SAP announced new tools for building, grounding, and governing AI agents at SAP TechEd 2026 in Berlin on October 27, with some capabilities rolling out now and others scheduled for the fourth quarter of 2026 and the first quarter of 2027.
SAP Chief Technology Officer Philipp Herzig, who delivered the keynote, said the company is “moving from AI learning your business to running it.” The announcements center on Joule Work, SAP’s interface for describing a goal and having AI agents carry it out, along with Joule Studio, SAP Business AI Platform, and SAP Business Data Cloud.
What SAP Is Rolling Out
General availability of Joule Work and Joule Studio is underway in phases, according to the SAP TechEd 2026 Innovation News Guide.
Joule Work gains an agentic capability that reasons, plans, and carries out multi-step tasks across SAP landscapes, and agents built in Joule Studio can now be deployed on the Joule Studio runtime, where they appear in SAP AI Agent Hub and in Joule Work conversations.
SAP also announced new agent gateway capabilities that let third-party agents invoke Joule Agents through a governed entry point. Ted Way, SAP’s vice president and chief product officer of SAP Business AI Product Engineering, told SAPinsider that customers “do not run wall-to-wall SAP (as much as we would like them to), so agent interoperability is critical.”
Way also said SAP-RPT-TS, a model that forecasts time-indexed business metrics such as demand in SAP Integrated Business Planning, is generally available.
What SAP Has Scheduled Through 2027
SAP’s innovation guide puts Joule capabilities for database administration in SAP HANA Cloud and a decision model for tasks such as approving customer orders in the fourth quarter of 2026. SAP Sovereign Cloud support for SAP AI Core, Joule, and SAP Datasphere in the UK, Australia, and Canada is planned for the same quarter.
The larger context and governance pieces arrive in the first quarter of 2027. SAP plans to release the SAP Enterprise AI Gateway, which will consolidate authentication, policy enforcement, routing, monitoring, usage tracking, and auditing of AI traffic. New SAP Knowledge Graph capabilities will incorporate customer-specific data from SAP and non-SAP sources in the same quarter.
SAP expects a beta of the SAP Business Data Cloud Ontology Manager, which will help build ontologies across SAP and third-party data. General availability of the SAP-RPT-2.0 tabular model, which adds anomaly and outlier detection, is planned for the first quarter as well. The guide also lists an enterprise knowledge repository for enterprise architects and SAP Document AI enhancements for that quarter.
Cost, Free Offers, and Spend Visibility
SAP describes the SAP Enterprise AI Gateway as a premium offering built on SAP Business AI Platform that extends the integration foundation customers already use.
Running custom agents on Joule Studio runtime is free through December 2026 for select customers under a time-bound promotion, and SAP says the design-time tools for building and testing agents and n8n workflows remain free under fair-use limits.
Customers in the Joule Studio early adopter program can also design and run n8n workflows, with broader availability to follow. SAP is also offering the Joule Studio Developer certification at no charge through December 31.
New observability and administrative controls in Joule Studio give developers and administrators visibility into model usage and spend, and the SAP Enterprise AI Gateway will consolidate usage tracking.
The announcement materials give no pricing for the Enterprise AI Gateway, the Knowledge Graph capabilities, or the Ontology Manager, all scheduled for the first quarter of 2027.
What Changes in the Data Layer
SAP is expanding the lakehouse capabilities of SAP Business Data Cloud with Dremio, adding native support for Apache Iceberg and Apache Polaris plus a federated query engine meant to give unified access to data without moving or copying it. SAP plans to make the lakehouse component generally available in the first quarter of 2027.
SAP also expanded its partnership with Databricks, bringing Databricks’ data engineering and AI capabilities into SAP Business Data Cloud as SAP Databricks. SAP says a new SAP Application Data Foundation and an integration between Joule and Databricks’ Genie help customers build a single lakehouse across the enterprise as the foundation for Joule Work.
SAP completed its acquisition of Reltio in May. The SAP Reltio solution, which SAP announced at SAP Connect on October 6, will bring multidomain master data management to SAP Business Data Cloud, unifying customer, supplier, and product records across SAP and non-SAP systems into reusable data products.
What This Means for SAPinsiders
Rollout is phased, so availability varies by customer. SAP describes general availability of Joule Work and Joule Studio as underway in stages. Confirming what is active in each landscape before planning keeps projects tied to what is live.
Context and governance tools arrive in the first quarter of 2027. The customer-specific Knowledge Graph capabilities and the Enterprise AI Gateway are both planned for that quarter. Customers can use the time before then to prepare the data the Knowledge Graph will draw on.
Pricing belongs in the evaluation. SAP calls the Enterprise AI Gateway a premium offering, and its announcement materials give no price for it, while the free Joule Studio runtime promotion for select customers runs through December 2026. Working out costs before those terms change gives teams a fuller picture before they commit to a build.
