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Joule

SAP’s AI assistant and the front door to its agents: what it can do for a finance team, how a request reaches your system, and what it takes to switch it on.

  • Joule Work
  • Assistants and agents
  • Joule Studio
  • Developers
  • Consultants

By · Updated

Facts checked in October 2026, after SAP TechEd 2026.

At a glance

Announced
26 September 2023
Skills (Q1 2026)
2,500+
Announced (Oct 2026)
40 assistants · 300 agents
Live in (Apr 2026)
35 SAP solutions
Base licence
Included, no cost
Premium
AI Units
Certification
ISO/IEC 42001

What Joule does

Joule is SAP’s generative AI assistant. It started in September 2023 as a chat panel in the SAP apps and has become the way users reach SAP’s AI: it understands a business question, opens the right app, reads or changes data within the user’s authorizations, and hands bigger jobs to agents.

Since 2026 it also has a workspace of its own, Joule Work, where users describe the result they want instead of navigating from app to app.

Four kinds of request

  • Navigational

    Finds and opens the right Fiori app.

    • Where can I create a purchase order?

  • Transactional

    Reads, creates and changes business objects in the conversation.

    • What is the status of sales order 12345?
    • Any issue in sales order 12345?

  • Informational

    Answers from SAP Help and your own documents, with links to the sources.

    • How can I configure a workflow for purchase orders?
    • What is a sales order without charge?

  • Analytical

    Charts and key figures, powered by SAP Analytics Cloud.

    • What’s our forecasted cash flow?
    • Show me sales by region for Q2 2025

Example prompts from SAP’s own training material.

JouleIllustrative · invented figures

What’s our forecasted cash flow?

Cash forecast for company code 1010, next four weeks (EUR million):

4.2W13.6W21.1W32.8W4

Week 3 drops because the supplier payment run and the tax payment fall on the same days.

Open Cash Flow AnalyzerShow by bank account

Which suppliers are in the week 3 payment run?

Nine suppliers, EUR 2.4 million in total. The three largest cover 70% of it. Do you want to review the payment proposal?

The first question is a prompt SAP uses in its own training. Answers and figures are invented to show the kind of reply.

Finance skills SAP has released

  • Costing variant explanationPublic Edition
  • Supplier invoice verificationPublic Edition
  • Allocation run summariesPublic Edition
  • Fixed asset creation and key figuresPublic Edition
  • Bank statements and transfersPrivate Edition
  • Revenue accounting and reconciliationPrivate Edition
  • Dispute and payment resolutionPrivate Edition
  • E-invoicing error explanationDocument and Reporting Compliance

SAP describes these as skills, not as exact prompts. Users can phrase the question in their own words.

How a request reaches your system

Joule does not have its own copy of your data: it works through the same APIs and authorizations as the Fiori apps.

  1. Ask

    In the Fiori launchpad, SAP Build Work Zone, Joule Work, the mobile app or Microsoft Teams.

  2. Sign in once

    SAP Cloud Identity Services identifies the user, so Joule acts as the same person in every connected system.

  3. Understand

    Large language models from the generative AI hub read the intent, grounded in the SAP Knowledge Graph and your documents.

  4. Pick a skill or agent

    A skill answers a single request; an agent plans several steps for a bigger job.

  5. Call the system

    The skill calls the system’s APIs (OData), with the user’s own roles and authorizations.

  6. Answer and confirm

    Joule shows the result with links; anything that posts or changes data waits for the user’s approval.

Where Joule runs

Joule is a cloud service. It reaches the SAP cloud products directly, and other systems through connectors.

  • ERP

    • S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition
    • S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition (2021 or later, with RISE)
    • On-premise S/4HANA and ECC: selected scenarios, with conditions (see below)

  • People and spend

    • SuccessFactors
    • Ariba
    • Concur
    • Fieldglass

  • Data and analytics

    • SAP Analytics Cloud (Just Ask)
    • Datasphere
    • Business Data Cloud
    • SAP IBP

  • Process and build

    • Signavio (since February 2026)
    • SAP Build and Build Code
    • SAP Customer Experience
    • SAP Start and Mobile Start

  • Outside SAP

    • Microsoft 365 Copilot and Teams
    • Non-SAP web apps, with the Joule action bar
    • Joule Work connectors: Office 365, Claude Cowork, Glean, ServiceNow

On-premise and ECC. Until May 2026 Joule needed a cloud edition. At Sapphire 2026 SAP opened selected Joule scenarios to on-premise S/4HANA and ECC, but only for customers on the Max Success Plan who commit most of their landscape to SAP Cloud ERP. SAP has not published a list of which assistants and agents work with which on-premise releases.

Skills, assistants and agents

Joule works at three levels. The step from skills to agents is the step from answering questions to doing work: an agent plans, acts across systems and comes back to a person for approval.

  • Skill

    One request, one answer: open an app, show a document, create a fixed asset. SAP ships more than 2,500.

    Mostly Base

  • Assistant

    Role-based, for example for accounts receivable or the financial close. Knows the role’s tasks and calls the right agents.

    Part of Joule

  • Agent

    Does one job end to end over several steps and systems, then asks a person to approve the result.

    Premium, AI Units

Example: the Accounting Accruals Agent

  1. Read the policy

    Reads your accrual handbook, a PDF with the rules per expense category.

  2. Calculate

    Uses the method the policy names: rolling average, percentage of revenue or year to date.

  3. Check

    Looks for accruals already posted, so nothing is booked twice.

  4. Propose

    Prepares the journal entries, each with an explanation.

  5. Approve

    The accountant accepts, adjusts or rejects every proposal.

In restricted availability in October 2026. SAP advises a handbook with five expense categories or fewer, kept under change control.

Finance assistants, October 2026

  • Financial Closing7 agents
  • Accounts Receivable7 agents
  • Billing6 agents
  • Cash and Treasury3 agents
  • Accounts Payable3 agents
  • Consolidation2 agents

Generally available in phases. What each agent does: AI in finance.

Joule Work

What it is
A workspace where users state the result they want and Joule assistants do the work across SAP and non-SAP apps
Channels
Web, desktop, mobile, voice and Apple CarPlay
Standards
A2A (agent to agent) and MCP (Model Context Protocol), through a governed agent gateway
Status
Customer rollout started in October 2026, in phases, after use by more than 110,000 SAP employees

Joule Studio: build your own

Part of SAP Build on the SAP Business AI Platform. Use it for company-specific processes that SAP will never ship.

  • Since July 2025

    Skill builder

    Low-code skills that call your own APIs and workflows. Part of Base.

  • Since December 2025

    Agent builder

    Agents with instructions, tools and MCP or A2A connections. Free until December 2026, then Premium.

  • 2026

    Pro-code

    LangGraph, AutoGen and LlamaIndex agents built in VS Code or Cursor, with an MCP builder and agent memory on SAP HANA Cloud.

  • Generally available

    AI Agent Hub

    Registry of all agents, models and MCP servers, from SAP and other vendors, with identity and observability.

Joule for developers and consultants

Two editions aimed at the people who build and run SAP projects. Both are paid with AI Units.

Joule for Developers

ABAP · CDS · RAP

In ABAP Development Tools for Eclipse, with VS Code tooling arriving through 2026.

  • Code completion and explanations for ABAP and CDS
  • ABAP Unit and CDS test generation
  • A RAP business object and OData service from a prompt
  • Custom code migration agents (since June 2026)
  • ABAP MCP server for Eclipse and VS Code (Q2 2026)
  • Private Edition: all releases from 2021, through a service on the platform

Joule for Consultants

Since May 2025

A research assistant for SAP projects, trained on SAP’s own implementation knowledge.

  • Answers from SAP Notes, KBAs and curated SAP content that is not public
  • Your own project documents as extra grounding, and file uploads
  • Eight languages, including Portuguese
  • Available in selected system-based SAP certification exams (since Q2 2026)
  • Priced at 35 AI Units per user per month

In SAP Build Code, Joule generates data models, service logic and test scripts for CAP applications. Since November 2025 SAP Build also offers local MCP servers for coding tools such as Cursor and Claude Code.

Setting it up

What a Joule activation needs, in order. SAP is preparing an SAP-managed activation through SAP for Me.

  1. Global account

    An SAP Business AI Platform (BTP) enterprise account and a subaccount in a data center where Joule is offered.

  2. Identity

    SAP Cloud Identity Services: Identity Authentication for sign-in, trusted with OpenID Connect (not SAML), and Identity Provisioning for users.

  3. Subscriptions

    Joule and SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition, in the same subaccount. The booster “Joule – End-to-End Setup Guide” does most of it.

  4. Connect the systems

    Public Edition: per tenant, not transportable. Private Edition: Cloud Connector, principal propagation, the OData services and Fiori roles listed in SAP Note 3523238.

  5. One Joule for all

    Several products can share one Joule instance when they use the same Identity Authentication tenant and Global User ID: plan this first.

  6. Test with real roles

    Joule only does what the user’s roles allow. Test with business users, not administrators.

Where setups usually fail

  • Trusted domains and Joule formations not maintained
  • Cloud Connector or principal propagation not working
  • Identity Provisioning errors, so users are missing in Joule
  • Business roles missing, or ICF and OData services not active in the backend

Licensing and privacy

Joule Base costs nothing; the premium features and agents are paid with AI Units.

  • Joule Base

    No cost

    Navigation, answers from SAP Help and the RISE methodology, and simple create, read and update actions. SAP lists the released Private Edition and SuccessFactors skills as Base.

  • Joule Premium and agents

    AI Units

    Paid with AI Units, bought yearly and shared across products. In 2026 each agent action uses 0.02 AI Units, and grounding on your own documents is billed in AI Units too. Free offers for custom agents end in December 2026.

  • RISE and GROW

    Bundles

    RISE with SAP activates three Joule assistants in the first year; GROW with SAP includes the full assistant portfolio.

  • No training on your data

    SAP does not share customer data with LLM providers to train their models; the providers process it only for the request and do not store it.

  • Your authorizations

    Joule uses the user’s existing SAP roles: it cannot show or change anything the user could not.

  • ISO/IEC 42001

    Joule is certified to the international standard for AI management systems.

  • Languages

    Language support differs by product and skill. Check SAP Help before rollout, especially for users who work in Portuguese or Spanish.

Limits and tips

What to expect when Joule moves from the demo to real users.

  • Check the status

    Many assistants and agents are in beta, Early Adopter Care or a phased rollout, and availability differs by country. Read the status in the SAP Business AI catalog before you promise a feature.

  • Public Edition first

    New skills reach S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition first. Heavily customised processes get fewer working skills.

  • Master data decides

    Joule answers from your data: poor master data and free-text fields give poor answers.

  • Design the approvals

    Every agent waits for a person to approve. Too many approvals and people click through without reading: SAP itself warns of approval fatigue.

  • Watch the AI Units

    Track consumption in SAP for Me from the first pilot, and check how custom agents will be billed once the free offers end in December 2026.

  • Know the limits

    Up to 3,000 requests per minute per user, no custom domain, and a separate setup per Public Edition tenant.

References