SAP is moving artificial intelligence agents from the conceptual stage into use in companies’ back-office operations through a new group of Joule Assistants covering finance, spend management, human resources, customer experience, and supply chains. The company revealed these plans during the Connect event in Las Vegas, after presenting at the Sapphire conference its vision of what it calls the “autonomous enterprise,” which manages large parts of its business through AI agents.
Eric van Rossum, SAP’s head of product marketing for applications and the suite, said Connect’s goal is to provide customers with practical proof points rather than strategy alone. Most of the new assistants will arrive through early-access programs and general releases between now and the first quarter of 2027, while the event offers more than 20 hands-on labs for building custom agents.
Agents for Financial Operations and International Trade
In finance, Revenue Recognition Assistant explains how to prepare, calculate, and post revenue, and classifies transactions according to IFRS 15 and US GAAP. Disclosure Assistant collects and tags external reporting data, then helps draft and validate the narrative before publication. Overhead Accounting Assistant enables users to update cost-allocation rules and make bulk changes to cost and profit centers.
SAP is planning early-access programs in the first quarter of 2027 for assistants dedicated to financial close, treasury, tax, billing, planning, and accounts receivable. It is also introducing International Trade Assistant for product classification, compliance-document preparation, and sanctions screening; the company says early deployments reduced product-classification time for trade by up to half.
Payments and Connecting Systems
SAP also announced SAP Pay, a service built on the recently acquired Tereina. When an invoice is approved in SAP Cloud ERP, the service sends the payment and matches it with the invoice or purchase order without leaving the ERP system. It supports cross-border settlements using stablecoins and is currently available in the United States and the United Kingdom.
To connect operations, SAP is providing managed integrations between SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, SAP Ariba, and SAP Sales Cloud, with subsequent integrations with SAP Taulia in October, SAP Subscription Billing in November, and SAP SuccessFactors before the end of the year. SAP Reltio is also now generally available within SAP Business Data Cloud to unify duplicate or conflicting customer, supplier, product, and employee records across systems.
Governance Is Not an Optional Layer
SAP says Joule agents inherit the localization and regulatory requirements embedded in its core applications, including Brazil’s electronic-invoicing rules and differences in AI regulations between Europe and the United States. Governance Assistant is coming in the fourth quarter to monitor compliance risks and controls across systems, while Access Governance and Security Assistant will begin in the first quarter of 2027 to subject agents to the same identity and access controls applied to human users.
Why Does This Direction Matter?
The more important shift is not adding a chatbot to an ERP system, but deploying agents capable of executing or proposing actions in areas where major errors cannot be tolerated, such as statutory reporting, payments, tax classification, and international trade. The outcome remains tied to data quality, system integration, and review mechanisms; for this reason, SAP connects its plan to data unification and continuous governance, not to model capability alone.
The company says customers typically start with individual use cases, but the greatest value may emerge when agents collaborate across finance, spend management, human resources, and customer service. To measure this, SAP is working with consulting partners and customers on benchmark performance indicators for each assistant and is launching a value calculator that compares customer data with those indicators. Most of these promises remain in early-access programs or future rollout stages, leaving the results of actual scaling and return on investment as open questions.
In a separate move, SAP announced its plan to acquire TechWolf, a Belgian company that develops a platform for mapping skills and work within organizations. The value of the deal was not disclosed, and SAP expects to close it in the fourth quarter after receiving regulatory approvals.