SAP begins rolling out Joule Work to customers and debuts SAP Pay – Unite.AI

SAP SE showcased the Autonomous Enterprise in action at SAP Connect in Las Vegas on October 6, 2026, announcing the start of the rollout of Joule Work to customers, its entry into the payments market with SAP Pay, new Joule Assistants and partnerships across core business functions.

“This is a transformative moment for enterprise AI,” said Christian Klein, CEO of SAP SE, in the company announcement. “The autonomous enterprise has arrived.” Klein said that with Joule and SAP Autonomous Suite, powered by SAP Business AI Platform, customers including Novartis, Morgan Foods, Nestlé and PwC are already connecting intelligence into every function.

SAP first introduced Autonomous Enterprise in its SAP Sapphire announcement in Orlando on May 12, 2026, unifying SAP Business Technology Platform, SAP Business Data Cloud and SAP Business AI into a single SAP Business AI platform. There, SAP said SAP Autonomous Suite will deploy more than 50 domain-specific Joule Assistants by orchestrating a subset of more than 200 specialized agents, and the company launched a €100 million fund for partners to help customers deploy SAP-built AI assistants and agents or build new ones on the platform.

Joule Work reaches its first customers

Joule Work is starting to roll out to customers as a new AI user interface that allows employees to work in their own language and complete tasks on SAP and third-party data. SAP said Joule draws its business context from the SAP Knowledge Graph, which maps more than 7 million data fields. Joule Work is already operating internally with 110,000 SAP employees, and the company said it is seeing productivity gains of 20% in finance, human resources and procurement. A select group of customers also use Joule Work in their corporate environments.

Maschinenfabrik Reinhausen, an SAP customer for 28 years, has joined the Joule Work desktop early adoption program. “What once took up to an hour of manual work in our SAP S/4HANA environment is now accessible in seconds through natural language,” said Peter Wied, the manufacturer’s director of complexity management. Keith Smith, SAP platform architect at CONA Services, said SAP adoption support helped his company prepare for Joule sooner than it could have done on its own.

Joule assistants in all company functions

In addition to answering questions, Joule Assistants carry out operational work within company workflows, drawing on consolidated data, authorizations and audit trails, while customers control the level of autonomy. SAP’s approach is also open: through the Agent2Agent protocol, Joule can connect with AI and third-party agents.

SAP said early implementations of its International Trade Assistant have reduced trade classification efforts by up to 50%. Through SAP Autonomous Suite, the company said controllers can automate revenue recognition, reporting and trade compliance; supply chain planners can resolve planning, production and logistics disruptions in a single step rather than in a few hours; HR leaders can identify the best way to fill workforce gaps while employees receive guidance on benefits that are right for their needs; procurement teams can identify savings opportunities measured against peer benchmarks and manage the entire lifecycle of the contingent workforce; Additionally, customer experience teams can use AI-powered campaigns, quotes and customer workflows to convert engagement into sales opportunities.

Novartis, Morgan Foods, Nestlé and PwC described initial work with assistants at the event. Novartis co-developed and recently launched a pilot of SAP’s Joule Sourcing Assistant, said Christoph Buerki, the company’s head of procurement. Morgan Foods, which has about 1,000 employees, is laying the technical groundwork for adopting agents, Chief Financial Officer Steve Hankins said. Nestlé is carrying out an SAP S/4HANA transformation in 140 countries, and Luca Dell’Orletta, global head of IT innovation and business architecture, said Joule and the accounts receivable assistant can sort collection activities based on risk and business context and recommend subsequent actions. Jill Notz, PwC’s chief accounting officer, said SAP’s Billing Assistant helps identify potential billing issues earlier in professional services work, and that PwC and SAP are extending their collaboration into new areas of joint AI innovation.

Platform, governance and availability

SAP Business AI Platform serves as a single environment to create, contextualize and govern artificial intelligence in both SAP and third-party systems. The Joule Studio environment supports no-code development through pro-code to create and extend skills and agents, with a choice of over 70 AI models, while SAP Business Data Cloud and SAP Knowledge Graph provide the underlying business data and context. SAP AI Agent Hub in SAP LeanIX offers organizations a central inventory of their business agents, and SAP said its governance architecture is independently ISO/IEC 42001 certified. The company’s Business Transformation Management portfolio – SAP Signavio, SAP LeanIX and SAP WalkMe – provides tools for process analysis, application and agent governance, and enterprise-wide adoption.

According to the SAP Connect 2026 Innovation News Guide, SAP Autonomous Suite, Joule Studio, and Joule Work assistants and agents are being delivered and activated as SAP-managed experiences through the SAP for Me portal, and general availability for these innovations begins in October 2026.

SAP Pay and new partnerships

SAP Pay, powered by Tereina, an SAP company, is integrated directly into SAP Cloud ERP, where it executes and reconciles a payment within the same workflow when an invoice is due. The innovation guide describes Tereina as a regulated payment services provider founded in April 2026 as a wholly owned subsidiary of SAP. The service supports EFT payments, including ACH, along with wire transfers and checks, and offers stablecoin-based settlement for cross-border transactions. SAP Pay is generally available now in the US and UK.

As part of a new partnership with Moody’s Corporation, Moody’s supplier risk monitoring data will be incorporated into SAP Ariba Supplier Lifecycle and Performance, feeding continuously updated data on supplier financial health, operational risk and regulatory status directly into the procurement workflow. SAP said the integration allows Joule agents to flag supplier risk signals and identify alternatives before disruption reaches the company, moving organizations from periodic risk reviews to continuous monitoring. General availability of these capabilities is expected in Q4 2026. An expanded partnership with ORO Labs adds SAP Ariba Procurement Orchestration from ORO Labs as an extension to the solution, giving business users a single layer of orchestration for hiring, actions and visibility across procurement workflows across heterogeneous business environments.

In addition to items already available, the Innovation Guide plans general availability of Governance Assistant, International Trade Assistant, and Contingent Workforce Assistant in Q4 2026, with Spend Analytics Assistant and new Customer Experience Assistants planned for Q1 2027.