Some SAP Customers Can Run Custom Joule Agents Free Through December

Running custom agents on the SAP-managed Joule Studio runtime will remain free through December for select SAP customers, under a time-bound promotion SAP announced Tuesday at its TechEd conference. The design-time tools for building and testing agents and n8n workflows with AI-assisted development will stay free under fair-use limits, the company said in a press release.

Joule Studio is SAP’s AI-first development environment for building and extending enterprise agents, reached through Joule Work. Business users and developers can work in no-code or pro-code tools and choose from more than 70 AI models. SAP said customers in the Joule Studio early adopter program can also design and run n8n workflows inside Joule Studio, with broader availability to follow. New observability and administrative controls show developers and administrators what agents are doing, which models they use and what they spend.

“SAP TechEd has always been where builders shape what comes next,” said Philipp Herzig, CTO of SAP SE. “This year, we are showing how we are moving from AI learning your business to running it.”

A gateway for agents SAP didn’t build

SAP said third-party agents can securely invoke Joule Agents through a governed agent gateway, and that new Joule Work capabilities will help agents handle complex business processes through open protocols including Agent2Agent (A2A) and the Model Context Protocol (MCP).

A new SAP Enterprise AI Gateway will give companies one place to manage AI traffic, consolidating authentication, policy enforcement, routing, monitoring, usage tracking and auditing. SAP also introduced an AI Governance Assistant to help customers meet compliance requirements under the EU AI Act. The release gives no availability date for the gateway.

On training data, the release states that SAP “does not share customer data with anyone to train or improve large language models.”

More data tools, and a model bound for the ISS

On the data side, SAP is adding native Apache Iceberg and Apache Polaris support to its lakehouse capabilities with Dremio, along with a federated query engine meant to give unified access to data without moving or copying it. An expanded Databricks partnership brings Lakeflow, Agent Bricks, Unity Gateway and Lakebase into SAP Business Data Cloud as SAP Databricks, along with an integration between Joule and Genie.

SAP also announced SAP-RPT-2.0, the latest version of its tabular AI model, which will add anomaly and outlier detection and embeddings-based analysis on top of classification and regression. A new SAP-RPT-TS model will forecast time-indexed business metrics in SAP Integrated Business Planning without custom machine learning.

The TechEd announcements come six days after SAP reported cloud revenue up 26% and quarterly revenue above €10 billion for the first time. CEO Christian Klein said then that customers “see that Joule Work makes the business case for their transformation more attractive than ever.”

With HPE, SAP plans to run SAP-RPT on the HPE Spaceborne Computer-2 aboard the International Space Station for anomaly triage and failure prediction without sending data back to Earth. SAP, which says the model is about 50,000 times more energy-efficient than state-of-the-art LLMs, expects that deployment by early 2027.