SAP spent TechEd Berlin talking about agents that act on their own. We read the announcements, the roadmaps and the fine print, and sorted them into what you can use today, what arrives in 2027, and what you should do before the year ends.
Somewhere in your company, a buyer is copying a confirmed delivery date from a supplier's PDF into SAP. It takes two minutes. It happens dozens of times a day. Meanwhile, on 27 October in Berlin, SAP's CTO Philipp Herzig stood on stage and said of the company's AI platform: "This entire platform is now generally available with all its capabilities."
Both things are true at the same time, and that gap is what this article is about. TechEd 2026 was full of agents, gateways and models. Some of it is ready now, some of it is a 2027 promise, and some of it comes with a deadline most procurement teams have not noticed.
The short version
- Live now: Joule Work and Joule Studio (rolling out in phases), governed access for third-party agents through A2A and MCP, a forecasting model for SAP Integrated Business Planning, and the Joule agents already shipping in SAP Ariba.
- Coming in 2027: the Enterprise AI Gateway, the Ontology Manager (beta), SAP-RPT-2.0 and new Knowledge Graph capabilities, all planned for Q1 2027.
- Ending on 31 December 2026: free runtime for custom Joule Studio agents (select customers), free Joule Agent runtime for current Ariba and Fieldglass customers, and a free Joule Studio Developer certification.
What you can use today
Joule Work starts to plan, not just answer
Joule Work now gets what SAP calls agentic thinking: instead of answering one question at a time, it can plan and run a multistep workflow, and pull in data or services from outside SAP along the way. SAP says general availability is underway in phases, so what you see depends on your system and region.
Joule Studio: build your own agents, with 70+ models to choose from
Joule Studio is SAP's development environment for agents, with no-code and pro-code options and more than 70 AI models to choose from. Agents you build run on the Joule Studio runtime and appear in SAP AI Agent Hub, next to SAP's own. New admin controls show agent behaviour, model usage and spend. For teams in the early adopter programme, agents can also trigger n8n workflows: fixed, rule-based steps for processes where the order matters. As SAP's Ted Way put it: "It needs to do these five steps in this order exactly like this every single time."
Third-party agents can call Joule, through a guarded door
Agents built outside SAP can now invoke Joule Agents using two open standards, Agent2Agent (A2A) and the Model Context Protocol (MCP), through a governed gateway. The reason is refreshingly honest. In Way's words, customers "do not run wall-to-wall SAP (as much as we would like them to), so agent interoperability is critical." His summary of the design: "Open protocols need governed doors."
Forecasting without a data science team
"Not every enterprise problem is a language problem," Way said, and much of what matters in procurement lives in tables. The new SAP-RPT-TS model forecasts time-based metrics, such as demand, inside SAP Integrated Business Planning without custom machine learning. It is generally available.
Governance for the EU AI Act
For European companies, a quieter announcement may matter most: an AI Governance Assistant to support EU AI Act compliance, alongside governance updates to SAP AI Agent Hub. Before agents touch purchase orders, someone has to answer who allowed them to.
Already in procurement: Joule agents in SAP Ariba
This did not start at TechEd. SAP planned a Joule agent for Ariba Intake Management, which takes requests by chat, e-mail or Microsoft Teams, checks policy and categorises spend before a buyer sees it, and AI-assisted contract drafting from natural-language prompts, for June 2026, as part of eleven Joule assistants: five in June, six in September. In Fieldglass, SAP reports that AI-assisted statement-of-work creation cuts manual creation time by 70%.
What waits for 2027
| Announcement | What it is | Planned |
|---|---|---|
| SAP Enterprise AI Gateway | One premium control point for authentication, policies, routing, monitoring and auditing of AI traffic | Q1 2027 |
| Business Data Cloud Ontology Manager | AI-assisted way to define how business facts relate, so agents reason across applications | Q1 2027 (beta) |
| SAP-RPT-2.0 | SAP's tabular model, extended to anomaly and outlier detection across several tables | Q1 2027 |
| SAP Knowledge Graph | New capabilities that include your own SAP and non-SAP data | Q1 2027 |
| Dremio lakehouse in BDC | Query data where it lives, without copying it (Apache Iceberg and Polaris) | Q1 2027 |
| SAP-RPT in orbit | With HPE, on the International Space Station, to predict failures and rebuild missing sensor data | 2027 |
The space project will not change your purchasing process, but it makes a point. As Herzig said: "The same trusted SAP-RPT model that powers global supply chains can also work in space."
Three offers that end on 31 December 2026
- Free Joule Studio runtime. In a time-bound promotion for select customers, deploying and running custom agents on the SAP-managed runtime is free through December 2026. Design-time tooling stays free under fair-use limits.
- Free Joule Agent runtime in Ariba and Fieldglass. SAP confirmed that current Ariba and Fieldglass customers pay no extra runtime charges until 31 December 2026.
- Free Joule Studio Developer certification. SAP is offering the certification at no charge until 31 December. For anyone building a career in SAP, this is the cheapest credential of the year.
What it means for procurement teams
1. Agents are only as good as your master data. SAP acquired Reltio this year to build a single "golden record" of customers, suppliers and products. SAP's Muhammad Alam explained why: "AI cannot reach its full potential when data is fragmented across business units, platforms and domains." If your supplier master has three versions of the same vendor, an agent will pick one of them, fast and confidently.
2. Governance is now a design decision. A2A, MCP and AI Agent Hub mean more agents will be able to act in your system, some of them not built by SAP. Decide now who may call what, with which limits, and how you will audit it. "Capability is becoming abundant; governance is the scarce advantage," as AI expert Johan Steyn told SAP News.
3. The manual edges are still manual. Intake, contracts and statements of work are getting agents. But many supplier order confirmations still arrive as e-mails and PDFs that someone types into SAP. That is the gap Vendor Date Hub closes: it reads the supplier's reply, compares it with the purchase order in S/4HANA and writes the confirmation back. Confirmations that match are accepted at once; the rest go to a person, who reviews them in seconds.
Your checklist for the next eight weeks
- Ask your SAP account team whether you are eligible for the free Joule Studio runtime, and what happens to your agents after 31 December.
- If you run Ariba or Fieldglass, check which Joule assistants are active in your tenant, and test one before the free runtime window closes.
- Pick one procurement process where your team still retypes data from e-mail or PDF. Measure it: how many documents per week, how many minutes each.
- Run a quick check of your supplier and material master data before any agent pilot: duplicates, missing fields, outdated contacts.
- Write down who in your company may approve an agent acting on purchase orders. If nobody knows, that is your first project.
Frequently asked questions
Is Joule Studio generally available?
SAP says yes, with a phased rollout, so availability can differ by customer and region. Check with your account team.
What are A2A and MCP?
Two open standards. MCP (Model Context Protocol) lets AI models use tools and data sources; A2A (Agent2Agent) lets agents from different vendors talk to each other. At TechEd, SAP opened Joule Agents to both, through a governed gateway.
Do I need S/4HANA Cloud to use these agents?
Joule Work and Joule Studio run on the SAP Business AI Platform and connect to SAP and non-SAP systems. What a given agent can do depends on the applications and data it is connected to.