German IT company SAP at its annual SAP Sapphire conference in Orlando on Tuesday unveiled innovations and partnerships with global companies like Perplexity that put the power of Business Artificial Intelligence (AI) in a user’s hands. It said that AI Innovations aim to boost business productivity by up to 30 per cent.
From a virtually omnipresent Joule assistant – SAP’s natural language generative AI co-pilot designed to enhance user interaction with SAP business systems – to an expanded network of Joule Agents that work across systems and lines of business, it announced various products.
SAP combines the suite of business applications with uniquely rich data and the latest AI innovations to create a flywheel of customer value, said its CEO Christian Klein. “With the expansion of Joule, our partnerships with leading AI pioneers, and advancements in SAP Business Data Cloud, we are delivering on the promise of Business AI as we drive digital transformations that help customers thrive in an increasingly unpredictable world.”
“Imagine you are reading the latest news online about tariffs and you want to understand what does this means for my business in a specific country. Joule will be able to think through your question. Find your business data, the specific country understands that data, correlates it with the external information on tariffs to give you the answer you need,” he said.
Collaboration with Perplexity
SAP announced a collaboration with Perplexity, an AI-powered answer engine company, to enhance Joule’s ability to draw on structured and unstructured data to solve complex business problems. Powered by Perplexity and the SAP Knowledge Graph, Joule now instantly answers questions with structured, visual answers — such as charts and graphs — grounded in real-time business data within SAP workflows. For example, a user could ask the tool how recent external events might impact their business and get a forecast based on both current events and the company’s own business data, he said.
Aravind Srinivas, Cofounder, CEO, Perplexity, talking on what customers can expect from the partnership, said that the company’s shared customers can expect better decision making from more intelligently connected data. SAP has a lot of structured data that customers rely on for trillions of dollars worth of decision making and Perplexity is a leader in making sense and a lot of unstructured data.
“I think what enterprise software companies and knowledge workers all know is you have to be able to trust an answer. People who are at work need answers, they need them fast and most importantly, they need to be able to trust them. And so, they need to be able to double check what they want. “Our joint customers what they should expect is making better decisions and in all aspects of their work. That’s what we hope to achieve together,” he said.
SAP also unveiled an expanded library of Joule Agents that reimagine business processes and workflows from the ground up. Fueled by real-time business data and orchestrated by Joule, these AI agents work across systems and lines of business to anticipate, adapt and act autonomously so organisations can stay agile in a rapidly changing world.
The IT giant also said that it is partnering with Palantir, the US-based software platforms for big data analytics, to facilitate joint customers’ cloud migration journey and modernisation programmes. Seamless connectivity between Palantir and SAP Business Data Cloud will enable customers to build a harmonised data foundation across their enterprise landscape. Together the companies will responsibly deliver essential outcomes and support customers, including the US government, to quickly adapt to changes and disruptions, the company said.
(This writer is in Orlando at SAP’s invitation)
Published on May 20, 2025