SAP made bold promises about AI at Sapphire 2025: Knowledge Graph, Joule Studio, and AI Agent Hub would ship by the end of the year. Those tools are now technically available, but adoption has lagged, and SAP is already announcing version 2.0.
“Joule Studio adoption has been minimal compared to what we’d like,” said Manoj Swaminathan, SAP’s chief product officer for Business Suite, in a briefing ahead of this year’s Sapphire. The tool “was limited to content-based experiences,” he said. “Anytime more complex agents were involved, it had limited capabilities.”
The issue, according to SAP’s chief AI officer Jonathan von Rüden, was that SAP had favored ease of use over power in its original architecture. “People wanted to see more pro-code flexibility,” he said in an interview at Sapphire 2026. “We had gone with a low-code approach. You could give it extension points and tools, but you couldn’t touch the core of it. Now you can build a custom agent, connect it to your own GitHub.”
Customers also came with “big plans” but needed hard rules and approval gates that the original Joule Studio didn’t support natively. “What people want is agentic flows with clear gates and workflows and subagents,” von Rüden said. “Old Joule didn’t provide that. Now it’s all baked together.”
What actually shipped
Joule and AI Agent Hub are generally available, though the latter is now getting a “massive revamp” with version 2.0. The Knowledge Graph is live and has expanded beyond its original scope. Initially used for building Joule skills, it now feeds context directly to AI agents so they can “figure out how to call something dynamically,” von Rüden said.
Joule Studio, however, is still in early customer adoption; general availability is expected in the third quarter — a year behind the original target. Joule Work, the new engagement layer announced this week, isn’t expected until the second half of this year.
What’s different in 2.0
The revamped Joule Studio addresses the gaps that held back adoption. Beyond the pro-code flexibility, developers can now build with popular agent frameworks like LangGraph and AutoGen. and agents will have a native understanding of SAP’s proprietary code and data models that generic tools can’t replicate.
It’s an evolution, not a reset, according to von Rüden. “The first runs were geared toward automation,” he said. “Now agents need to bring optimization and intelligence as well.” Customers, including Ericsson, Mercado Libre, and Siemens, are already using Joule agents in production.
Meanwhile, SAP is rethinking how it gets AI tools into customers’ hands. Joule Desktop, launching this week, lets individual users build automations without going through IT — a bet that grassroots adoption will move faster than centralized rollouts.
This article first appeared on CIO.
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