SAP expanded its partner ecosystem at Sapphire 2026 with new announcements involving Anthropic, NVIDIA and Palantir, each tied to a different part of its Autonomous Enterprise strategy. Anthropic will bring Claude to SAP Business AI Platform to support Joule agents, NVIDIA is working with SAP on secure runtime infrastructure for agent execution, and Palantir is extending its role in AI-supported data migration for customers moving to SAP cloud ERP.
The announcements show how SAP is building out Business AI Platform through a mix of model, infrastructure and migration. They also give customers a clearer view of how SAP plans to connect partner technology to its own governance, orchestration and business context layers as it pushes AI deeper into enterprise workflows.
SAP continues to maintain partnerships with AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure for infrastructure and model access, but the Sapphire announcements signal which partnerships SAP is prioritizing for deep integration into Business AI Platform.
Analysis
What This Means for ERP Insiders
SAP is using partners to fill key gaps in its AI stack, rather than trying to build every layer itself. Anthropic, NVIDIA and Palantir each support a different part of the platform, while SAP keeps governance, orchestration and business context in its own hands.
How Claude Will Support Joule Agents Across SAP Workflows
Claude will power the reasoning layer behind Joule agents across SAP’s core applications, including, SAP S/4HANA, SAP SuccessFactors, SAP Ariba, and non-SAP systems connected through the Model Context Protocol. Rather than operating on isolated data, Claude-powered agents will access SAP’s business context, such as transaction histories, approval hierarchies, process rules, through Business AI Platform, allowing them to execute multi-step workflows across systems without requiring users to manually gather and provide that context.
SAP and Anthropic will also collaborate on industry-specific agents for sectors including healthcare, public sector, utilities, and life sciences, where regulatory complexity and process depth demand more than generic task automation. The goal, SAP said, is agents that don’t just retrieve information but take sequential action. A typical sequence could look like, looking up data, triggering approvals, updating records, and moving workflows forward, all within the governance boundaries SAP customers already have in place.
Why SAP Is Using NVIDIA OpenShell for Secure Agent Execution
SAP and NVIDIA announced a technical collaboration to integrate NVIDIA OpenShell, a secure open-source runtime environment for autonomous AI agents, with SAP Business AI Platform.
OpenShell provides isolated execution environments, policy enforcement for file system and network access, and runtime-level controls that limit agent behavior even when agent logic fails, addressing the production challenge of running AI agents safely within defined boundaries while maintaining audit trails.
SAP’s role in the collaboration is to bring enterprise requirements into OpenShell’s development, ensuring the runtime can handle mission-critical SAP workloads with the governance, auditability, and scalability that regulated industries require.
SAP framed the division of responsibility clearly: OpenShell handles technical execution safety (isolation, resource limits, policy enforcement), while Joule Studio Runtime handles business-level governance (who can deploy which agents, what data they can access, how they map to organizational roles and responsibilities). This layered approach is designed to ensure agent autonomy aligns with business goals and accountabilities, not just technical permissions.
Analysis
What This Means for ERP Insiders
SAP is treating agent security as core infrastructure, not just an application feature. By working OpenShell into Business AI Platform, SAP is signaling that running AI agents safely, with control and auditability, will be as important as what those agents can do.
How SAP and Palantir Are Using AI to Simplify ERP Data Migration
SAP and Palantir expanded their partnership at Sapphire 2026 to focus on AI-supported data migration for customers moving to SAP Cloud ERP applications. The offering combines SAP’s enterprise application and SAP Business AI capabilities with Palantir AIP to support migration analysis, planning, remediation, testing, and impact assessment across SAP and non-SAP systems, with the goal of making complex migrations faster and more manageable.
This is not just SAP introducing another migration tool. It reflects a broader shift in how ERP migrations may be delivered, with AI taking on more of the manual analysis and preparation work that has traditionally slowed projects down and driven consulting costs higher. Palantir provides the technology layer, SAP is packaging it into its cloud ERP migration story, and Accenture is the first major services partner positioned to help customers apply it in large transformation programs.
Analysis
What This Means for ERP Insiders
SAP is presenting these partnerships as part of an open ecosystem, but customers will still need clarity on how much flexibility they retain around models, runtime environments and service partners. The more tightly these tools are built into Business AI Platform, the more important those questions become.
Editor’s note: A version of this story first appeared on SAPinsider.
