Joule Agents are designed to help you act—not just analyze. Whether you're looking to automate a common process or solve a unique business challenge, SAP offers a spectrum of agents that range from ready-to-use to fully customizable. This lesson helps you understand when to use which type, what value they deliver, and how they fit into your broader AI strategy.
Exploring Ready-to-Use and Custom Agents
Objective
After completing this lesson, you will be able to understand how to use ready-to-use Joule Agents and build custom agents using Joule Studio to address specific business needs.
Introduction
AI Agents at SAP
SAP utilizes AI agents to enhance user interactions and automate various tasks. These agents are categorized based on their complexity and the type of runtime that they use. The AI agents interact with users through Joule, which can act as either a conversational or non-conversational trigger.
Joule scenarios emphasize simple functions with lower complexity, operating through Joule Execution Runtime and Joule Functions. Joule orchestration addresses higher complexity by managing scenario dependencies and native agenticness, incorporating chaining of functions, and generic planning.
Content-based agents use the Managed Agent Runtime to facilitate interactions with specific prompts and declarative tools, ensuring tailored planning and reasoning.
Code-based agents operate through Custom Agent Runtime, employing prompts and custom tools for optimized planning and reasoning.
Both content-based and code-based agents can have non-conversational triggers enabling collaboration within agents to solve a business problem and execute a solution.
Overall, SAP’s framework showcases a structured approach to enhancing user interaction through various levels of complexity across these AI agents. This dynamic methodology underlines SAP’s commitment to innovation, transforming how users engage with digital systems through specialized planning and reasoning functions.
Ready-to-use Joule Agents: Fast Value, Embedded Intelligence
SAP provides a growing library of ready-to-use Joule Agents that are embedded across SAP applications for every business function. These agents are designed to execute designated tasks across these business functions.
They can be seamlessly integrated into existing systems to automate operations such as finance, customer engagement, and marketing initiatives, delivering immediate value with minimal customization requirements.
These agents are designed to:
- Automate complex, multi-step workflows
- Collaborate across business functions
- Deliver contextual insights and recommendations
- Act autonomously or with human-in-the-loop oversight
Watch: Highlight Joule Agent Demos
To bring these capabilities to life, here are three embedded demos that showcase how Joule Agents solve real-world challenges:
Accounting Accruals Agent
Automates the accruals process by identifying missing entries, proposing corrections, and triggering workflows.
Dispute Resolution Agent
Accelerates resolution of customer invoice disputes by analyzing root causes and coordinating actions across teams.
Sourcing Agent
Streamlines supplier selection by analyzing requirements, evaluating vendors, and recommending optimal sourcing strategies.
See here for all the latest information on Joule Agents
See Feature Catalogue to discover the latest available Joule Agents.
Custom Joule Agents: Tailored for your needs
While ready-to-use agents cover many common scenarios, SAP also empowers you to build your own agents using Joule Studio’s no-code Agent Builder. These agents can be tailored to meet your unique business needs.
The benefits of custom agents include:
- Flexibility: Custom agents can be tailored to address specific operational challenges not covered by ready-to-use solutions.
- Innovation: Organizations can continuously innovate and adapt their AI solutions based on evolving business needs.
- Integration: Custom agents can operate across both SAP and non-SAP applications, ensuring comprehensive integration.
Comparison of Ready-to-use and Custom Agents
| Feature | Ready-to-use Agents | Custom Agents |
|---|---|---|
| Purpose | General business challenges | Specific business needs |
| Development | Pre-built by SAP | Created by users using no-code tools |
| Deployment | Immediate deployment | Agent builder enables no-code deployment |
| Flexibility | Limited to predefined tasks | Highly adaptable to unique needs |
| Integration | Works across SAP functions | Can integrate with SAP and non-SAP applications |
Overall, ready-to-use Joule agents help you realize value quickly by automating well-defined tasks.
Custom agents empower you to innovate, differentiate, and scale AI across your enterprise.
Together, they form a powerful continuum—allowing you to start fast and grow smart.
Joule Studio Agent Builder
Joule Studio's Agent Builder lets businesses create custom AI agents without coding, using SAP's business process expertise and data integration. Here's how it works.
Joule Studio's Agent Builder simplifies the creation of custom AI agents, empowering businesses with tailored AI solutions without the need for coding.
With Joule Studio's Agent Builder, businesses can efficiently create, equip, and deploy custom AI agents tailored to their specific needs, enhancing productivity and operational efficiency.
Business Transformation with Joule Agents
AI agents are a result of decades of technological evolution, which is accelerating now because of advances in generative AI and computing. Their potential is not only in utilizing AI and technology to deliver incremental productivity gains but to transform or disrupt the entire industries and markets.
Businesses across the world are now feeling the need for transforming their operations and models to take advantage of this next wave or they are at a risk of losing out to their competitors who are adopting these technologies.
SAP is uniquely positioned to help businesses leverage the full promise of AI agents. SAP Business Suite powers Joule Agents with our unmatched understanding of business processes, access to all the most relevant and contextually rich data in your enterprise, and the ability to act in every corner of your business. It is the combination of SAP Knowledge Graph, SAP Business Data Cloud, and the SAP business applications that makes Joule Agents uniquely capable of delivering cross-enterprise outcomes.
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.