Top 5 things to know from SAP TechEd 2026

Today, at SAP TechEd 2026, we introduced new capabilities to orchestrate AI agents, accelerate agent development, ground AI in business context, and govern AI at the scale organizations need.

Teams can use many of these innovations today, along with additional capabilities that arrive in the coming months, to expand how they embed AI into business processes with the control, transparency, and reliability required to accelerate outcomes.

Five announcements define the moment

• Joule Work now leverages enterprise-grade agentic thinking that reasons, plans, and executes across SAP and non-SAP systems.
• Joule Studio shortens the path from idea to production-grade deployment for custom AI solutions.
• A comprehensive context layer gives AI the business grounding it needs to reason across the business.
• Governance is becoming a continuous, auditable part of the architecture from day one.
• SAP and partners help close the gap between AI ambition and AI readiness.

These announcements reflect the latest evolution of our work to reduce friction, preserve context, and make it easier for every organization to build, extend, and govern intelligent systems at scale and become an Autonomous Enterprise.

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Joule Work, the new UI for AI—and the driving force behind the Autonomous Enterprise—now features a new, significantly more powerful orchestration capability.

The expanded capability broadens the range of business problems Joule Work can address while maintaining the reliability enterprises need to run agent-driven workflows in production. Built-in governance features—like audit trails, role-based permissions, and human-in-the-loop checkpoints—give enterprises the control they need to deploy agentic AI that’s reliable and trusted.

The new orchestration capability works alongside the recently expanded SAP Knowledge Graph. Together, they help Joule Work handle more complex, customer-specific problems—with the reliability needed for agent-driven workflows at scale.

Governed agent-to-agent interoperability enables a third-party agent to call a Joule Agent. A single, governed entry point lets agents from different providers participate in the same business workflow, with access control enforced throughout.

Why it matters: Joule Work enables agentic AI across business workflows

For CIOs and business leaders, built-in security and governance features help build trust in autonomous decisions, addressing a central barrier to scaling agentic AI.

For IT decision makers and enterprise architects, the secure agent-to-agent gateway helps organizations get more from AI investments across a multivendor landscape. It governs interactions between SAP and non-SAP agents, allowing agents from different providers to collaborate in the same workflow while maintaining oversight and control.

Joule Studio, accessible directly through Joule Work, allows business users to build Joule Agents using natural language prompts and developers to use pro-code. Business users shape requirements while developers build and refine solutions, with everything moving through a governed pipeline before reaching production. New agent lifecycle management capabilities enable teams to innovate quickly while IT maintains oversight.

Joule Studio now offers role-based access so business users can define requirements in the web experience while developers refine generated components in their preferred development environment or the Joule Studio command-line interface (CLI) tool, giving users the ability to build agents and n8n workflows in a single unified environment.

The CLI supports intent-based development, setting up connections, development skills, and authorizations in one step, with requirements available as structured project files. Agents built in Joule Studio can be deployed to Joule Studio runtime, surfaced in SAP AI Agent Hub, and accessed in Joule Work conversations.

A built-in sandbox lets teams test agents before deployment using queries, execution traces, and automatically generated tests. Planned offline evaluations will help teams check accuracy, A2A correctness, and resistance to prompt injection attacks. They can test changes in isolation before rolling them out.

Why it matters: Joule Studio accelerates AI assistant and AI agent development

For CIOs and business leaders, Joule Studio’s governance-first approach addresses top concerns around compliance and risk.

For IT and enterprise architects, role-based access and agent lifecycle management give teams autonomy without losing oversight.

For developers and partners, intent-based development means less time on infrastructure setup and more time to focus on agent logic and business value. Deployment on Joule Studio runtime makes agents discoverable and accessible where business users already work.

Additionally, Joule Studio enhancements will give developers the business context they need to more easily turn business intent into enterprise solutions. Developers can enter their intent, and Joule Studio helps identify processes, data and APIs; map system relationships; account for authorizations; and translate business requirements into a solution. It does this through its integration with SAP LeanIX, SAP Signavio and SAP Knowledge Graph solutions, as well as SAP Domain Models.

AI is only as good as the data and context it reasons over. But assembling fragmented context can take months of effort before a single useful agent runs. SAP Business AI Platform is designed to help teams realize value faster. Innovations announced at SAP TechEd 2026 strengthen this capability further with broader data access, richer business context, and new intelligence for structured data.

SAP will expand its lakehouse capabilities with native Apache Iceberg support and a distributed SQL query engine. Capabilities from Dremio, now part of SAP, will help customers use SAP and third-party data for analytics and AI

SAP Knowledge Graph will incorporate additional customer-specific SAP and non-SAP sources to help AI assistants and agents reason more accurately. The new SAP Business Data Cloud Ontology Manager will complement this capability with AI-assisted tools for curating domain-specific ontologies—reusable business context for AI applications and agents.

Two additions to the SAP-RPT model family will help enterprises act on structured data with less data preparation and model training effort. SAP-RPT-TS brings out-of-the-box time-series forecasting to use cases such as demand planning in SAP Integrated Business Planning. SAP-RPT-Decisions helps automate decisions in agentic workflows, such as approving orders or routing supply chain exceptions.

Why it matters: Business context is essential for trusted enterprise AI

Enterprise AI needs to understand how business data, relationships, and processes fit together. These capabilities give IT leaders a foundation to build on, while helping developers reuse context and models across agent projects. Broader data access, customer-specific context, and models designed for structured data will help teams build agents grounded in how their businesses actually operate.

Reliable AI agents need systems that are classified and documented, knowledge that is governed and version-controlled, and data interfaces built to understand intent. Together, these capabilities address this foundational requirement of the Autonomous Enterprise.

Built on SAP Integration Suite, the new SAP Enterprise AI Gateway centralizes and standardizes management of AI traffic (for example, MCPs, APIs, A2As and LLMs) across the enterprise. It consolidates authentication, policy enforcement, routing, monitoring, usage tracking and auditing in a single managed layer.

In SAP AI Agent Hub, the AI Governance Assistant supports timely EU AI Act assessments by continuously flagging documentation and classification gaps, pre-filling assessment fields, and triggering reassessment when records change materially. Its outputs will be framed as drafts for legal and compliance review.

A new architecture context capability, available through SAP LeanIX, will let enterprise architects ground Joule Agent recommendations in approved standards and technical decisions. It connects and synthesizes architecture standards, landscape data, decisions, and documentation as context for agents, with human approval and governed reuse. A knowledge intake agent will extract principles from uploaded documents, propose connections in the SAP LeanIX graph, and route them for human approval before reuse.

The SAP Sovereign Cloud portfolio will grow with new support on Amazon Web Services (AWS) for the SAP AI Core foundation, Joule solution and SAP Datasphere solution. This will help regulated industries—including government, financial services, healthcare and defense—meet local security and compliance requirements.

Why it matters: AI governance helps scale AI responsibly across the enterprise

These capabilities help IT, security, and compliance leaders manage AI risk as systems evolve. Assessments connected to an agent inventory support ongoing review, while centralized traffic management improves visibility into access, usage, and costs. Approved architecture context gives people and agents a shared basis for decisions.

For developers, a standardized gateway makes it easier to discover MCP servers, access tools consistently, and reuse existing APIs and integration flows when building agents.

Closing the gap between AI ambition and readiness requires skilled teams and a clear adoption plan. Innovations announced at SAP TechEd 2026 support both with new certifications and an enhanced RISE with SAP Methodology.

The new SAP Business AI Platform Solution Architect certification validates architects’ ability to design solutions across the platform’s three pillars: build, contextualize and reason, and govern. The Joule Studio Developer certification validates skills in building custom AI agents, applications, and workflows, including moving from a business idea to a deployable agent through intent-based development. Candidates can claim a free Joule Studio certification through December 31, 2026.

An enhanced RISE with SAP Methodology puts AI at the center of the customer journey through personalized onboarding, AI-enriched implementation guidance, and a readiness assessment that maps business priorities to AI use cases and produces an adoption roadmap.

Why it matters: Skills, certifications, and adoption planning accelerate AI readiness

For business and IT leaders, these updates connect technical readiness to business priorities—helping teams decide where to start and how to track value. For partners, developers, and architects, the certifications provide a path to validate agent development and platform design skills, while the free Joule Studio exam voucher lowers the cost of getting certified.