Exploring Core Capabilities of Joule Agents

Objective

After completing this lesson, you will be able to explore the core capabilities of Joule Agents that differentiate them from other AI agents

Introduction

Joule Agents incorporate the previously discussed capabilities and enhance them with unique features from the SAP ecosystem.

Key Differentiating Capabilities of Joule Agents

Most AI agent solutions fall short because of siloed role-based assistance, limited business process context, and a lack of context-rich data.

The challenge is that, while there are many vendor offerings available, they do not fully realize the potential of AI agents. These offerings often focus on enhancing productivity within isolated roles rather than across end-to-end processes. Additionally, they typically lack sufficient context about your processes to perform reliably. Furthermore, being concentrated in a single business function, such as CRM, they do not have access to all the data in your enterprise, limiting their ability to reason effectively. This situation necessitates significant effort to address these limitations to build a single effective agent.

Achieving the full promise of AI agents is not based on the quantity of agents. Solving complex business challenges that span your business requires agents to be grounded in the right business context, the right agents, and working together and with your people.

As covered in the previous lessons, only Joule Agents possess the capabilities required to be grounded in the appropriate business context and data. These agents can collaborate effectively with each other and your team to enhance cross-functional processes efficiently.

The key capabilities of Joule Agents are outlined in the image. The details are described in the text that follows.

These capabilities make Joule Agents powerful digital teammates that can significantly streamline and optimize business operations.

Joule Agents are AI systems designed to boost business productivity by automating workflows and supporting operations. Their core capabilities include:

Grounded in the business context: Grounded by SAP Knowledge Graph and SAP Business Data Cloud, Joule Agents have access to comprehensive and context-rich data sets, allowing them to make informed decisions.
Collaboration: Joule Agents are designed to work together and with business users across various roles to execute complex cross-functional processes with speed and reliability. They collaborate to solve bigger problems by combining their expertise in multiple functions.
Planning: Joule Agents can break down complex problems and map out efficient, step-by-step approaches to solve them.
Reflection: They learn from their actions in real-time, self-correcting and iteratively improving their performance.
Tool Usage: Joule Agents can utilize Joule Skills, external tools like APIs, databases, and other AI models to expand their capabilities.

These features make Joule Agents valuable digital teammates for optimizing business operations.

Other capabilities unique to Joule Agents are:

Access to Unified Data Layer: Joule Agents use SAP Business Data Cloud, which provides a unified data platform. This enables access to relevant data across both SAP and non-SAP systems, allowing for more comprehensive analysis and informed actions.
Integration Across Business Functions: Joule Agents are designed to integrate seamlessly into cross-functional processes, enhancing collaboration and reducing inefficiencies across finance, procurement, supply chain management, and more.
Pre-Configured Skills: Joule offers an extensive library of over 1,300 pre-configured skills designed to automate tasks across both SAP and non-SAP applications. These skills can be integrated to execute complex multi-step workflows.
Customization: SAP offers a way to customize Joule Agents allowing users to create custom AI agents tailored to their unique business needs. This is possible through a custom agent builder capability in Joule Studio, which is facilitated through a guided no-code workflow.
Enterprise-Wide Impact: Joule Agents utilize SAP’s extensive process expertise and our enterprise-wide business applications. Embedded across SAP’s suite, Joule allows employees to easily access, optimize, and connect workflows, unlocking transformative value quickly and broadly.

Key Capabilities in Action

Let us see a use case of Joule Agents to see their true impact.

Imagine a CFO needs to answer a complex business question: "How do we improve our working capital?" Traditionally, an employee would spend weeks on tasks like:

Creating an analysis plan
Gathering insights and information
Combining siloed data and conducting analysis
Formulating macro-insights

With current AI, employees often waste time on trivial tasks, leading to disjointed insights. Joule Agents leverage AI to provide deeper insights and smarter recommendations. Joule Agents are grounded in the business context using SAP Business Data, SAP Knowledge Graph, and SAP Business Suite, integrating all SAP, non-SAP, and external data into one connected layer. This gives Joule Agents access to richer data sets for immediate answers to complex questions.

This enables Joule Agents to access a more diverse and comprehensive range of data sets for analysis, providing the CFO with prompt answers to even the most intricate business inquiries.

Solution with Joule Agents

To continue our example with Joule Agents, the employee can simply instruct Joule to address the CFO’s question, regardless of their location within the SAP ecosystem.

Joule will automatically deploy a finance agent on behalf of the employee that will:

Plan: Formulate an analysis plan and prioritize steps.
Business context: Use SAP Knowledge Graph to find and access relevant data in SAP Business Data Cloud.
Generate queries: Source existing insights and information.
Analyze: Engage unmatched set of insight applications and analytical tools using SAP Business Data Cloud to generate insight.
Customization: Create a custom insight application if one does not already exist and integrate relevant external data (net-new data enrichment and combinations).
Enterprise-wide impact: Reason over the collective data/insights, form a summarized conclusion, and provide recommendations (complex problem solving and inference).

The employee can review and add any additional context needed before sharing the recommendation with the CFO. This process drives efficiency and surfaces insights that the employee may not have considered, unlocking deeper understanding and informing smarter recommendations.

However, as any business leader knows, insights are only valuable if you can act on them. Joule Agents go beyond insights and recommendations by collaborating across functions to solve more complex business challenges.

Enterprise-Wide Impact: Cross Functional Use Case

In this example, the finance agent identifies poor cash collection as the reason for inadequate working capital performance. Speeding up cash collection involves various teams and can be time-consuming. Joule Agents simplify this process by leveraging harmonized data and process expertise.

With Joule Agents and SAP Business Data Cloud, the CFO can now ask: "What is hindering our cash collection? And how do we improve it?"

Joule uses its understanding of the cash collection process to analyze the relevant data and provide recommended steps to the CFO. After the CFO approves the proposed resolution, Joule deploys agents to execute it autonomously. This demonstrates how SAP Business Suite, SAP Business Data Cloud, and SAP Knowledge Graph support collaborative agents and cross-enterprise outcomes:

Understanding: Joule identifies a series of customer invoice disputes as the source of slow cash collection. It then classifies the disputes and identifies impacted processes and data using SAP Knowledge Graph to disambiguate terms, link concepts to entities, and ground alerts or user conversations in domain-specific knowledge.
Decision-making: Once Joule understands the disputes, it formulates a plan, deciding the sequence of steps and the agents to deploy from both the existing SAP library and any custom agents developed through Joule Studio. SAP Knowledge Graph provides the context to evaluate multiple paths forward, prioritizing the paths based on business constraints, and ensuring outcomes align with insights from SAP Business Data Cloud.
Reasoning and sharing findings: Joule gathers all relevant data and insights from SAP Business Data Cloud and reaches a conclusion using SAP Knowledge Graph to infer connections, validate assumptions, or derive logical conclusions from structured relationships. The proposed resolution is presented to the user for review and approval.
Executing resolution: Joule then activates the appropriate agents to execute specialized tasks across business functions and captures the necessary data/process notes for an entirely transparent and repeatable process.

The image illustrates multi-agent collaboration through four stages: Understanding, decision-making, reasoning and sharing findings, and executing resolution. The process starts with 'Understanding' to identify the problem using SAP Business Data Cloud, SAP Knowledge Graph, and SAP Business Suite. Then, 'Decision Making' involves selecting the sequence of steps and agents to deploy. Next, 'Reasoning & Sharing Findings' focuses on reaching conclusions and presenting results. Finally, 'Executing Resolution' activates agents across functions to execute tasks and capture the process.

In this process, Joule leverages its advanced understanding and analytical capabilities to tackle cash collection issues by identifying root causes, formulating actionable plans, reasoning with comprehensive insights, and executing resolutions efficiently. This showcases the power of integrating SAP Business Suite, SAP Business Data Cloud, and SAP Knowledge Graph in enhancing collaborative problem-solving and achieving enterprise-wide impact.

Cross-functional use cases like this are just one example. SAP enables organizations to achieve transformative efficiencies today, allowing them to reimagine their future business operations. AI's full potential can be realized by transforming business operations with Joule’s system of agents and SAP Business Data Cloud.

Conclusion

Joule Agents are AI systems uniquely grounded in your business context and data, designed to enhance productivity across various roles and functions. With capabilities such as collaboration, planning, reflection, and tool usage, they streamline and optimize operations. Their integration with SAP's unified data layer and extensive library of pre-configured skills makes them valuable digital teammates, capable of customizing to meet specific business needs, thereby ensuring a seamless operational experience.

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