At Sapphire 2026 on May 12, SAP CEO Christian Klein asked whether SAP would still be a software company in the future. The answer he offered was the Autonomous Enterprise: a rebuilt SAP Business AI Platform with more than 200 specialized agents and over 50 domain assistants.
Claude sits in the most valuable part of that stack. SAP’s Joule assistant is becoming Joule Agents, with Claude handling the reasoning, planning and tool use across S/4HANA, SuccessFactors and Ariba. The examples were deliberately operational: close the books, calculate leave across countries, reroute supplier orders and prepare CFO briefings from live data.
SAP is not tying itself to one vendor. Microsoft, AWS, Google Cloud, Palantir and NVIDIA all appear in the Sapphire stack. But Anthropic wins the default brain for many workflows, at a moment when SAP’s share price has fallen sharply and thousands of ECC customers face a 2027 maintenance deadline.
Sources: SAP News Center; The Next Web; Analytics India Magazine; CocoLoop