SAP's AI strategy: Come for the openness, stay because you have to

SaaS

Joule Studio 2.0 waves the flag of interoperability, API policy tells enterprises who's really in charge

Like many enterprise software vendors, SAP's share price plunged during the "SaaSpocalypse" – the belief that GenAI and vibe-coding could disrupt traditional enterprise app vendors. At its annual conference in Orlando last week, the ERP giant pushed back with a new vision for how GenAI will work across its enterprise apps and analytics portfolio.On the one hand, it is helping users build agents based on data from outside the SAP ecosystem. On the other, it is arguably creating friction for those wanting to build agents on third-party platforms and use data from SAP systems to power them.

At its Sapphire conference, SAP announced Joule Studio 2.0, with new features allowing developers to create and manage AI agents. Agents created in Joule Studio will natively support Model Context Protocol and A2A protocols – two standards designed to help GenAI integration between data sources – crucially allowing the SAP tool to connect and collaborate with third-party tools and agents.

Other features, such as the agentic orchestration, are also designed to run across hybrid landscapes, while real-time data ingestion promises to support "context-aware processes" across SAP and third-party systems.