Deep AI research and role-based assistants, coupled with SAP Business Suite innovations were unveiled at the SAP’s inaugural SAP Connect event, here, on Monday (October 6).There is now a new network of role-based assistants in Joule (the AI copilot from SAP to enhance productivity and enable internal collaborations) to partner with humans to elevate performance, combined with an expanding data ecosystem, and supply chain software that anticipates disruptions, SAP leaders said. Each assistant is designed to partner with a human being in their specific business role. Assistants in Joule tap into the right agents for the job, configuring, orchestrating and managing them so humans can focus on unlocking new levels of insight and productivity. Supporting the assistants in Joule are specialised Joule agents, designed to help execute complex workflows within a specific function. For instance, a People Manager Assistant coordinates a team of specialised agents to help spot and resolve issues say, of compensation anomalies.“Our announcements today demonstrate the power of SAP Business Suite, where AI, data and applications come together in an experience to propel smarter decisions, faster execution and scalable transformation,” said Muhammad Alam, member of the executive board of SAP SE, SAP Product & Engineering. Later in his keynote address, he drew parallels with the mobile phone indicating that disparate things, once unconnected are now seamlessly integrated into one device. “The world of business applications is no different anymore,” he added.Data that fuels AI’s transformative power is limited often, by being siloed in different systems.The SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC) Connect securely links with partner platforms to enable a bidirectional flow of business-ready data products across organisational and technological boundaries.The data remains securely in SAP systems, yet remains instantly accessible in customers’ existing data platforms, preserving business context without costly copies. Thomas Pfiester, head of SAP’s Global Customer Engagement and Services told The Hindu: “We follow all required global data standards. We also don’t need to copy anymore. Earlier we used to see data being taken out, copied and this caused data security concerns. With BDC Connect, we are now partnering with Databricks and Google Query and you can now access it in a non-SAP environment without copying, thus mitigating security issues.”The following products were also formally introduced during the event: SAP Supply Chain Orchestration and new AI-native with a live knowledge graph to detect real-time risks among suppliers and orchestrate a coordinated response; SAP Engagement Cloud, uses business-critical context to personalise interactions across customers, suppliers and other stakeholders. The next-generation SAP Ariba procurement suite is as an AI-native solution, facilitating spend management, from sourcing through supplier engagement.(This reporter is at SAP Connect in Las Vegas at the invitation of SAP)Published - October 08, 2025 08:16 pm IST