SAP: Best-of-Breed

AI-supported SAP Business Suite is the end of a best-of-breed ERP

SAP wants to orchestrate AI agents across business units with role-based AI assistants in Joule. An ERP patchwork quilt will become a two-tier AI system consisting of assistants and agents. "To succeed in a volatile market environment, companies need more than a patchwork of different best-of-breed applications," said Muhammad Alam, member of the SAP Executive Board and Head of SAP Product Engineering. "Our announcements today illustrate how SAP Business Suite, with the interplay of AI, data and applications, enables smarter decisions, faster execution and scalable transformation."

At the SAP Connect event in Las Vegas (USA), SAP demonstrated how the integration of AI, data and applications can create added value for existing customers. Innovations include a new network of role-based AI assistants that increase the performance of AI agents, as well as a growing data ecosystem for insights into company data and software that predicts disruptions in supply chains.

SAP-Joule: AI assistants and AI agents

SAP continues to strengthen the AI assistant Joule as a driving force for the added value of SAP Business Suite. Based on the applications and data of the new Business Suite, SAP presented a new generation of role-based AI assistants that understand a business context at SAP Connect in Las Vegas. Each AI assistant is designed to support users in their specific roles within the company. These AI assistants in turn use the appropriate AI agents for the task at hand and configure, combine and control them. It is a sophisticated two-tier AI system that can consolidate the S/4 patchwork and possibly incorporate additional AI agents from competitors. This would create an AI ontology in the new Business Suite that could become a composable ERP.

A back-referenced SAP Joule system

According to SAP, the Joule assistants are supported by a growing library of specialized Joule agents to perform complex workflows within a specific function. For example, an AI People Manager Assistant coordinates a team of specialized AI agents - including the new People Intelligence Agent, which can detect and resolve issues such as compensation anomalies - to support ERP users.

A new AI Financial Planning Assistant is supported by a group of AI agents - such as the new Cash Management Agent, which optimizes cash flow and improves interest income - to help finance professionals increase efficiency.

This new generation of role-based AI assistants and AI agents not only supports ERP users in partnership to improve performance in their respective areas. AI based on SAP Joule is also designed to work cross-functionally to solve complex enterprise-wide challenges.

Databricks becomes best-of-breed partner of SAP BDC Connect

SAP announced in Las Vegas that Databricks and Google Cloud are the first partners for Business Data Cloud Connect. Others will follow. However, as announced in February 2025, Databricks will remain a data service within SAP BDC (Business Data Cloud). BDC Connect is intended to extend the benefits across an open data ecosystem. With these partnerships between Google, Databricks and SAP, existing customers can gain faster access to data products for analytics and AI.

At SAP Connect in Las Vegas, SAP wanted to overcome the data hurdles with BDC Connect to counteract an ERP patchwork. The new Databricks solution securely links BDC with platforms from other partners and competitors for a two-way flow of ready-to-use data products across company and technical boundaries. The potential result: fewer data silos, simpler data flows and no costly data duplication.

Knowledge Graph from SAP Hana with best-of-breed

SAP presented a new application of the Knowledge Graph from SAP Hana in Las Vegas. Graph theory in general and graph databases in particular have been considered a successful representation of data networks for many years. SAP Supply Chain Orchestration is a new native AI solution that combines the strengths of Joule with a knowledge graph to identify risks at upstream suppliers in multi-level supply chains in real time and respond to them with coordinated measures.

At the SAP Connect event in Las Vegas (USA), Executive Board member Muhammad Alam made an important announcement: SAP's existing customers need more than a patchwork of different best-of-breed applications. It is not clear where this insight came from, as SAP is unlikely to describe S/4 Hana itself as a patchwork, but the path to a composable ERP seems consistent.

At the same time, Muhammad Alam's statement was qualified on a technical level. With a two-tier system of AI assistants that control several AI agents, the result will probably be another patchwork quilt. It was also announced in Las Vegas that the Databricks component from the SAP BDC (Business Data Cloud) will be expanded to include a Databricks connector: Databricks will become Databricks in the sense of best-of-breed and a Knowledge Graph from SAP Hana will be added. More best-of-breed is not possible.