At Sapphire in May 2026, SAP gathered its agent strategy under the heading of the autonomous enterprise. Underneath sits a shared layer for building, contextualising and governing AI agents, plus more than fifty ready-made Joule Assistants that orchestrate over two hundred specialised agents across finance, supply chain, human resources, procurement and customer processes. All of them are tied to the Knowledge Graph, which anchors them in real business objects and process flows rather than in freely generated answers.
For mid-sized companies the operating logic matters more than the feature list: one common approach to governance and lifecycle for every agent, instead of scattered point solutions per department. The Autonomous Close Assistant aims straight at the length of the period-end close. Anyone already running S/4HANA Cloud can start incrementally from the third quarter of 2026, and should first define how far agents may act alone and where staff confirmation stays in place.