SAP users are increasingly integrating AI agents into their workflows. While AI agents help automate routine tasks and provide decision support, they also present new risks.
An AI agent could, for example, approve a vendor payment outside of a policy limit without oversight, creating a problem for finance. Another AI agent might prioritize a low-margin product for manufacturing in an unexpected way, leading to a production bottleneck.
These are examples of “invisible autonomy” risks. They are risks that emerge when AI agents act autonomously in the absence of strong oversight.
Managing the Invisible Autonomy of AI Agents
SAP Signavio, part of SAP’s Business Process Intelligence portfolio, has addressed these risks through a new AI agent mining capability, which grants IT leaders and other stakeholders greater oversight into the behavior of AI agents across their systems.
The new AI agent mining capability enables users to track agent behavior, analyze their impact, monitor cost efficiency, and benchmark overall performance. In this way, it serves as an additional intelligence layer for users to manage their AI workforce, ensuring that AI agents work within scope, authorized data, and defined rules.
The capability is a leap forward for businesses looking to deploy AI agents at scale.
Dr. Gero Decker, SAP Signavio general manager, said, “We are preparing for the future by focusing on the organizational and process dimensions of agentic AI adoption.” He added that SAP Signavio “aims to ensure that AI agents are integrated seamlessly, efficiently, and compliantly into the broader enterprise.”
Process Intelligence, Process Insights Promise Greater Visibility
SAP Signavio also released new capabilities for Process Intelligence, its collaborative process solution, and Process Insights, its cloud-based data solution.
On SAP Signavio Process Intelligence, an AI-Assisted Process Analyzer allows users to ask natural-language questions for immediate answers (“text-to-insights”) and visualizations that are transformed into widgets (“text‑to‑widget”).
In a release note, Jelisaveta Nikolic, product and topic officer at SAP, wrote that “this release also delivers seamless, large-scale data replication via SAP Datasphere, enabling direct, reliable, and continuous extraction of process-relevant data from SAP ERP systems.”
Further, SAP Signavio made Variant Explore, a popular widget on Process Intelligence, available on Process Insights, enabling users to visualize process execution paths. It also introduced a new benchmark pop-up view for Process Insights, which allows users to quickly see whether their KPIs have external benchmarks.
What this Means for ERP Insiders
Invisible autonomy is a real risk. AI agents help many professionals automate routine tasks and unlock actionable data insights, but their autonomy means they can also disrupt business processes in unintended ways. SAP Signavio AI agent mining gives users the oversight they need to monitor agents and mitigate risks before they emerge.
AI agent mining offers more than just risk prevention. It also enables users to assess the efficiency, cost, and performance of their AI agents. This capability helps ensure AI agents are aligned with business objectives and stakeholders see the ROI they expect before scaling AI agent deployment.
SAP Signavio provides greater visibility. In addition to the AI agent mining capability, the enhancements for SAP Signavio Process Intelligence and Process Insights help users identify inefficiencies and improve governance. Together, these tools provide a comprehensive view of both human- and AI-driven activities within the enterprise.
