German enterprise giant SAP has announced a new AI assistant called “Joule” for its enterprise customers. Joule will be integrated into SAP’s extensive cloud enterprise suite, allowing customers to access it across SAP apps and programs. Similar to Microsoft’s Windows Copilot, Jewel will be available across computing platforms on desktop and mobile. The assistant relies on a combination of underlying technology from multiple vendors, including IBM, and utilizes real-time customer data to provide the best-performing language learning models for specific scenarios. SAP has also constructed an “AI Foundation” to ensure the assistant delivers trustworthy and secure responses without any harmful or biased content.
Joule’s capabilities include answering questions in multiple languages and suggesting solutions based on data from SAP’s services and third-party sources. It can help manufacturers identify sales issues and offer actionable solutions tied to the supply chain. The assistant is designed to be integrated into various SAP applications across sectors like finance, customer experience, and procurement. Joule maintains context by diving deep into relevant data across various SAP applications and even third-party sources to deliver actionable solutions. SAP is focused on providing trustworthy, secure, private, and compliant AI, and its “AI Foundation” acts as a filtering layer to analyze and ensure appropriate responses.
Joule will have a staggered rollout starting with SAP SuccessFactors and SAP Start before extending to other SAP cloud solutions, including S/4HANA Cloud. This announcement follows SAP’s investments in AI foundation model startups Cohere, Anthropic, and Aleph Alpha. However, Amazon’s recent investment in Anthropic takes precedence over SAP and Google’s earlier investments, redirecting the startup’s focus towards the e-commerce and cloud services giant. SAP is committed to building an expansive enterprise AI ecosystem and intends to fund AI-focused startups with the support of Sapphire Ventures.
