SAP's AI strategy: Come for the openness, stay because you have to

Summary

SaaS SAP's AI strategy: Come for the openness, stay because you have to Joule Studio 2.0 waves the flag of interoperability, API policy tells enterprises who's really in charge Like many enterprise software vendors, SAP's share price plunged during the "SaaSpocalypse" – the belief that GenAI and vibe-coding could disrupt traditional enterprise app vendors. At its annual conference in Orlando last week, the ERP giant pushed back with a new vision for how GenAI will work across its enterprise apps and analytics portfolio.On the one hand, it is helping users build agents based on data from outside the SAP ecosystem. On the other, it is arguably creating friction for those wanting to build agents on third-party platforms and use data from SAP systems to power them. At its Sapphire conference, SAP announced Joule Studio 2.0, with new features allowing developers to create and manage AI agents. Agents created in Joule Studio will natively support Model Context Protocol and A2A protocols – two standards designed to help GenAI integration between data sources – crucially allowing the SAP tool to connect and collaborate with third-party tools and agents. Other features, such as the agentic orchestration, are also designed to run across hybrid landscapes, while real-time data ingestion promises to support "context-aware processes" across SAP and third-party systems. Speaking to the conference, Muhammad Alam, SAP executive board member for product and engineering, said: "Underpinning the autonomous suite are out-of-the-box agents, hundreds of agents cutting across all core business processes. These agents come together into what we call assistance, or Joule assistants."We've made extensibility a core design principle. You can extend any of these agents by adding tools, workflow steps, and even code through the same simple experience in Joule Studio. This allows you to connect them to your non-SAP applications, because we know you're going to have to do that."But this approach ...