SAP unveils major AI innovations at TechEd 2026 with enhanced Joule agents and enterprise governance

SAP TechEd 2026 Introduces Enhanced Joule Work with Open Protocols

SAP kicked off its 30th TechEd conference in Berlin with a comprehensive set of SAP AI innovations designed to transform how enterprises deploy and govern AI agents1

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. The centerpiece announcement focuses on Joule Work, which now supports open protocols including Agent2Agent (A2A) and Model Context Protocol (MCP) to enable AI agents to handle complex business processes more effectively3

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. According to SAP CTO Philipp Herzig, the company is "moving from AI learning your business to running it," with Joule Work serving as a unified experience across the entire SAP landscape and beyond3

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Agentic Thinking and Multi-Step Workflow Orchestration

The enhanced Joule platform introduces new agentic thinking capabilities that plan and orchestrate the steps assistants and AI agents need to reliably complete complex, multistep business workflows across SAP landscapes1

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. SAP Business AI Platform now gives organizations a single environment to build, contextualize, and govern AI across SAP and third-party systems, with Joule Studio offering both no-code and pro-code tools for building agents from more than 70 AI models4

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. Ted Way, vice president and chief product officer of SAP business AI product engineering, emphasized that "open protocols need governed doors," explaining that while SAP wants customers' own agents to collaborate with its business agents, this requires a controlled entry point where organizations can enforce and oversee activity2

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SAP Knowledge Graph Expands with Multi-Source Data Integration

New capabilities in SAP Knowledge Graph will incorporate data from additional SAP and non-SAP sources unique to each customer, allowing users to query and explore their customized data in natural language and receive accurate answers grounded in their own information1

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. The SAP Business Data Cloud Ontology Manager provides an AI-native authoring experience for building ontologies across SAP and third-party data, helping AI understand how data from different teams, systems, and applications relate to one another so agents can more accurately reason and make decisions across the autonomous enterprise3

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Centralized AI Governance Through SAP Enterprise AI Gateway

Addressing critical barriers to scaling enterprise AI, SAP introduced the SAP Enterprise AI Gateway solution to extend governance to AI interactions1

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. This centralized approach manages AI traffic across the enterprise, consolidating authentication, policy enforcement, routing, monitoring, usage tracking, and auditing3

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. Advancements in interoperability allow third-party agents to securely invoke Joule Agents through a governed agent gateway, with enforced access control enabling agents from different providers to collaborate across business workflows without sacrificing governance or control1

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. A new AI Governance Assistant helps customers meet compliance requirements for the EU AI Act, keeping AI systems classified, compliant, and operating within defined organizational guardrails3

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Tabular AI Models and Workflow Integration

SAP announced its latest tabular AI model, SAP-RPT-2.0, which expands beyond classification and regression to support anomaly and outlier detection, providing AI-driven enhancements through embeddings2

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. "Not every enterprise problem is a language problem," Way explained, noting that much business data is stored in tables2

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. A new SAP-RPT-TS model helps customers predict values across time-indexed metrics for forecasting. The platform now allows agents to trigger n8n workflows, a node-based workflow automation platform that uses deterministic automation suitable for highly regulated or sensitive work requiring exact sequences2

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. This combination of flexible, natural-language agentic triggers with prescribed workflows ensures compliance-sensitive procedures follow exact steps while maintaining AI flexibility.

Bosch Tests Joule Work with 110,000 SAP Employees

Joule Work has been extensively tested with all 110,000 employees at SAP and more than 150 customers who joined the Early Adopter Care program, including Bosch1

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. Robert Miller, Executive Vice President Applications at Bosch Digital, said the consumer appliances firm joined the program for early learning access and to influence solution development, with teams currently testing Joule Work, Joule Studio 2.0, and using the first assistants and agents in Billing and HR1

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. Joule Studio will run a time-bound promotion for select customers, where deploying and running custom agents on the SAP-managed Joule Studio runtime will remain free through December 20263

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. SAP emphasized that customers' data remains their data, with SAP not sharing customer data with anyone to train or improve large language models3

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