The News: Joule, SAP’s generative AI copilot personal assistant, will be embedded into a wide range of SAP business applications starting later in 2023. The enterprise applications software maker will bring new capabilities to help businesses get their work done more efficiently. Joule will be integrated into SAP applications from human resources (HR) to finance, supply chain, procurement, CX, the SAP Business Technology Platform, and other SAP products over time. Read the full press release on the SAP News Center website.

SAP’s Generative AI Copilot, Joule, Coming to SAP Applications

Analyst Take: SAP’s generative AI copilot, Joule, is a great new feature for enterprise customers of SAP’s rich portfolio of business applications because it is built to use the power of AI to help users find information and solve their work challenges with efficiency and speed.

Like other technology vendors that are making similar copilot AI assistant moves, SAP hopes that this innovation will make its products more intuitive and useful for business workers who are faced with a wide range of tasks in their workplaces. I think this innovation is great to help workers do their jobs by presenting them with more information and giving them more resources from which to gather answers to their everyday work questions.

And that is what SAP hopes workers will use Joule for – SAP is even calling it a tool that can be used “like tapping your smartest colleague on the shoulder” to gain useful insights and information within the workplace to move important tasks from the to-do list to the finished tasks list.

What Is SAP Joule?

Joule is a natural language, generative AI copilot that builds on and enhances existing SAP business AI offerings. Joule is designed to be built into more and more SAP applications in the company’s cloud enterprise product portfolio over time to provide users with proactive and contextualized insights gathered across SAP products. Joule is designed to help users quickly sort through and contextualize data from multiple systems to provide deep and useful insights that can help them accomplish their work tasks more quickly and improve business outcomes securely.

The beauty of tools such as Joule, I believe, is that workers can ask it a question or describe a problem using plain language and Joule will generate intelligent answers pulled in from across the business data used by an enterprise’s SAP applications and infrastructure and from third-party sources. The searches will retain the context of the inquiries and will provide information that can help users complete their needed tasks. I believe this useful tool will be valuable to many workers who want to get useful information quickly to resolve work task inquiries.

For instance, according to SAP, a retailer or product maker can use Joule to better understand sales performance by identifying underperforming regions, linking to data sets that reveal supply chain issues, and automatically generating potential fixes within the supply chain system. Using Joule, enterprises will be able to continuously receive such scenarios for all SAP applications, helping them to stay abreast of their minute-by-minute operations. I think Joule could be a difference-maker for many enterprises by helping them better evaluate bottlenecks while graphically seeing the status of their overall operations across their facilities.

Joule Starts Arriving in Late 2023

Joule will first be integrated into SAP SuccessFactors products and the SAP Start site by the end of 2023, followed by integration early in 2024 into SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition. Other SAP applications will follow, including SAP Customer Experience, SAP Ariba, and the SAP Business Technology Platform. SAP said it will announce even more coming SAP application updates at its SuccessConnect event from October 2-4 in Las Vegas, at its SAP Spend Connect Live event on October 9-11, at its virtual SAP Customer Experience LIVE event on October 25, and at the SAP TechEd conference from November 2-3.

Overview: SAP’s Generative AI Assistant

I believe that Joule will be a big help for enterprises, especially because it will help understaffed companies quickly increase and disseminate the useful institutional knowledge that is stored in hard-to-find places within stored business data. This assistant can be a dramatic boost for work teams across a business as they are given new tools that can help them solve simple tasks and inquiries so that they can get to the more important tasks before them.

Using generative AI tools such as Joule will, I believe, be one of the most direct and valuable ways to implement early generative AI features while boosting productivity and employee satisfaction across enterprises. Getting rid of mundane tasks lets workers know their time is valuable and they can use that saved time to make a difference where they will feel more valued and rewarded.

It will be interesting to watch as SAP continues to develop Joule and other assistive generative AI tools within its product lines. Making sure that these tools bring further employee gains, deep data security and compliance features, and even more capabilities is exactly what I expect from a strong software innovator like SAP. I will watch with excitement as SAP continues these developments into 2024.

Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.

Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.