On October 6, 2026, during its SAP Connect conference in Las Vegas, German software company SAP presented what it calls the “Autonomous Enterprise” in action. The company showed how its AI tools Joule Work and Joule Assistants are producing results for customers across sectors and announced several product updates and partnerships.
“This is a breakthrough moment for business AI,” said Christian Klein, CEO of SAP. “The Autonomous Enterprise has arrived.” Klein cited Novartis, Morgan Foods, Nestlé and PwC as organizations already connecting intelligence across their functions with Joule and SAP Autonomous Suite, built on the SAP Business AI Platform.
The centerpiece is Joule Work, which is beginning its customer rollout as a new AI interface that lets employees interact with SAP applications in their own language and complete work across SAP and third-party data. According to the company, its answers are grounded in the context of SAP Knowledge Graph, which maps more than seven million data fields.
SAP says Joule Work is already live internally with 110,000 employees and that the company is seeing 20% productivity gains in finance, human resources and procurement. A select group of customers is also using it in their environments. Peter Wied of Maschinenfabrik Reinhausen, an SAP customer for 28 years, said tasks that once took up to an hour of manual work are now handled in seconds through natural language.
When a query is not enough, Joule Assistants come into play, carrying out operational work directly within business workflows using existing data, authorizations and audit trails. SAP stresses that customers control the level of autonomy, and that through the Agent2Agent protocol Joule can connect with third-party AI agents.
Customer examples illustrate the approach. Christoph Buerki, head of procurement at Novartis, explained that the pharmaceutical company has co-developed and launched a pilot of the Joule Sourcing Assistant so agents can take over manual work while professionals focus on strategy and suppliers. Nestlé, in the middle of an SAP S/4HANA transformation across 140 countries, uses an accounts receivable assistant to prioritize collections by risk.
PwC highlighted the Billing Assistant, which helps spot billing issues earlier, and announced it will extend its collaboration with SAP into new areas. Morgan Foods, for its part, talked about moving from a reactive to a predictive model by connecting demand signals, inventory and supplier status. In finance, SAP says early deployments of its International Trade Assistant cut trade classification effort by up to 50%.
The foundation for all of this is the SAP Business AI Platform, which brings together in one place the building, contextualizing and governing of AI across SAP and third-party environments. With Joule Studio, business users and developers can create skills and agents, from no-code options to professional development, choosing from more than 70 AI models. SAP LeanIX provides a central inventory of enterprise agents through AI Agent Hub.
Governance is a key selling point. SAP notes that its AI governance architecture holds independent ISO/IEC 42001 certification, an international standard for artificial intelligence management systems, and that it supports regulatory requirements, established authorizations and auditable operations. For large regulated companies, that traceability matters as much as model capability.
One of the most notable announcements is SAP Pay, with which the company enters the payments market. Powered by Tereina, an SAP company, the service is embedded directly in SAP Cloud ERP to execute and reconcile payments within the same workflow when an invoice is due, reducing manual file handling and dependence on external processes.
SAP also announced partnerships to extend its reach. With Moody's, it will embed supplier risk monitoring data into SAP Ariba Supplier Lifecycle and Performance, so procurement teams can move from periodic reviews to continuous monitoring and Joule agents can flag risk signals and alternatives. With ORO Labs, it expands procurement orchestration through SAP Ariba Procurement Orchestration.
The figures should be read with caution: the productivity and effort-reduction numbers come from SAP itself and from selected customers, not from independent evaluations. Even so, the announcement confirms a clear trend in enterprise software: major vendors are no longer selling only conversational assistants, but agents that carry out real tasks with permissions and auditing.
In short, SAP Connect consolidates SAP's bet on turning AI into an everyday working layer inside its applications. Joule Work is reaching customers, assistants are taking over complete processes and SAP Pay extends that automation all the way to payment. The challenge in the coming months will be to prove those gains at scale and with controls that satisfy regulators and auditors.
