October 6, 2026 • 7 min read
SAP Unveils New AI Assistants, Advances Its Autonomous CX Vision
Director of Content & Market Research
October 6, 2026
SAP has debuted several new and improved Joule Assistants for SAP Customer Experience, building on its Autonomous CX vision.
That Autonomous CX vision confronts today’s reality where brands manage customer experiences through disconnected systems, fragmented data, and manual coordination across teams.
As an alternative, SAP wants to deliver a cohesive, autonomous system that can understand context, anticipate needs, take action, and continuously learn across marketing, commerce, sales, and service.
It’s an ambitious vision, and SAP is far from the only CRM vendor pursuing it.
What sets SAP apart, however, is the breadth of the enterprise it already touches.
Beyond CX, the company owns critical parts of the enterprise technology stack spanning supply chain, order management, human capital management, finance, and beyond.
That gives SAP a direct connection to the operational systems and data that underpin the customer experience, which its competitors lack.
As Jessica Keehn, CMO of SAP CX, puts it, this allows the company to “start from the operational truth of the business.”
“Every customer interaction is connected to what's happening across the enterprise, whether that's inventory availability, supply chain constraints, financial implications, fulfillment capacity, or service resources. That means AI isn't making decisions in isolation. It's acting with a complete understanding of the business.”
Against this operational backdrop, SAP’s opportunity is to build AI assistants that deliver not just useful answers, but more deterministic, reliable actions.
That distinction matters in CRM, where AI can influence decisions with direct financial consequences, from discounting and quoting to retention plays.
Consider an example of that distinction in action. Many CRM providers will support organizations in delivering an AI agent that draws on coaching data, often from a third-party solution like Gong, to recommend ways for a salesperson to hit their quota. That’s valuable.
But SAP goes a step further. Its Joule Assistants can actively prevent an excessive discount or flag an unprofitable deal before it happens. That's an intervention that directly protects the bottom line.
Ultimately, use cases like these are where SAP’s broader enterprise ecosystem becomes a competitive advantage.
Rather than requiring brands to build and manage agentic workflows across multiple systems and vendors, SAP can deliver them in-house, pre-packaged through its Joule Assistants.
“By grounding AI in a richer, more connected data foundation, SAP can surface precise information faster and enable more reliable decisions than simply layering probabilistic AI or coaching data onto the CRM.”
“The value isn’t just better assistance; it's greater confidence in decisions that materially affect revenue and profitability,” said Schneider.
Some of SAP’s newly released and improved Joule Assistants bring Schneider’s point to life.
The New & Improved Joule Assistants Announced at SAP Connect 2026
Ahead of its Connect 2026 event, SAP stressed that it designs each assistant around practical workflows, rather than standalone AI experiences.
“The goal isn't simply to provide an answer,” noted Keehn. “It's to help people get work done more effectively.”
With this in mind, here’s a look at SAP’s new and improved Joule Assistants.
Joule Assistants for Sales
The new and new-look Sales Assistants fall into two broad categories: order processing and quote automation on one side, and billing and compensation resolution on the other.
1. Order Processing & Quote Automation Assistants
SAP has released new capabilities for two existing AI Assistants, its Shopping and Quoting Assistants.
The Shopping Assistant now includes B2B email order processing that validates customer and product details and prepares orders for fulfillment, reducing manual entry while keeping people in control of exceptions and approvals.
Meanwhile, the Quoting Assistant helps sales teams create accurate, compliant quotes and customer-ready proposals, bringing the entire quote-to-proposal process into a single, unified workflow.
For Keehn, the Quoting Assistant exemplifies SAP’s differentiation.
“Sales teams often need information from ERP systems, pricing engines, CRM platforms, and other sources to create accurate quotes. Historically, that work has spread across multiple systems. The assistant helps bring that information together so teams can create complete, customer-ready proposals more quickly and with greater confidence.”
2. Billing and Compensation Resolution Assistants
Here, SAP has introduced two new Joule Assistants: the Incentive Compensation Assistant and the Service Planning and Operations Assistant.
The Incentive Compensation Assistant gives salespeople greater transparency into crediting and payment issues, enabling them to raise and resolve compensation disputes more efficiently.
Elsewhere, the Service Planning and Operations Assistant helps sales and customer success teams manage the journey from initial customer engagement through to the final invoice, creating a smoother handoff between sales, service, and billing.
How? By connecting planning, logistics, post-service activities, and performance data in one guided workflow.
Joule Assistants for Marketing
SAP has released new capabilities for its Content and Campaign Assistants.
The Content Assistant helps marketing teams create personalized customer content, with messaging and assets automatically adjusting across channels.
Meanwhile, the Campaign Assistant transforms this content into “omnichannel campaigns”, leveraging "customer and business signals."
The improvements will incorporate data across the SAP ecosystem to better inform both assistants while accelerating campaign execution.
Joule Assistants for Service
The new Service Planning and Operations Assistant is just as relevant for service teams as for sales teams, ensuring a smooth handover.
Additionally, SAP already offers a Case Management Assistant, Service Optimization Assistant, and Self-Service Assistant for customer support teams.
Now, much of the focus is on helping brands build custom Joule Agents that can orchestrate new customer experiences using data from across SAP.
For example, if a customer queries a high bill, SAP can surface the relevant billing information to a human or AI agent, along with the operational context needed to understand and resolve the issue. There’s no need to transfer the customer. The agent can address the query there and then, creating a faster, smoother experience for the customer.
Again, this illustrates where SAP's differentiation lies: at the intersection of customer data and the operational data that sits behind it.
“The service opportunity isn't just helping companies respond faster. It's helping them resolve issues with the full customer, order, product, and operational context available to them. That's how you move from simply understanding a customer's problem to actually solving it. And that's very much aligned with our broader Autonomous CX vision.”
What Comes Next for SAP CX?
SAP introduced its Autonomous CX strategy at Sapphire 2026.
Now, at Connect 2026, SAP is showing what that vision looks like in practice.
Moving forward, expect more of the same, as SAP builds additional Joule Assistants for its customers, leveraging its broader ecosystem to deliver accurate pricing, available inventory, reliable fulfillment, effective service, and consistent experiences.
“What comes next is continuing to connect customer engagement with operational execution,” noted Keehn.
“You'll see us continuing to focus on Joule Assistants, orchestration, order management, and shared business context because that's what helps organizations move from recommendations to outcomes.”
Expect to hear the word “outcome” more and more.
AI assistants and agents are no longer just about automation. They’re about turning customer understanding into tangible business outcomes. Critically, that sits at the heart of SAP’s Autonomous CX vision.
SAP’s Autonomous Enterprise
Autonomous CX is one part of SAP’s broader Autonomous Enterprise vision.
In this vision, AI assistants and agents orchestrate end-to-end business processes, optimizing work and, in many cases, completing it autonomously.
Autonomous CX brings that vision to life across customer-facing functions.
By following this path, SAP is betting on growth by expanding and deepening its relationships with existing customers, rather than chasing new business.
While SAP was once criticized for innovations that failed to light up the room, its focus on integrating CX with ERP and the broader portfolio now appears to be paying dividends.
After all, SAP’s data footprint is a valuable asset in the agentic age, and something only Oracle can match in the CRM space.