Boost your productivity with SAP Business AI
A world without artificial intelligence is hard to imagine today. SAP Business AI brings together SAP’s artificial and generative intelligence capabilities across the portfolio. It is seamlessly embedded across SAP S/4HANA, SuccessFactors, SAP Business Data Cloud and others, ready to be activated and start supporting your business processes.
The power is already under the hood! Now is the moment to turn it into real business value.
HR challenges in practice
Data and processes
Fragmented HR data and processes across countries and systems, making standardisation difficult.
Insights
Limited insight into workforce data, skills and costs, slowing down decision making.
Pressure
Growing pressure to support the full employee lifecycle while improving experience, compliance and efficiency.
THE CORNERSTONES
What are the cornerstones of SAP Business AI?
SAP Business AI consists of three core components that embed AI into your business processes.
Joule: The super orchestrator
Your AI copilot and new user experience:
- Navigate your business applications naturally
- Execute transactions with questions
- Find information instantly
- Gain analytical insights
Embedded AI
AI integrated into business processes:
- Works across SAP Cloud solutions and end-to-end processes
- Leverage AI agents and features
- Build your custom AI application
AI Foundation
The backbone running on BTP:
- Tools to integrate AI at scale
- Build custom AI solutions
- Extend with your requirements
- Run AI agents and applications
TAKE THE FIRST STEP
Meet Joule, your AI copilot for SAP
Joule is SAP’s AI copilot that helps users work faster and achieve better results by simply asking questions or telling the system what to do in natural language. Your copilot Joule can assist you in an informational, navigational, transactional and analytical way. Let’s have a look!
Informational
Ask Joule questions about processes, rules, or documentation. Get instant answers.
Navigational
Ask Joule where you want to go and skip the menu navigation. Get there directly.
Transactional
Ask Joule to execute tasks like creating records, submitting forms, or updating data.
Analytical
Request analyses and reports on demand. Joule generates insights from your data.
HOW AI CREATES VALUE
SAP Business AI in practice
We support SAP customers whether you’re activating Joule, implementing embedded AI features, or building custom solutions on BTP. Below are two practical examples of how this can create value.
CUSTOM AI ON BTP
Email automation with LLMs
Service organization receiving high volumes of routine customer emails requiring categorization, routing, and responses.
The challenge: Customer service teams spending hours daily on repetitive email handling. Manual categorization and routing delays response times. Team wants to focus on complex cases.
Our solution: Built a CAP application on BTP using Large Language Models. System reads incoming emails, categorizes requests, routes to correct team, and drafts appropriate responses for approval.
Impact: 80% of routine emails handled automatically. Response time reduced from hours to minutes. Team now focuses on cases requiring human judgment and relationship building.
PROOF OF CONCEPT
AI image recognition for waste management
Public service organization managing waste collection and recycling centers. Citizens report illegal dumping via mobile app with photos.
The challenge: Reports with photos arrive in SAP. Staff manually review images to categorize waste type (overflowing bin vs dumped furniture) to dispatch correct vehicle. Time consuming and error prone.
Our solution: AI image recognition on SAP AI Launchpad to automatically identify waste categories. System pre-categorizes, user confirms. Built with data privacy compliance requirements.
Status: POC successfully recognizes waste in photos. Next phase: optimizing costs for production deployment and expanding category recognition accuracy.
EMBEDDED AI CAPABILITIES
Centralising talent management at AWEX with SAP SuccessFactors and SAP Business AI
AWEX manages over 500 agents across Belgium and abroad. Their HR setup was spread across multiple tools with no unified view of employee skills or career paths. They needed one platform to bring it all together, within the constraints of the public sector.
The challenge: Talent management was fragmented across multiple tools, limiting visibility into employee skills and career paths. The organisation needed a centralised HR platform for recruitment, training, performance and talent development, while meeting public sector compliance requirements.
Our solution: Persolis, in partnership with EY, deployed SAP SuccessFactors covering Recruiting, Learning, Performance and Goals, Career and Talent Development, and Employee Central as the core data foundation. Generative AI features were added to support the writing of job descriptions and the definition of development goals.
Status: The solution is live and operational. AWEX now has a unified HR ecosystem with improved talent visibility, increased process automation and a modernised employee experience for HR teams, managers and staff alike.
CUSTOM AI ON BTP
Interface mAIntenance app for Ecotone
Ecotone is a mission-driven B-Corp and organic food pioneer whose business processes rely on a wide range of interfaces across Integration Suite, connecting multiple applications and partner systems.
The challenge: In a hybrid landscape, planned downtime of on-premise systems causes errors in the integration platform, alert overload and messages that require manual resending. SAP Integration Suite has no native functionality to pause selected interfaces, making the process manual, time-consuming and error-prone. Any incorrect restart can have direct business impact such as missed or delayed orders.
Our solution: Using SAP Joule Skills, application managers can retrieve all relevant interfaces through a simple natural language question. A CAP application behind the skill saves the selected interfaces in an undeployment plan to redeploy these after maintenance, eliminating the risk of human error. The solution is built on standard Integration Suite APIs using interface metadata, ensuring a consistent and complete response every time.
Status: The mAIntenance app is live and in productive use to pause and restart interfaces during planned SAP S/4HANA downtime. Since go-live, new ideas for additional functionality and broader AI applications have already emerged within Ecotone.
IN PRACTICE
How SAP SuccessFactors works in real life
How we typically approach HR transformations and what this means for HR teams, managers and employees.
- Where we start when designing or improving a SuccessFactors landscape
- Common pitfalls and lessons learned from HR projects
- What changes in daily operations and employee experience
INSIGHTS
Insights on HR and SuccessFactors
Practical perspectives for HR and IT leaders navigating cloud HR and hybrid landscapes.
Digital Transformation of Soft HR at AWEX with SAP SuccessFactors and SAP Business AI
The Walloon Agency for Export and Foreign Investment (AWEX) is an international public institution that...
Migration to SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central to Optimize HR Processes
SAP SuccessFactors 2026 releases – key changes to anticipate
The upcoming SuccessFactors 1H 2026 release is approaching (Preview: April 13 / Production: May 15–16)...
COMMON QUESTIONS
Frequently asked questions
Where can we leverage SAP Business AI?
Most SAP Business AI capabilities are available in SAP cloud solutions such as SAP S/4HANA Cloud, SuccessFactors and SAP Ariba.
They are embedded directly in the applications, so they support everyday business processes right where people work.
If you run SAP on-premise, custom AI scenarios can still be built and connected through SAP BTP.
How does pricing work for SAP Business AI?
SAP distinguishes between Base AI and Premium AI.
Base AI is included in standard SAP cloud subscriptions at no additional cost, while Premium AI covers more advanced capabilities.
Premium AI is priced flexibly depending on the requested services, through AI units.
What are SAP AI Units?
SAP AI Units are a virtual currency for premium AI capabilities in SAP cloud services.
You buy them in a central pool and use them flexibly across supported SAP solutions, instead of arranging separate licenses for each feature.
Usage is tied to clear metrics such as requests, records, or other predefined measures.
Do we need AI specialists to get started?
SAP AI capabilities are already embedded in SAP applications, enabling a fast and straightforward start with our support for activation, setup, and adoption. Your role? Bringing your unique business knowledge.
Should we start with standard SAP AI or build something custom?
If your needs go beyond that, SAP gives you a route to build custom AI agents and applications around your business context.
Ready to explore AI for your SAP environment?
We help SAP customers at every level: from activating Joule and embedded AI features, to building custom solutions on BTP when needed. Let’s talk about where you are today and how AI can add value in your specific situation.
Charlotte is here to listen.
Get in touch with her.
Charlotte is based in Belgium.
Ready to take action?
Whether you are running SAP BW today or already working with Datasphere, evaluating SAP Business Data Cloud starts from your current situation. Our approach helps organisations gain clarity on architecture, migration options, costs and timing, so they can make well-founded decisions.