SAP, the world's largest enterprise resource planning (ERP) company, unveiled a blueprint for a new business initiative called the "autonomous enterprise." To support this initiative, SAP announced it would transform its entire product lineup around artificial intelligence (AI) agents. The company also expressed confidence in becoming the world's leading industrial AI platform provider by embedding Nvidia's solutions and Anthropic's AI models into its services.
SAP unveiled the business direction at its annual conference, "SAP Sapphire 2026," held at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando on Wednesday local time. Christian Klein, SAP's chief executive officer (CEO), took the stage as keynote speaker and introduced the autonomous enterprise model as SAP's new business direction. An autonomous enterprise refers to an information technology (IT) innovation that uses AI to convert all corporate tasks into automated systems.
Klein said a complete autonomous enterprise cannot be achieved using general-purpose AI. He cited the reason as the accuracy of general-purpose AI services reaching only around 80 percent. He also noted clear limitations in using a company's internal data to train general-purpose AI services. "SAP can solve this problem," Klein said. "ERP, the brain of every enterprise, is the starting point for the solution." He added, "We are launching a new SAP AI platform that combines SAP's more than 50 years of ERP business expertise with AI." The remarks signal SAP's confidence that its ERP expertise in managing sensitive corporate data positions it to deliver AI that utilizes enterprise data more intelligently.
SAP also unveiled a new product called the "SAP Business AI Platform" as part of the autonomous enterprise initiative. The platform is a tool that allows SAP customers to develop SAP's AI agent "Joule" tailored to their own environments. "The core of the new platform lies in a layer that richly understands data context," Klein said. "High-quality industrial knowledge stored in ERP can be injected into Joule." He added, "Joule developed with the Business AI Platform learns not only from data in SAP's ERP but also from data outside SAP systems, learning the operational framework of customer companies."
At Sapphire 2026, SAP declared that its identity has transformed into that of an industrial AI specialist. "The challenge facing companies today is creating business value with AI," Klein said. "I hope SAP's AI services will mark the end of overwhelming workloads and the beginning of the autonomous enterprise."
SAP disclosed its collaboration with Anthropic for the Business AI Platform business. SAP uses its in-house model "SAP-RPT-1" and Microsoft's "Copilot" as AI foundation models to power its AI services. Anthropic's AI model "Claude" has now been added. Daniela Amodei, Anthropic's president, appeared via video during the keynote and said, "Global enterprises run on SAP, and trusted AI must be there. Within SAP's platform, Claude will power AI agents across corporate operations including finance, human resources (HR), and supply chain management."
Alongside the Business AI Platform, SAP is also launching a new "Autonomous Suite" service. It will be offered by embedding AI agents into SAP's existing business systems. SAP has prepared 224 AI agents and 51 AI assistants, and plans to gradually expand the number of agents. An AI assistant is a collection of AI agents designed to perform specific tasks. For example, under the broad HR category, there are subfields such as recruitment, payroll management, and workforce development, each with a dedicated AI assistant. SAP's vision is for more than 200 AI agents to coordinate tasks and execute instructions among themselves, achieving near-perfect work automation.
SAP also prepared a solution to address security concerns surrounding AI agents. To control AI agents that work proactively, SAP adopted Nvidia's "OpenShell." OpenShell is software that configures AI agents' data access rights and task execution environments. It was developed to prevent AI agents from leaking sensitive corporate information externally or performing tasks beyond their authorized scope. SAP said it has embedded OpenShell within the Autonomous Suite to control the operational scope of all AI agents. Jensen Huang, Nvidia's CEO, also appeared via video during the keynote and said, "SAP has adopted OpenShell across its entire platform. AI agents only perform authorized tasks, and all task records can be traced."
Executives from KPMG, JPMorgan, and H&M also took the stage during the keynote to share cases of using SAP's AI services. More than 3,000 KPMG consultants are currently using Joule. JPMorgan decided to replace its general ledger with SAP's latest system. H&M developed a store management AI agent together with SAP.
