SAP made bold promises about AI at Sapphire 2025: Knowledge Graph, Joule Studio, and AI Agent Hub would ship by the end of the year. Those tools are now technically available, but adoption has lagged, and SAP is already announcing version 2.0.
“Joule Studio adoption has been minimal compared to what we’d like,” said Manoj Swaminathan, SAP’s chief product officer for Business Suite, in a briefing ahead of this year’s Sapphire. The tool “was limited to content-based experiences,” he said. “Anytime more complex agents were involved, it had limited capabilities.”
The issue, according to SAP’s chief AI officer Jonathan von Rüden, was that SAP had favored ease of use over power in its original architecture. “People wanted to see more pro-code flexibility,” he said in an interview at Sapphire 2026. “We had gone with a low-code approach. You could give it extension points and tools, but you couldn’t touch the core of it. Now you can build a custom agent, connect it to your own GitHub.”
Customers also came with “big plans” but needed hard rules and approval gates that the original Joule Studio didn’t support natively. “What people want is agentic flows with clear gates and workflows and subagents,” von Rüden said. “Old Joule didn’t provide that. Now it’s all baked together.”
