110,000 employees. That’s how many people at SAP already use Joule Work, SAP’s new AI interface, and SAP reports 20% productivity gains in finance, HR and procurement (SAP News, 6 October 2026). Customers are next. Joule Work has started its customer rollout, and SAP’s Joule Assistants are coming to finance, supply chain, HR and procurement.
Most of the discussion is about what this means for business users. Less is said about the people who keep SAP running: the application support team.
What SAP is putting into your system
According to SAP, Joule Assistants “execute operational work directly within business workflows, using established data, authorizations and audit trails.” Customers decide how much the assistants may do on their own. SAP also offers a central list of all AI agents in a company, the AI Agent Hub in SAP LeanIX. And through the Agent2Agent protocol, Joule can work with AI agents from other vendors, so not every agent in your landscape will come from SAP.
In other words, the agents work inside your SAP system, with the same authorizations and logs as a user.
What changes for a support team
- Fewer “how do I” tickets. When users can ask Joule a question in their own language, some of the questions that now reach the service desk will never be raised.
- A new kind of ticket. When an agent changes a record, someone will ask why. Support needs to be able to read the audit trail and explain what the agent did and on whose authority.
- Agent settings become configuration. How much an agent may do on its own is a setting, like any other customising. Changes to it should go through the same change process, with testing and sign-off.
- More attention on data. An agent working from wrong master data makes the same mistake many times, and faster. Data quality becomes part of daily support work.
Four things to do before the agents arrive
None of these need new tools. A good support team should already work this way, and agents make it more important.
- Keep a list of active agents. Support can’t fix what it doesn’t know is running. Use SAP’s agent inventory, or a simple register, and keep it up to date.
- Agree who owns each agent. Every agent needs a business owner who decides what it may do, and a support contact who knows how it works.
- Fix recurring incidents first. In our support work, most incidents trace back to a small number of root causes. Removing those causes is worth more than automating the fix.
- Plan user training. Agents change how people work. Users who don’t understand what an agent does will either ignore it or trust it too much.
Where our support model fits
Our BEST subscription for SAP support was built around the same habits. For a fixed monthly price, it includes daily monitoring, an analysis of all incidents from the past three months to find the biggest causes, quarterly notes on new SAP IBP features that matter to your business, and user training twice a year.
Those are also the routines a company needs when AI agents start working in its SAP system: someone watching the system every day, someone looking for patterns in incidents, someone tracking what SAP releases, and users who know how to work with the tools.
We’ve written before about SAP’s approach to AI-powered customer support, and today about what the new Joule agents mean for planners.
Want to know how BEST would work for you?
The subscription comes in three packages, from 12 support days a year up to a full-time dedicated consultant. See how BEST works →