SAP SE today debuted a new version of Joule, an artificial intelligence assistant that ships with many of its business applications.

The company is also upgrading the developer tools that customers use to extend its software with custom features. 

Introduced last September, Joule can provide workers with pointers on how to use SAP applications. A financial analyst, for example, could ask the assistant how to generate revenue forecasts. Joule can also answer questions about the records that a company keeps in a SAP application to spare users the hassle of manually sifting through the data. 

The software maker said today that it’s extending Joule to cover 80% of the most popular business tasks that customers perform with its applications. As part of the push to make the assistant more useful, SAP is expanding it with new AI agents. Those are specialized machine learning tools that are each optimized for a narrow range of tasks.

According to SAP, the new agents can ease situations where one of the parties involved in a transaction wishes to challenge a certain detail. If a customer claims to have been billed twice, Joule’s agents can automate some of the work involved in verifying the assertion. SAP is also promising to ease the management of other transaction errors such as missing credits.

The new agents promise to ease other financial tasks as well. According to SAP, Joule will help financial professionals more quickly pay their company’s bills and update the ledger in which accounting records are kept. Furthermore, the new AI capabilities promise to reduce errors in those accounting records.

The Joule enhancements are part of a broader AI upgrade to SAP’s application portfolio. The company is also updating SAP Generative AI Hub, a software component that underpins Joule and several of its other machine learning features. The latter enhancement will give customers access to three new open-source large language models: Llama 3.1 70B, Mistral Large 2 and Mistral Codestral, which is optimized for programming tasks.

The company plans to follow up the upgrades by releasing a tool called the SAP Knowledge Graph early next year. It will allow enterprises to link together related pieces of data, such as transactions involving the same customer. Grouping business records in this manner will make them easier to understand for Joule and other AI tools, which should improve the quality of their prompt responses. 

SAP is rolling out new features for developers in conjunction. The additions will become available in SAP Build, a suite of tools that customers use to extend the company’s applications with custom features. 

The toolkit is receiving a generative AI capability that can explain code snippets in natural language to ease developers’ work. Another new feature will speed up the task of finding content in SAP’s product documentation. According to the company, the capabilities will make it simpler for software teams to extend its applications using the Java and JavaScript programming languages.

Photo: SAP