SAP has announced SAP Business Data Cloud, a new data solution intended to unify all SAP and third-party data throughout an organization while providing a trusted data foundation for business insights and artificial-intelligence applications.
Cementing its new partnership with Databricks, a San Francisco-based maker of data analytics and data management software, SAP’s latest software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution marks the evolution of the company’s data, planning, and analytics suite—and significantly enhances the agentic capabilities of Joule, its generative-AI copilot.
By natively embedding Databricks’ technology for data engineering, machine learning, and AI workloads in an SAP cloud solution, SAP Business Data Cloud promises to redefine enterprise data management while empowering AI-powered applications like Joule with business process knowledge and access to high-quality data.
Bringing together SAP Datasphere, SAP Analytics Cloud, and SAP Business Warehouse in a unified experience, the solution—to be available on cloud services from Amazon, Microsoft, and Google—is designed to create a common semantical data layer that harmonizes data from mission-critical applications while breaking down business silos. It will do so with both packaged data products derived from SAP solutions and “insight applications” that leverage that data, as well as AI models connected to real-time data sources, to deliver advanced analytics and planning across multiple lines of business.
The announcement, made at SAP’s Business Unleashed event, was accompanied by the launch of ready-to-use Joule agents across finance, service, and sales functions, and by a preview of custom agent builder capabilities for Joule studio in SAP Build that will make it easier for users to build custom AI agents.
Realizing the Value of SAP Business AI
“Today, enterprises spend up to 50% of their total IT budget on data and analytics,” said SAP CEO Christian Klein during the event. “Why? Because companies face large data silos between SAP and non-SAP data, unstructured and structured data, with entire data-scientist departments focusing on trying to bring different data sources together.”
But without building a continuous, harmonized data layer for the company, these efforts often fail. “In the age of AI, more than ever, having one common semantical data layer for your business data is key,” Klein added. “Only when you can bring together your SAP and non-SAP data, your structured and unstructured data, can you totally understand your business holistically, as well as the external trends impacting it. And only then can you have a 100% reliable business data for AI, because large language models don’t have access rights to the company’s most sensitive business, nor can they fully understand the context or quality of financial, consumer, supplier, or employee data.”
To this point, “our customers are telling us that they're struggling to implement and realize the value of AI in their organizations,” Muhammad Alam, Head of Product Engineering and Member of the Executive Board of SAP SE, explained during a press briefing held before SAP Data Unleashed.
“It’s hard to get reliable, high-quality datasets across the enterprise to power this AI; many have done hundreds of proof-of-concepts but have not been able to get them to production effectively,” he added. The issue isn’t only adoption: ensuring the reliability of answers and recommendations provided by AI has been another challenge, Alam said.
The end-to-end business processes encompassed by SAP’s integrated suite of solutions contain much of the mission-critical data that AI requires to provide relevant, reliable, and responsible output for end-users. “But unless this data is harmonized across the business processes, managed and governed across your business, its value materially decreases,” Alam added.
To establish the generative-AI governance users require, strengthening their data position—ensuring data quality, governance, and semantical context is harmonized and preserved as it moves out of source applications and into LLMs—is imperative.
To that end, SAP Business Data Cloud signifies SAP’s most sizable investment yet in the concept of a data product economy, establishing semantically rich data products across business processes, such as finance, spend and supply chain data in SAP S/4HANA and SAP Ariba or learning and talent data in SAP SuccessFactors. While maintaining business context, SAP Business Data Cloud will allow organizations to access and analyze data from across source systems without the added complexities of extraction and data processing.
Said Klein: “SAP Business Data Cloud gives data-engineering teams full control and seamless access to shared data by bringing together all your SAP and non-SAP data to create semantically aligned data products, allowing your company to get out-of-the-box, reliable, and deeper analytical insights, and to unleash the full potential of your AI.”
SAP had previously integrated its solutions with Databricks’ Data Intelligence Platform, but this new partnership goes further. Discussing the “one-of-a-kind” alliance between SAP and Databricks, bringing together the data within SAP applications with Databricks’ data platform expertise, Alam said the companies will continue to co-develop capabilities to help customers unlock the power of their data in the age of AI. “With SAP and Databricks, you get the world’s most important dataset with the world’s leading data-platform capabilities,” he said.
Establishing A Unified Data Fabric
Last year, during its Business Unleashed event, SAP extended the capabilities of SAP Datasphere and SAP Analytics Cloud, enhancing two of its major data analytics solutions with generative AI, data governance, and knowledge graphing capabilities. By adding new data modeling capabilities to SAP Datasphere and vector capabilities to SAP HANA Cloud, SAP aimed to improve its data analytics solutions’ interactions with large language models (LLMs), supporting generative-AI outputs with business context and inhibiting AI-induced data hallucinations.
As an evolution of SAP Datasphere, SAP Business Data Cloud builds upon its concept of a unified business data fabric. While still connecting to various SAP and non-SAP data sources and creating pipelines between them to enhance information flow, the new solution will incorporate SAP-managed data products and be more closely integrated with planning solutions like SAP Analytics Cloud.
Through the Knowledge Graph data modeling technology in SAP Datasphere, SAP similarly made it possible to ask open-ended questions of solutions like SAP Analytics Cloud, allowing for extended planning and analysis across various datasets and further facilitating the creation of a semantically enriched data layer. With SAP Business Data Cloud serving as the evolution of SAP Datasphere, SAP moves closer to establishing a unified data fabric for customers while linking enterprise-wide data management to AI innovation, according to Alam.
That connection between SAP Datasphere and the business-AI side of SAP’s technology suite is particularly critical because the Knowledge Graph developed by SAP will serve as a semantic bridge between Joule agents and SAP Business Data Cloud and provide business context and a semantical understanding of the relationships between data sets, making it easier for its agents to identify patterns, derive insights, and reason through tasks across applications.
“With SAP Business Data Cloud, Joule will have access to more diverse and rich data sets to surface deeper insights, solve more complex business problems, and make smarter recommendations,” Klein said during the SAP Business Unleashed announcement. He highlighted Joule’s ability to enrich customers’ payment histories with third-party credit ratings, enabling it to make more intelligent payment-term recommendations.
SAP Business Data Cloud Equips AI Agents With Single Data Layer
At the event, SAP additionally showcased ready-to-use Joule agents built for SAP finance, service, and sales applications, which can speed up time-consuming processes such as claims management and customer service.
In the first quarter of 2025, SAP will make available a cash collection Joule agent that analyzes disputes and works across finance, customer service, and operations to verify information and recommend resolutions. Other Joule agents announced include a Q&A agent for sales and service that can monitor opportunities and customer cases, predicting likely questions and surfacing relevant answers; a knowledge creation agent that will automatically identify novel case resolutions and create articles detailing them to help scale expertise across organizations; and a case classification agent that evaluates case context, assessing which team a case should be assigned to before routing it their way.
This library of Joule agents will expand to encompass human resources, supply chain, spend management, and finance later in the year. “We are infusing Joule with agents for every core business function,” Klein explained. “These Joule agents can take the insights from SAP Business Data Cloud and put them into action for you, our customers. In short, we are making Joule the super-orchestrator of tomorrow.”
Collaboration between these agents and others will make Joule more effective at solving problems across cross-functional processes. “It’s not important to have billions of AI agents,” said Philipp Herzig, Chief AI Officer & Chief Technology Officer and Member of the Extended Board of SAP SE. “It's about having the right ones with the right skills, grounded in the right data, with the right guidance through SAP's end-to-end business processes, so they can work together seamlessly to break down traditional business silos.”
The company previewed new AI agent builder capabilities, to be made available at a future date, that will allow customers to extend existing Joule agents or build and deploy their own. This agent builder for Joule studio in SAP Build, a step forward for SAP’s efforts to instill a citizen-developer mentality within customers’ organizations, will work by guiding users through a no-code workflow that grounds these custom AI agents in the correct business processes and data while allowing users to tailor them to the specific problems they need to solve.
“This is the only agent builder that natively understands your business processes, deep awareness through the applications and the processes through SAP Signavio, and has out-of-the-box access to data—through SAP Business Data Cloud—that's governed and high-quality,” said Alam. “All of this, again, is enhanced and enriched by SAP Knowledge Graph, that semantically understands the relationship across these data sets; and the agent builder works not just with SAP applications but allows you to connect to non-SAP applications.”
For more information:
- SAP and Databricks Open a Bold New Era of Data and AI
- Experience SAP Business Data Cloud with the guided product tour
- Register for the upcoming webinar: “30-Minute Primer on SAP Business Data Cloud”
- Learn more about SAP Business Data Cloud
- Attend one of the upcoming SAP Business Unleashed Innovation Days