AI
AI
AI
Enterprise software giant SAP SE today announced a wave of AI-powered updates to its Business Suite core applications, extending across finance, supply chain, procurement and more.
The new features introduce AI agents and expand the company’s data ecosystem to help customers make faster, more intelligent decisions.
Because AI depends on large volumes of enterprise data, SAP is enhancing its Business Data Cloud with a new connectivity solution that enables secure, zero-copy sharing of SAP data with customers’ existing data lakes and platforms.
Through the Business Data Cloud, SAP ensures customers receive a consistent representation of data across applications by harmonizing and curating records, such as purchase orders from different systems, into a uniform structure.
The new enhancement, Business Data Cloud Connect eliminates the need for traditional extract, transform and load pipelines, which often lead to data duplication and latency. Instead, it allows semantically rich SAP data to be shared in real time with customer platforms.
Connect for Databricks Inc. is generally available today, following the company’s February partnership announcement. Support for Google LLC’s BigQuery, the company’s fully managed enterprise data warehouse for large-scale analytics, is planned for the first half of 2026.
“Because of disjointed sets of applications, the data around these transactions are siloed… so what we are doing with the suite really opens up the opportunity for us to bring these things together,” Manoj Swaminathan, general manager and chief product officer for Business Suite, finance and spend at SAP, told SiliconANGLE in an interview.
He explained that the goal was to have a consistent experience, so that users don’t see the “seams” of the product. By connecting disparate pools of data from applications and products, customers experience all the data as a single plane, without needing to discover or determine where to pull it from.
This unified data layer powers Joule, SAP’s AI assistant. With these enhancements, Joule is evolving into a platform of agentic AI assistants embedded across the Business Suite. The assistants automatically select the right AI agents for a user’s role, delivering insights, automating routine tasks and recommending next steps. SAP said it has added more than 40 agents to the suite.
“Joule is no longer a simple natural language chat client,” said Swaminathan. “Joule now powers agents that truly support automating the possibilities of what the user could go do. It’s fully auditable, with the right set of skills, continuing to enable any persona to interact in the simplest natural language way possible.”
For example, financial managers can use an accruals agent that automatically generates and records revenue and expense data, reducing the complexity of period-end accounting and freeing teams to focus on strategic planning.
Procurement professionals gain new capabilities in SAP Ariba, where AI now supports contract analysis, sourcing event creation, bid evaluation and supplier summaries. In the supply chain domain, Supply Chain Orchestration with Joule taps into live knowledge graphs spanning multi-tier supply chains, detecting risks in real time and coordinating responses.
“Our philosophy with these is we’re not replacing these personas,” added Swaminathan. “Rather, we’re supporting them… Our goal is not to eliminate people, but to facilitate every persona with an AI agent so they can… do more with less.”
A new engagement orchestration solution, Engagement Cloud, also debuted, useing business-critical data context to deliver personalized interactions across suppliers and other parties. It will allow businesses to receive AI-driven segments, triggers and campaigns to improve customer loyalty and relationships with partners. Marketing, sales and service teams can use recommendations and information from Engagement Cloud immediately to enhance communications with customers.
SAP said the new Engagement Cloud will become generally available in February 2026.
“We no longer want customers to think about best-of-breed as the only option, because best-of-breed doesn’t give them what they would need,” said Swaminathan. “It makes them go through a substantially large IT costs that they have to actually go manage.”
To this end, Swaminathan explained that the Business Suite is receiving a “full-fledged AI infusion” to reimagine business operations and build a system of intelligence, one designed to support users by assisting them in productively performing their work.
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