AI and SAP for SMEs: Joule, costs and interfaces

What SAP means by Business AI

Since SAP Sapphire in May 2026, SAP has bundled its AI offerings in SAP Business AI Platform. It unifies Business Technology Platform (BTP), SAP Business Data Cloud and SAP Business AI. Four building blocks matter:

• Joule: the AI assistant in SAP applications for questions, navigation and information. Since October 2026, SAP has been rolling out Joule Work, where staff describe tasks in their own words.
• Joule Agents and Joule Assistants: agents run defined multi-step workflows, assistants coordinate them. SAP has announced over 50 assistants with over 200 agents, for example for the financial close.
• Joule Studio: the environment for your own agents and workflows, with a choice of more than 70 AI models, SAP says.
• SAP Business Data Cloud: the data platform introduced in February 2025, combining SAP and third-party data and meant to give Joule business context.

Joule: where it runs and what it costs

Joule is a BTP application embedded in SAP cloud products. The onboarding documentation requires a licence for an SAP product that supports Joule integration. Guides exist for SAP S/4HANA Cloud (Public and Private Edition), SuccessFactors, Ariba, Concur, Fieldglass, Analytics Cloud and Datasphere, among others; S/4HANA on-premise, ECC, Business One and ByDesign are missing. Billing has three layers:

For “later this year”, without a specific date, SAP announces that most generative AI features now needing AI Units will move into Base AI at no extra cost; the per-user Joule Premium packages are being retired and Premium AI will focus on agents. In May 2026, SAP also announced that RISE with SAP includes access to the Joule Assistants, three of them activated in the first year, while SAP GROW, the offering for growing businesses, provides the full portfolio at onboarding.

ECC and S/4HANA on-premise: maintenance and AI

For SAP ERP 6.0 (ECC) and the other core applications of SAP Business Suite 7, the 2020 dates stand: mainstream maintenance until 31 December 2027, then optional extended maintenance until 31 December 2030 at two percentage points on top of the maintenance basis. Customers who do not opt for it by the end of 2027 move to customer-specific maintenance automatically. In October 2026, SAP added that support agreements for third-party databases and Java also end in 2030. Systems on third-party databases can then no longer be converted to S/4HANA or SAP Cloud ERP, only re-implemented. For 2031 to 2033, SAP offers the “Transition Option for SAP ERP”, a time-bound subscription for the largest and most complex customers whose move is already underway. Their systems must be on SAP ERP, private edition on SAP HANA before 31 December 2030, and further eligibility requirements apply.

Base AI is included in every SAP cloud subscription, SAP says; the pricing page does not mention on-premise licences. In its press release of 12 May 2026, however, SAP states that S/4HANA on-premise and ECC customers are “not excluded”: those committing to move most of their landscape to SAP Cloud ERP gain access to selected AI scenarios. SAP’s Max Success Plan service is also meant to let customers adopt AI at their own pace, including on eligible on-premise systems as they move to the cloud. These announcements give no full list of scenarios.

Generative AI Hub: models on the SAP platform

For your own AI applications, SAP offers the Generative AI Hub in SAP AI Core, a BTP service. It provides language models from different vendors under one management layer:

• Hosted by SAP: open models on SAP infrastructure with an OpenAI-compatible interface, including models from Mistral.
• At hyperscalers: OpenAI via Azure OpenAI, Anthropic Claude and Amazon Nova via AWS Bedrock, Google Gemini via Vertex AI. In its Q1 2026 release highlights, SAP names new models such as GPT 5.2, Gemini 3.0 Pro, Claude Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6.
• Further vendors: NVIDIA, Cohere, Perplexity and Prior Labs, plus SAP’s SAP-RPT-1 tabular models for predictions from business data.
• Announced in May 2026: models from Mistral AI and Cohere as a sovereign option on SAP infrastructure; Claude is to become one of the models powering Joule Agents.

Billing is by consumption in BTP capacity units, converted per model as listed in SAP Note 3437766. The hub is part of the extended service plan, with a free 30-day trial, and includes modules for content filtering, anonymisation and grounding on your own documents. Processing location depends on model and region; SAP offers document grounding for Joule in Frankfurt and the Netherlands, for instance. Before using personal data, check location and data processing agreement; see the guide to AI and the GDPR.

SAP Business One and ByDesign: what SAP documents

SAP Business One

With Feature Package 2608 (documentation dated 3 August 2026), SAP Business One gained AI additions including the following, the first two in the web client:

• Ask AI: in nearly all list and detail views, you can ask about the record on screen, such as shipping time and costs in a sales order. The AI answers from the data supplied, its general knowledge and public internet information.
• AI-assisted user-defined queries: from a plain-language description, the AI generates an SQL SELECT query that you review and run.
• MCP server: an open-source MCP (Model Context Protocol) server connects AI agents to the Service Layer; SAP provides sample code.

You need your own SAP AI Core instance on BTP; administrators enter its service key and resource group and choose the model, such as gpt-5. According to SAP, the AI cannot read or change Business One data itself. For query generation, metadata such as your prompt, table relationships and naming conventions goes to the model, but no records. Administrators should first check that contracts, data processing agreements and data residency rules cover this.

SAP Business ByDesign

For ByDesign, SAP documents embedded AI and machine learning. Intelligent Invoice Scanning reads PDF supplier invoices via Document Information Extraction and proposes values, with no separate licence. The mobile app turns business cards captured by camera into contacts. The Machine Learning Cockpit builds prediction models with the SAP HANA library PAL, and the data stays in the tenant. Joule appears neither in the ByDesign documentation for release 2608 nor among the Joule integrations.

Connecting your own AI: the official interfaces

For your own AI on SAP, such as an agent checking order status or document recognition proposing postings, use documented interfaces only:

• SAP S/4HANA, cloud and on-premise: SAP lists the public APIs in SAP Business Accelerator Hub, as OData (versions 2 and 4) and SOAP. The Public Edition uses communication arrangements. Authentication is by password, X.509 certificate, OAuth 2.0 or SAML, depending on the API.
• SAP ERP 6.0 (ECC): BAPIs, standardised methods of SAP business objects that external programs call via RFC.
• SAP Business One: the Service Layer, based on HTTP and OData (versions 3 and 4). Programs log in with company database, user and password; views and SQL queries are available to authorised users only.
• SAP Business ByDesign: OData services that can be modelled on business objects with the OData Service Modeler, plus web services.

I recommend a technical user with exactly the rights the use case needs: read-only at first, write access only after approval and with logging. That is how I build AI agents. For incoming invoices and other documents, see AI document processing.

The licensing question: indirect access to SAP

When third-party software, a bot or an AI agent works with SAP, SAP calls it Indirect/Digital Access. Under SAP’s contractual definition for on-premise software, any use requires a licence, however it is accessed. For SAP ERP and S/4HANA, SAP introduced a document-based model in April 2018:

• Licensing is based on nine document types: sales, invoice, purchase, service and maintenance, manufacturing, quality management, time management, material and financial. Other document types cost nothing extra.
• Only creating the initial document counts; reading, updating, deleting and automatic follow-on documents cost nothing extra.
• Weighting: most documents count 1, frequent lower-value ones 0.2.
• Existing customers could keep their contract, exchange licences or convert, SAP says.

SAP’s own AI or your own solution?

The two routes can be combined. If you are moving to the SAP cloud anyway, check first what Base AI and Joule Assistants cover. If you stay on ECC or S/4HANA on-premise, or automate beyond SAP, your own connection is more direct, as SAP’s own AI is tied to the cloud move there. A custom connection is a software project with an interface, a permission concept and logging; more under software development.