SAP has evolved its AI commercial model to provide simplicity, cost predictability, and automatic scalability. Understanding this model helps you plan your investment and articulate the value proposition to stakeholders.
The SAP Business AI Commercial Model
SAP Business AI uses a hybrid commercial model that combines per-user access for premium AI capabilities with AI Units as the virtual currency. This approach addresses common challenges with AI pricing by simplifying metrics, enabling cost predictability, and supporting automatic scalability as new capabilities are added.
AI Units are a consumption-based virtual currency that provides access to SAP Business AI services across SAP solutions. Customers purchase AI Units annually and draw from a central pool with flexible usage across multiple products. AI Units can now be purchased directly from the SAP Store for quick, self-service activation.
Base AI versus Premium AI
Joule Base includes navigational, informational, transactional, and simple analytical capabilities. These are included with your SAP product licensing and do not require AI Units. All currently released SAP SuccessFactors and SAP S/4HANA Private Cloud Edition Joule Skills are categorized as Base.
Joule Premium includes advanced transactional capabilities with access to embedded AI features and dedicated high-value Joule features, advanced analytical capabilities such as AI-assisted calculations and advanced formula generation, and agent actions executed by Joule Agents. Premium capabilities require AI Units.
Joule Premium Capability packages are a good fit when you want to:
- Reduce disruptions, automate planning, speed execution in Supply Chain
- Improve HR efficiency, boost employee self-service, reduce manual tasks in Human Resource
- Strengthen financial accuracy, accelerate close tasks, enhance controls in Financial Management
- Help sellers and agents work faster, increase personalization, improve CX outcomes in Customer Experience
- Improve spend visibility, enforce policies, streamline sourcing and expense tasks in Spend Management
AI Assistants in Joule are part of the experience layer and are not commercialized separately. They come as part of your core Joule entitlement. The Joule Agents that each assistant coordinates are commercialized within premium AI capability packages.
For more details on base and premium capabilities, please navigate to SAP Business AI packages and pricing.
Per-User-Per-Month Packages
Premium AI capabilities are available through Per-User-Per-Month packages that provide predictable, user-based pricing. Each package includes a fair use limit of requests per user per month.
Example: Activating Users and Managing Overage Consumption
To make the Per-User-Per-Month model more tangible, let’s walk through a real world example that shows how user assignments and usage based overages are calculated within a single month.
Starting Point: AI Units and Activation
In this scenario, a customer purchases 500 AI Units.
Using SAP for Me, the customer opens the Activation Dashboard and activates two premium capability packages:
- Joule Premium for Human Capital Management (HCM)
- Joule Premium for Customer Experience (CX)
After activation, the customer is automatically directed to SAP Cloud Identity Services (IAS) to assign users.
User Assignment During the Month
At the start of the month, the customer assigns:
- 10 Users to Joule Premium for HCM
- 10 Users to Joule Premium for CX
Later in the same month, the customer assigns 10 additional users to the HCM package, increasing the total to 20 HCM users.
With the Per‑User‑Per‑Month model, billing is based on the highest number of assigned users (the high-watermark) during the month, and not when the users were added.
Calculating Package Consumption
Each capability package consumes AI Units based on the number of assigned users:
- HCM: 20 users × 0.5 AI Units per user = 10 AI Units
- CX: 10 users × 8 AI Units per user = 80 AI Units
At this point, total package consumption is 90 AI Units.
Learn how Joule pricing works through clear, real-world consumption examples. All assignments, consumption details, overages, and remaining balance are clearly visible in SAP for Me, giving customers full transparency and control.
This example also highlights two important aspects of the Per-User-Per-Month model: pricing scales with the number of assigned users, with larger deployments benefiting from more favorable rates, and any usage beyond the included request limits is transparently charged as overages at 2 AI Units per 1,000 requests.
Agent Pricing
Agent usage is measured in steps, and each step consumes requests from the user’s package or AI Units directly for consumption-based scenarios.
For users within a Per-User-Per-Month package, Basic Agents consume 5 requests per step, Standard Agents consume 10 requests per step, and Advanced Agents consume 25 requests per step. These requests are drawn from the user’s fair use pool.
For consumption-based scenarios such as customer-built agents in Joule Studio or agents not included in a package, Basic Agents consume 0.005 AI Units per step, Standard Agents consume 0.01 AI Units per step, and Advanced Agents consume 0.025 AI Units per step.
Customer-built agents generally fall into the Basic category at present, with fewer steps required for simpler tasks.
Activating Premium AI
To start using Premium AI, two steps are required. First, SAP activates your selected AI capability package in SAP for Me after you purchase AI Units and create a support ticket. Second, you assign named users to the activated package in SAP Cloud Identity Services (SAP Help Documentation).
Customers can monitor AI Unit consumption, view detailed breakdowns by package, and track usage for each feature through SAP for Me. The customer overview page displays total assigned users, number of requests, and related charges.
Commercial Tools and Resources
SAP provides several tools to help you estimate and manage AI costs. The Business AI Feature Catalog and AI Unit Estimator allow you to explore AI features, estimate AI unit requirements, and request quotes. The AI Features Guide Price List provides an overview of available AI capabilities and their associated pricing with important details on how requests are counted for each feature. In addition, you can calculate your savings with SAP Business AI with the Value Calculator.
You can also see an overview of SAP Business AI Commercial Model.
Summary
- SAP Business AI uses a hybrid model combining per-user packages with consumption-based AI Units
- Joule Base capabilities are included with product licensing; Joule Premium requires AI Units
- Per-User-Per-Month packages provide predictable pricing with fair use limits and tiered pricing based on user volume
- Agent usage is measured in steps, with different consumption rates for Basic, Standard, and Advanced agents
- Use the Business AI Feature Catalog, AI Unit Estimator, and SAP for Me to estimate costs and monitor consumption