SAP Schweiz, the Swiss subsidiary of the German business software vendor SAP, has presented Joule Work in Zurich, a new interface for its enterprise resource planning (ERP) suite in which artificial intelligence (AI) agents carry out the work the user assigns to them. According to the specialist website Inside IT, which reported on the "SAP Now AI Tour" on 6 November 2026, around fifty Swiss companies are testing SAP Joule Work as pilot customers. Part of the offering, however, remains announced rather than available to everyone.
How does Joule Work operate?
Joule Work replaces navigating between screens with a request phrased in everyday language. SAP describes it in its presentation of 13 May 2026, signed by Brenda Bown, chief marketing officer of SAP Business AI. Users tell Joule what they want to achieve, without opening each application themselves.
The work is then split across two levels. "Joule Assistants", organised by function and equipped with the context of the role and the process, coordinate teams of "Joule Agents". These agents look for the relevant information and automate repetitive tasks across departments and systems. The workspace is assembled in real time, with data and menus drawn from several applications.
Joule Work comes in three forms of access, according to the innovation news guide published by SAP on 12 May 2026:
- a cloud-hosted web client, for tasks linked to online business applications;
- a desktop application installed on the computer, which can use local files and applications, analyse documents, search files and e-mails and draft documents;
- a mobile application, which succeeds the SAP Mobile Start app.
The tool is not limited to SAP software. The guide states that Joule Work can serve as a single interface for SAP and non-SAP systems. With Joule Studio, customers build their own agents, which use the MCP (Model Context Protocol) and A2A (Agent2Agent) protocols. The latter is meant to allow agents from other vendors to call Joule Agents within company processes.
What role is left for humans?
In SAP's vision, humans set the course and the machine executes. The vendor sums up its "Autonomous Enterprise" this way: "people set the direction and AI executes". In Zurich, Alexander Finger, chief technology officer (CTO) of SAP Schweiz, described the same idea according to Inside IT: humans set the goals, then AI systems act on their own to achieve them.
SAP highlights its business know-how as a safeguard. André Bechtold, president of SAP Industries & Experiences, explained that the vendor feeds the AI with industry knowledge and regulatory requirements. He said it draws on the experience of more than 400,000 customers in more than 180 countries.
Control also relies on governance tools. SAP states that approval workflows, compliance, identity management and the ability to audit decisions must apply to AI. Its SAP AI Agent Hub is used to inventory and oversee agents, both SAP's own and those of other vendors. These are the vendor's statements: the pages consulted cite no independent assessment of these safeguards.
What is available and what is announced
The timeline published by SAP in May 2026 clearly distinguishes what exists from what is planned:
| Item | Status stated by SAP in May 2026 |
|---|---|
| Joule Work mobile application | Available to all customers |
| Joule Work (excluding the mobile application) | Restricted to the SAP Early Adopter Care programme; general availability planned for the second half of 2026 |
| Joule Work desktop application | Early Adopter Care programme planned for the second quarter of 2026; general availability planned for the second half of 2026 |
| Joule Work and A2A functions | General availability planned for the fourth quarter of 2026 |
| New Joule Assistants and Joule Agents | Gradual rollout until the end of 2026 |
| SAP AI Agent Hub | Available, with functions added over the course of 2026 |
Inside IT's account matches this timeline. SAP Schweiz still talks about pilot customers there, not about a product rolled out to all its customers.
Roche and Swiss Post, first Swiss feedback
The pharmaceutical group Roche is one of the pilot customers. Erjena Keller, global head of ERP systems management, said that Roche migrated its business systems to a private cloud (Private Cloud) in June, as part of its "Aspire" programme. Three months later, the first AI agent was in service. It helps customer service at the Genentech division optimise order processing.
Swiss Post has also completed its migration to the SAP cloud, according to Christos Mitos, head of IT for corporate services. However, it uses AI primarily in software development. Christos Mitos said he was open to SAP's approach: in the past, Swiss Post modified its systems to optimise a process; in future, it wants to change the way it works with them.
Alexander Finger added that Nestlé and Novartis have bought into SAP Schweiz's AI vision. The Inside IT article does not specify what these two groups are actually deploying.
What SAP Joule changes for Swiss companies running SAP
The cloud becomes the gateway. SAP's guide presents these tools as available in the public or private cloud ERP. It makes no mention of installation on the customer's own servers. The two Swiss examples follow the same order: Roche and Swiss Post migrated to the SAP cloud before talking about agents.
Business data feeds the agents. According to SAP, Joule Agents reason over company data thanks to the SAP Knowledge Graph, SAP Business Data Cloud and the new SAP Domain Models. The vendor states that these models are trained on SAP code, customer data, metadata and business processes. The desktop application, for its part, accesses local files and e-mails. Before activating these functions, a legal department will want to know which data is used for what.
Licensing remains unclear. SAP details neither the price nor the licensing terms of Joule Work in its presentation of 13 May 2026, nor in its innovation news guide.
The maintenance timeline weighs on the decision. In its press release of 4 February 2020, SAP set its deadlines for the core applications of SAP Business Suite 7, including SAP ERP 6.0:
- mainstream maintenance until the end of 2027;
- optional extended maintenance from 2028 to the end of 2030, at a premium of two percentage points on the maintenance basis;
- without this choice by the end of 2027, an automatic switch to customer-specific maintenance, which handles known issues at an unchanged fee;
- for SAP S/4HANA, the ERP that succeeds it, a maintenance commitment until the end of 2040.
For a Swiss company still on SAP ERP 6.0, migrating to S/4HANA and gaining access to agents therefore become one and the same question. The Roche case shows one possible sequence: migrate first, then launch a first agent within a few months.
SMEs that do not work with SAP will rather look for simpler uses, presented on our page AI for SMEs and in the AI in business section. SAP is not alone in this field: 2clics has already covered OpenAI's autonomous agents, Google's Gemini Agents and a report on AI agents in European SMEs.
What we do not know yet
- The price of Joule Work and the licences required of Swiss customers: SAP has not published them.
- Whether the general availability planned for the fourth quarter of 2026 is actually happening: SAP Schweiz was still talking about pilots in early November.
- How many of the roughly 50 Swiss pilot customers already have agents working in production.
