user.
The most favorite questions by some customers is….
Question: Can we leverage Joule the same level in on-premise as in cloud editions?
Answer: In the contect of S/4 HANA, Joule is only available for SAP S/4 HANA Cloud private and public edition. What you can do is you can extend Joule. So you can build your custom skill with Joule Studio, for example. This allows you to call each and every system, be it an on-prem, ECC, and third-party system. However, this content catalog that I have also shown in the capability catalog, we are not investing in down-porting that to on-prem or ECC systems.
This is only available for the cloud systems. However, you could build one or the other skill And just to highlight again, I posted the link to our previous session last week, how to extend Joule skills in Joule Studio via SAP Build.
I posted a link in the webinar chat so you can watch the recording. And of course, Christoph touched on it. Soon you will also be able to build your custom AI agents via Joule Studio.
Question: I navigate to one sales order and my next question is more another sales order. Can Joule determine the current open sales order and answer accordingly?
Answer: So we are currently investigating how we can enable this going forward. So right now, the capabilities of Joule are based on individually developed capabilities by our lines of businesses, by as for Hana by success factors, etc. So what we are trying to what we are currently evaluating is how can we support. So basically two things, how we can enable to will to have reading and writing access to all existing CDS views, business objects in the respective customer tenants in the respective SAP applications via MCP service, via SAP knowledge graph. So there’s a lot of ideas. in the market right now in the research community about MCP server usage. However, after first tests, we have identified hallucination in that scale of tens of thousands of individual CDS views, business objects, or data calls, et cetera. So therefore, we want to also leverage SAP Knowledge Graph to ensure to we can mitigate basically this hallucination and these scaling issues. So this has a lot of technical complexity we are trying to improve. The second topic we are also currently driving research on evaluating how is Joule able to understand the contextual UI. And based on this also can act proactively, can suggest things on the screen, et cetera. So all of this is currently in progress.
Question: And is Joule available for all data centers?
Answer: There’s a list of data centers mentioned in the help.sap.com slash Joule. You can screen the progress.
Question: Can we customize the greeting of Joule and its color when we get started with Joule? There are many things on the user experience side we want to introduce in the next months to come with Joule?
Answer: There is a long list of priority items to actually improve the quality of the responses, et cetera. I believe the welcome screen, the color of Joule, et cetera, is a very, very valid request, but doesn’t rank right now. in the top list of the requirements, but we’ll definitely take it with us and consider.