SAP used its TechEd conference in Berlin on October 27, 2026 to expand Joule Work, its AI experience for getting work done across SAP systems, and Joule Studio, the tool companies use to build their own AI agents on top of SAP data. The announcement frames the news as an expansion of SAP's portfolio for developers.
The short version: SAP wants Joule Work to be the place where an employee types what they need and agents carry out the steps across SAP and non-SAP systems. The new pieces are about connecting outside agents, controlling what agents can do, and making it cheaper to try building one.
What Joule Work is
In an October 8 post, SAP said Joule Work would roll out to all SAP customers later that month. SAP says it answers questions in natural language using a company's own SAP data and runs agent-driven workflows. SAP's CTO Philipp Herzig put it this way in the TechEd release: "Joule Work is where you put your intent and get work done, in one experience across the entire SAP landscape and beyond."
Ready-made agents come from the SAP Autonomous Suite, which SAP calls a library of Joule Agents across every business function. Custom agents are built in Joule Studio and deployed into Joule Work.
What SAP announced at TechEd
Agents that plan multistep work. SAP says new "agentic thinking" capabilities plan and orchestrate the steps that assistants and agents need to complete complex, multistep business workflows across SAP systems.
Outside agents can call Joule Agents. New Joule Work capabilities use open agent protocols, including Agent2Agent (A2A) and Model Context Protocol (MCP). Third-party agents can invoke Joule Agents through what SAP calls a governed agent gateway, with access controls enforced. SAP says this enforced access control lets agents from different providers collaborate across business workflows without sacrificing governance or control.
Richer company data. SAP Knowledge Graph will pull in data from more SAP and non-SAP sources, and users can query it in natural language.
One gateway for AI traffic. A new SAP Enterprise AI Gateway is meant to give IT one place to manage authentication, policy, routing, monitoring, usage tracking and auditing for AI interactions across the company.
Governance tools. SAP announced a new Joule Assistant and expanded SAP AI Agent Hub, plus an AI Governance Assistant that SAP says helps customers meet EU AI Act compliance requirements. The October 8 post said AI Agent Hub is generally available and governs agents, LLMs and MCP servers across SAP and non-SAP environments.
Joule Studio gets admin controls and n8n. Joule Studio now has observability and admin controls that show agent behavior, model usage and spend. Builders can choose from more than 70 AI models, with no-code and pro-code tools. Customers in the Joule Studio early adopter program can design and run n8n workflows inside Joule Studio, with broader availability to follow.
New models for spreadsheet-style data. SAP announced SAP-RPT-2.0, its tabular AI model for structured business data. SAP says it will add anomaly and outlier detection and embeddings on top of classification and regression. A separate SAP-RPT-TS model forecasts time-based business metrics inside SAP Integrated Business Planning without custom machine learning.
What it costs to try
SAP is running a time-limited promotion for select customers: deploying and running custom agents on the SAP-managed Joule Studio runtime stays free through December 2026. The design-time tools for building and testing agents and n8n workflows stay free under fair-use limits. SAP did not publish general pricing in the release, so check with your SAP account team before planning around it.
Customer results SAP cites
SAP's October 8 post includes two customer examples. Warehouse automation company KNAPP built an assistant in Joule Studio that helps workers solve problems without waiting for an expert; SAP says issue resolution times dropped by about 90% and documentation and training times fell by about 80%. Reinhausen joined SAP's early adopter program for Joule Work, and a Reinhausen director said the company sees potential in making its SAP S/4HANA data easier and faster to reach through natural language. These are vendor-reported figures, not independent measurements.
Why it matters for business teams
SAP's bet, as its release describes it, is that agents from different providers will work together through open protocols like A2A and MCP, both now hosted by the Agentic AI Foundation, while SAP's agent gateway enforces access control.
For a finance or operations team, the practical change is the gateway and the governance layer. If outside agents can trigger SAP actions, the questions become which agents are allowed, what data they can touch, and who reviews what they did. SAP is pitching AI Agent Hub, the AI Gateway and the new Joule Studio dashboards as the answer, with spend visibility built in.
IBM announced an AI Gateway for watsonx Orchestrate the same day, which it says discovers and governs agents built on platforms such as Amazon Bedrock, Microsoft and Google. See our IBM watsonx Orchestrate AI Gateway explainer.
SAP also says customers' data remains their data and that it does not share customer data with anyone to train or improve large language models.
What to check first
- Is Joule Work live in your tenant? SAP said it would roll out to all customers in October 2026. Ask your SAP admin whether it is enabled.
- Are you eligible for the free runtime? The free-through-December offer is for "select customers," so confirm before building.
- Which agents get gateway access? Decide which third-party agents may call Joule Agents before you connect any.
- Who watches spend? Use the new Joule Studio usage and spend views, and set an owner.
- n8n is early. n8n workflows in Joule Studio are only in the early adopter program for now.
