At SAP Join 2026, SAP CEO Christian Klein requested, “Why would anybody construct brokers stand alone on an LLM platform?” Basic-purpose fashions have no idea which provider will ship, which controls govern a cost, or how an organization handles an exception. “LLMs nonetheless do not know how your corporation runs,” he mentioned.
SAP offered an structure meant to shut that hole by Joule Work, AI assistants and brokers, SAP Enterprise Information Cloud, the SAP Data Graph, and SAP Signavio. They’re competing to turn out to be the layer that provides enterprise context, coordinates work and captures operational studying throughout functions. CIOs ought to consider that ambition by 4 choices.
Resolve Which Work Intelligence SAP Ought to Provide
Enterprise functions historically mixed screens, workflows, enterprise logic, and data. SAP’s structure distributes these capabilities. Joule Work turns into the engagement layer, assistants set up work by function, and brokers execute throughout finance, procurement, provide chain, HR, and buyer expertise. Functions proceed to report transactions and implement controls. If the structure works as meant, customers will full extra work with out opening them.
SAP is betting that executable course of information will stay scarce as interfaces and brokers turn out to be cheaper to create. Christian Klein mentioned the SAP Data Graph maps over 7 million fields, half one million tables, greater than 50,000 APIs, and roughly 400 information merchandise. These vendor-reported figures point out scope. They don’t show semantic accuracy inside a buyer setting or reveal enterprise worth. Their significance is that SAP is making an attempt to transform many years of utility construction into machine-readable enterprise context for brokers. This displays a broader shift through which course of intelligence may help floor and govern AI brokers, though our analysis finds a spot between vendor positioning and productized capabilities, accessible information, and significant buyer adoption.
Use SAP’s context the place its transactional, regulatory, or trade information is differentiated. Nevertheless, we suggest that tech leaders maintain company-specific definitions, insurance policies, and determination standards beneath enterprise management. Apply Forrester’s AEGIS framework to outline enterprise guardrails throughout governance, id, information, utility safety, menace operations, and Zero Belief earlier than brokers can execute enterprise transactions.
SAP says its gateway permits different AI experiences to name its brokers and Joule Work to invoke registered third-party brokers. That establishes connectivity as a acknowledged functionality, not portability. Connectivity lets prospects combine an agent into one other setting. Portability lets them substitute it with out shedding functionality, historical past, or management.
Resolve Which Context Debt Deserves Restore
Each advanced enterprise carries an accumulation of lacking, conflicting, or inaccessible enterprise context that stops work from finishing appropriately. We name this context debt.
A 20-year-old SAP ECC property exposes context debt by customized code, duplicate data, and native course of variants. An S/4HANA property faces the identical downside when a course of is determined by CRM information, specialist providers, or controls documented exterior the workflow.
Sebastian Steinhaeuser warned prospects in opposition to paying “unbelievable token payments for one thing that they may have mounted on the database degree.” He additionally advised product groups, “Don’t simply encode the final 5% of lacking automation in your backlog into an agent and name that an innovation.”
Use brokers to show the debt that issues. Classify failed executions as information defects, course of defects, integration gaps, authorization issues, mannequin errors, or instances requiring human judgment. Döhler Group reported that incomplete and duplicate grasp information constrained its growing no-touch gross sales order course of. A Novartis procurement chief suggested firms to start out the place a unsuitable determination is recoverable. The primary instance displays working expertise; the second got here from an early pilot. Neither establishes repeatable market-wide outcomes.
Restore a defect when it repeatedly blocks beneficial work or creates materials management danger. Don’t flip each agent failure right into a migration program. Forrester recommends that expertise leaders govern ERP modernization as a seamless innovation system, addressing integration and testing debt whereas maintaining analytics, orchestration, and AI replaceable.
Resolve Who Owns What Brokers Be taught
The richest course of information usually seems when customary execution breaks down. A planner overrides a advice, a purchaser selects a higher-priced provider, or a controller resolves an uncommon posting. Transaction techniques report the end result however usually lose the reasoning.
Agent-mediated work can seize elements of that reasoning by corrections, overrides, and conversations. SAP described a deliberate company-memory functionality that may ingest course of paperwork, insurance policies, and execution data, then present distilled context to brokers. SAP executives mentioned future approaches for utilizing noticed interactions to refine guidelines and exception dealing with. Collectively, these capabilities may create a studying loop through which human corrections affect future execution. Brokers curate information from enterprise artifacts and occasions whereas individuals contribute intent and judgment. The governance query is who controls the ensuing information and whether or not it stays usable exterior the originating platform.
That is an architectural danger, not a confirmed supply of lock-in. Collected corrections, evaluations, and determination traces could be costly to recreate if prospects can’t export them in reusable kind.
Require entry to prompts, corrections, overrides, evaluations, and ensuing reminiscence artifacts. Outline whether or not worker interactions can enhance customer-specific brokers or broader fashions. Take a look at exportability earlier than manufacturing deployment. An exit proper is hole if a alternative agent should relearn years of exceptions.
Resolve Who Measures Worth And Bears Failure Threat
SAP is shifting premium agentic capabilities towards consumption pricing, together with expenses linked to agent actions, whereas retaining AI items as its industrial forex. It is usually growing enterprise evaluations, worth calculators, and SAP Signavio agent mining to attach exercise with course of outcomes.
SAP may function the agent, present the benchmark and calculation instruments, and meter utilization. Prospects nonetheless take in retries, human rework, and failed execution. The deeper governance query is who defines profitable work. Organizations ought to approve the baseline and reproduce the calculation independently.
Separate the worth meter from the billing meter. This separation is more and more vital as consumption pricing and workflow orchestration shift leverage towards software program distributors and make utilization, dependency, and enterprise outcomes more durable to guage independently. Outline profitable completion earlier than deployment. Require uncooked execution, exception, intervention, and consumption information. Scale when accomplished outcomes enhance quicker than consumption and exception dealing with declines.
SAP is assembling the elements required to turn out to be the orchestration layer for enterprise work. The unanswered query is how a lot management prospects are prepared to switch to it, and whether or not the ensuing course of information, studying historical past, and financial alerts stay moveable and extendable for an extra the place the brokers will go throughout vendor ecosystems.
Flip Your SAP AI Technique Right into a Defensible Resolution
Forrester shoppers can schedule an inquiry or steerage session to guage a proposed SAP agent use case, pressure-test its modernization and consumption economics, and outline the governance, studying possession, and exit rights wanted earlier than deployment.
Carry one candidate course of, its present efficiency baseline, and the functions and information sources it crosses. The session will assist set up deployment situations, proof necessities, and a transparent scale-or-stop determination.
