SAP, the ERP software giant, launches enterprise AI assistant Joule.

German corporate giant SAP announced today the launch of a new AI assistant called "Joule" for enterprise customers, hoping to "drive human and business outcomes," said Julia White, SAP's Chief Marketing and Solutions Officer and Executive Director, during a live press conference.

Joule will be integrated into SAP's extensive suite of cloud enterprise solutions, allowing customers to access it anytime within SAP applications, similar to Microsoft's new Windows Copilot sidebar available in the Windows 11 operating system. Like Windows Copilot, Joule will also provide support across computing platforms (desktop and mobile devices).

This new assistant relies on a combination of underlying technologies from multiple vendors to achieve its interactive capabilities.

Bharat Sandhu, Senior Vice President of SAP AI and Application Development Platform, stated in a statement sent to VentureBeat by a spokesperson, "Our approach is to leverage the best and latest technologies and incorporate them into our SAP applications to support our customers' most critical business processes. Through Joule, we will combine third-party LLMs (including IBM) from trusted partners and enhance them with real-time customer data. Joule will select the best LLM based on specific scenarios."

The new era of business intelligence

Joule's capabilities range from answering questions in multiple languages to providing solution recommendations based on SAP's various services and third-party data sources.

This makes the AI assistant highly valuable in scenarios such as helping manufacturers identify sales issues and offering feasible solutions related to the supply chain.

The assistant is designed to integrate with various SAP applications, covering industries such as finance, customer experience, and procurement.

In addition, Joule is capable of maintaining contextual awareness. When presented with a question or issue, it not only seeks answers but also delves into relevant data from various SAP applications and even third-party sources to provide actionable solutions in the real world.

Of course, with over 25,000 customers already using SAP's previous AI capabilities, the company is well aware of the demand for trustworthy, secure, confidential, and compliant AI.

During the Joule press conference, SAP's spokesperson mentioned that the company has built an "AI foundation" that essentially leverages trusted data for Joule and other SAP AI products, serving as a filtering layer to analyze prompts from each individual interacting with the AI assistant and ensuring that Joule does not provide harmful, biased, gender-discriminatory, or inappropriate responses.

Phased rollout and multi-pronged AI approach

Joule will initially be launched in SAP SuccessFactors and SAP Start, and eventually expanded to other SAP cloud solutions, including SAP S/4HANA Cloud.

This news comes after SAP's series of AI partnerships with tech giants such as Microsoft, Google Cloud, and IBM.

Earlier this summer, SAP announced direct investments in three AI foundational model startups: Cohere, Anthropic, and Aleph Alpha, with undisclosed investment amounts.

However, just yesterday, Amazon announced a $4 billion investment in Anthropic, acquiring a significant stake in the highly anticipated San Francisco AI startup, overshadowing SAP and Google's previous investments and redirecting loyalty to the e-commerce and cloud service giant.

With SAP's support, Sapphire Ventures also plans to provide funding support for AI-focused startups, demonstrating their commitment to building a robust enterprise AI ecosystem.