SAP has announced SAP Busi­ness Data Cloud, a new data solu­tion intend­ed to uni­fy all SAP and third-par­ty data through­out an orga­ni­za­tion while pro­vid­ing a trust­ed data foun­da­tion for busi­ness insights and arti­fi­cial-intel­li­gence applications. 

Cement­ing its new part­ner­ship with Data­bricks, a San Fran­cis­co-based mak­er of data ana­lyt­ics and data man­age­ment soft­ware, SAP’s lat­est soft­ware-as-a-ser­vice (SaaS) solu­tion marks the evo­lu­tion of the company’s data, plan­ning, and ana­lyt­ics suite — and sig­nif­i­cant­ly enhances the agen­tic capa­bil­i­ties of Joule, its gen­er­a­tive-AI copilot. 

By native­ly embed­ding Data­bricks’ tech­nol­o­gy for data engi­neer­ing, machine learn­ing, and AI work­loads in an SAP cloud solu­tion, SAP Busi­ness Data Cloud promis­es to rede­fine enter­prise data man­age­ment while empow­er­ing AI-pow­ered appli­ca­tions like Joule with busi­ness process knowl­edge and access to high-qual­i­ty data.

Bring­ing togeth­er SAP Data­s­phere, SAP Ana­lyt­ics Cloud, and SAP Busi­ness Ware­house in a uni­fied expe­ri­ence, the solu­tion — to be avail­able on cloud ser­vices from Ama­zon, Microsoft, and Google — is designed to cre­ate a com­mon seman­ti­cal data lay­er that har­mo­nizes data from mis­sion-crit­i­cal appli­ca­tions while break­ing down busi­ness silos. It will do so with both pack­aged data prod­ucts derived from SAP solu­tions and ​“insight appli­ca­tions” that lever­age that data, as well as AI mod­els con­nect­ed to real-time data sources, to deliv­er advanced ana­lyt­ics and plan­ning across mul­ti­ple lines of business. 

The announce­ment, made at SAP’s Busi­ness Unleashed event, was accom­pa­nied by the launch of ready-to-use Joule agents across finance, ser­vice, and sales func­tions, and by a pre­view of cus­tom agent builder capa­bil­i­ties for Joule stu­dio in SAP Build that will make it eas­i­er for users to build cus­tom AI agents.

Real­iz­ing the Val­ue of SAP Busi­ness AI

“Today, enter­pris­es spend up to 50% of their total IT bud­get on data and ana­lyt­ics,” said SAP CEO Chris­t­ian Klein dur­ing the event. ​“Why? Because com­pa­nies face large data silos between SAP and non-SAP data, unstruc­tured and struc­tured data, with entire data-sci­en­tist depart­ments focus­ing on try­ing to bring dif­fer­ent data sources together.” 

But with­out build­ing a con­tin­u­ous, har­mo­nized data lay­er for the com­pa­ny, these efforts often fail. ​“In the age of AI, more than ever, hav­ing one com­mon seman­ti­cal data lay­er for your busi­ness data is key,” Klein added. ​“Only when you can bring togeth­er your SAP and non-SAP data, your struc­tured and unstruc­tured data, can you total­ly under­stand your busi­ness holis­ti­cal­ly, as well as the exter­nal trends impact­ing it. And only then can you have a 100% reli­able busi­ness data for AI, because large lan­guage mod­els don’t have access rights to the company’s most sen­si­tive busi­ness, nor can they ful­ly under­stand the con­text or qual­i­ty of finan­cial, con­sumer, sup­pli­er, or employ­ee data.” 

To this point, ​“our cus­tomers are telling us that they’re strug­gling to imple­ment and real­ize the val­ue of AI in their orga­ni­za­tions,” Muham­mad Alam, Head of Prod­uct Engi­neer­ing and Mem­ber of the Exec­u­tive Board of SAP SE, explained dur­ing a press brief­ing held before SAP Data Unleashed.

“It’s hard to get reli­able, high-qual­i­ty datasets across the enter­prise to pow­er this AI; many have done hun­dreds of proof-of-con­cepts but have not been able to get them to pro­duc­tion effec­tive­ly,” he added. The issue isn’t only adop­tion: ensur­ing the reli­a­bil­i­ty of answers and rec­om­men­da­tions pro­vid­ed by AI has been anoth­er chal­lenge, Alam said. 

The end-to-end busi­ness process­es encom­passed by SAP’s inte­grat­ed suite of solu­tions con­tain much of the mis­sion-crit­i­cal data that AI requires to pro­vide rel­e­vant, reli­able, and respon­si­ble out­put for end-users. ​“But unless this data is har­mo­nized across the busi­ness process­es, man­aged and gov­erned across your busi­ness, its val­ue mate­ri­al­ly decreas­es,” Alam added. 

To estab­lish the gen­er­a­tive-AI gov­er­nance users require, strength­en­ing their data posi­tion — ensur­ing data qual­i­ty, gov­er­nance, and seman­ti­cal con­text is har­mo­nized and pre­served as it moves out of source appli­ca­tions and into LLMs — is imperative. 

To that end, SAP Busi­ness Data Cloud sig­ni­fies SAP’s most siz­able invest­ment yet in the con­cept of a data prod­uct econ­o­my, estab­lish­ing seman­ti­cal­ly rich data prod­ucts across busi­ness process­es, such as finance, spend and sup­ply chain data in SAP S/4HANA and SAP Ari­ba or learn­ing and tal­ent data in SAP Suc­cess­Fac­tors. While main­tain­ing busi­ness con­text, SAP Busi­ness Data Cloud will allow orga­ni­za­tions to access and ana­lyze data from across source sys­tems with­out the added com­plex­i­ties of extrac­tion and data processing. 

Said Klein: ​“SAP Busi­ness Data Cloud gives data-engi­neer­ing teams full con­trol and seam­less access to shared data by bring­ing togeth­er all your SAP and non-SAP data to cre­ate seman­ti­cal­ly aligned data prod­ucts, allow­ing your com­pa­ny to get out-of-the-box, reli­able, and deep­er ana­lyt­i­cal insights, and to unleash the full poten­tial of your AI.” 

SAP had pre­vi­ous­ly inte­grat­ed its solu­tions with Data­bricks’ Data Intel­li­gence Plat­form, but this new part­ner­ship goes fur­ther. Dis­cussing the ​“one-of-a-kind” alliance between SAP and Data­bricks, bring­ing togeth­er the data with­in SAP appli­ca­tions with Data­bricks’ data plat­form exper­tise, Alam said the com­pa­nies will con­tin­ue to co-devel­op capa­bil­i­ties to help cus­tomers unlock the pow­er of their data in the age of AI. ​“With SAP and Data­bricks, you get the world’s most impor­tant dataset with the world’s lead­ing data-plat­form capa­bil­i­ties,” he said.

Estab­lish­ing A Uni­fied Data Fabric

Last year, dur­ing its Busi­ness Unleashed event, SAP extend­ed the capa­bil­i­ties of SAP Data­s­phere and SAP Ana­lyt­ics Cloud, enhanc­ing two of its major data ana­lyt­ics solu­tions with gen­er­a­tive AI, data gov­er­nance, and knowl­edge graph­ing capa­bil­i­ties. By adding new data mod­el­ing capa­bil­i­ties to SAP Data­s­phere and vec­tor capa­bil­i­ties to SAP HANA Cloud, SAP aimed to improve its data ana­lyt­ics solu­tions’ inter­ac­tions with large lan­guage mod­els (LLMs), sup­port­ing gen­er­a­tive-AI out­puts with busi­ness con­text and inhibit­ing AI-induced data hallucinations.

As an evo­lu­tion of SAP Data­s­phere, SAP Busi­ness Data Cloud builds upon its con­cept of a uni­fied busi­ness data fab­ric. While still con­nect­ing to var­i­ous SAP and non-SAP data sources and cre­at­ing pipelines between them to enhance infor­ma­tion flow, the new solu­tion will incor­po­rate SAP-man­aged data prod­ucts and be more close­ly inte­grat­ed with plan­ning solu­tions like SAP Ana­lyt­ics Cloud.

Through the Knowl­edge Graph data mod­el­ing tech­nol­o­gy in SAP Data­s­phere, SAP sim­i­lar­ly made it pos­si­ble to ask open-end­ed ques­tions of solu­tions like SAP Ana­lyt­ics Cloud, allow­ing for extend­ed plan­ning and analy­sis across var­i­ous datasets and fur­ther facil­i­tat­ing the cre­ation of a seman­ti­cal­ly enriched data lay­er. With SAP Busi­ness Data Cloud serv­ing as the evo­lu­tion of SAP Data­s­phere, SAP moves clos­er to estab­lish­ing a uni­fied data fab­ric for cus­tomers while link­ing enter­prise-wide data man­age­ment to AI inno­va­tion, accord­ing to Alam.

That con­nec­tion between SAP Data­s­phere and the busi­ness-AI side of SAP’s tech­nol­o­gy suite is par­tic­u­lar­ly crit­i­cal because the Knowl­edge Graph devel­oped by SAP will serve as a seman­tic bridge between Joule agents and SAP Busi­ness Data Cloud and pro­vide busi­ness con­text and a seman­ti­cal under­stand­ing of the rela­tion­ships between data sets, mak­ing it eas­i­er for its agents to iden­ti­fy pat­terns, derive insights, and rea­son through tasks across applications. 

“With SAP Busi­ness Data Cloud, Joule will have access to more diverse and rich data sets to sur­face deep­er insights, solve more com­plex busi­ness prob­lems, and make smarter rec­om­men­da­tions,” Klein said dur­ing the SAP Busi­ness Unleashed announce­ment. He high­light­ed Joule’s abil­i­ty to enrich cus­tomers’ pay­ment his­to­ries with third-par­ty cred­it rat­ings, enabling it to make more intel­li­gent pay­ment-term recommendations. 

SAP Busi­ness Data Cloud Equips AI Agents With Sin­gle Data Layer

At the event, SAP addi­tion­al­ly show­cased ready-to-use Joule agents built for SAP finance, ser­vice, and sales appli­ca­tions, which can speed up time-con­sum­ing process­es such as claims man­age­ment and cus­tomer service. 

In the first quar­ter of 2025, SAP will make avail­able a cash col­lec­tion Joule agent that ana­lyzes dis­putes and works across finance, cus­tomer ser­vice, and oper­a­tions to ver­i­fy infor­ma­tion and rec­om­mend res­o­lu­tions. Oth­er Joule agents announced include a Q&A agent for sales and ser­vice that can mon­i­tor oppor­tu­ni­ties and cus­tomer cas­es, pre­dict­ing like­ly ques­tions and sur­fac­ing rel­e­vant answers; a knowl­edge cre­ation agent that will auto­mat­i­cal­ly iden­ti­fy nov­el case res­o­lu­tions and cre­ate arti­cles detail­ing them to help scale exper­tise across orga­ni­za­tions; and a case clas­si­fi­ca­tion agent that eval­u­ates case con­text, assess­ing which team a case should be assigned to before rout­ing it their way. 

This library of Joule agents will expand to encom­pass human resources, sup­ply chain, spend man­age­ment, and finance lat­er in the year. ​“We are infus­ing Joule with agents for every core busi­ness func­tion,” Klein explained. ​“These Joule agents can take the insights from SAP Busi­ness Data Cloud and put them into action for you, our cus­tomers. In short, we are mak­ing Joule the super-orches­tra­tor of tomorrow.”

Col­lab­o­ra­tion between these agents and oth­ers will make Joule more effec­tive at solv­ing prob­lems across cross-func­tion­al process­es. ​“It’s not impor­tant to have bil­lions of AI agents,” said Philipp Herzig, Chief AI Offi­cer & Chief Tech­nol­o­gy Offi­cer and Mem­ber of the Extend­ed Board of SAP SE. ​“It’s about hav­ing the right ones with the right skills, ground­ed in the right data, with the right guid­ance through SAP’s end-to-end busi­ness process­es, so they can work togeth­er seam­less­ly to break down tra­di­tion­al busi­ness silos.”

The com­pa­ny pre­viewed new AI agent builder capa­bil­i­ties, to be made avail­able at a future date, that will allow cus­tomers to extend exist­ing Joule agents or build and deploy their own. This agent builder for Joule stu­dio in SAP Build, a step for­ward for SAP’s efforts to instill a cit­i­zen-devel­op­er men­tal­i­ty with­in cus­tomers’ orga­ni­za­tions, will work by guid­ing users through a no-code work­flow that grounds these cus­tom AI agents in the cor­rect busi­ness process­es and data while allow­ing users to tai­lor them to the spe­cif­ic prob­lems they need to solve. 

“This is the only agent builder that native­ly under­stands your busi­ness process­es, deep aware­ness through the appli­ca­tions and the process­es through SAP Sig­navio, and has out-of-the-box access to data — through SAP Busi­ness Data Cloud — that’s gov­erned and high-qual­i­ty,” said Alam. ​“All of this, again, is enhanced and enriched by SAP Knowl­edge Graph, that seman­ti­cal­ly under­stands the rela­tion­ship across these data sets; and the agent builder works not just with SAP appli­ca­tions but allows you to con­nect to non-SAP applications.”

For more information:

• SAP and Data­bricks Open a Bold New Era of Data and AI
• Expe­ri­ence SAP Busi­ness Data Cloud with the guid­ed prod­uct tour
• Reg­is­ter for the upcom­ing webi­nar: ​“30-Minute Primer on SAP Busi­ness Data Cloud”
• Learn more about SAP Busi­ness Data Cloud
• Attend one of the upcom­ing SAP Busi­ness Unleashed Inno­va­tion Days