May 12, 2026 • 7 min read
SAP Unveils Its Vision for Autonomous CX, Announces New AI Assistants for Customer-Facing Teams
Director of Content & Market Research
May 12, 2026
SAP has shared its vision for the future of customer experience while announcing new Joule Assistants to bring it to life.
The vision centers on the idea of Autonomous CX, where AI agents and assistants connect customer-facing teams to the broader enterprise, reimagining how work gets done.
Over recent years, SAP has set the stalls for this, establishing its ERP and CRM solutions on a shared foundation.
In doing so, it’s pulling pricing, reliable inventory, order management, and more data into service, sales, and marketing workflows, paving the way for better-informed customer engagements.
Since the launch of Joule Agents in late 2024, SAP customers have started applying AI to these cross-solution workflows.
Here's an example of such a workflow: a SAP customer places a Joule Agent within the ERP to flag if the customer’s most recent bill was unusually high when they call service, passing that information through to the rep, who begins the interaction with that valuable context.
Yet, that's just one example underscoring SAP’s differentiator in owning the broader ecosystem, connecting data, and supporting clients in reimagining customer journeys with AI.
Now, it's doubling down on this differentiation with its Autonomous CX vision and new Joule Assistants.
More on SAP’s Autonomous CX Vision
As noted, Autonomous CX connects AI agents and assistants across marketing, commerce, sales, and service on a shared foundation with SAP Cloud ERP.
The agents can plan, reason, and act across applications to complete specific tasks. Whereas the new assistants coordinate agents to automate end-to-end processes on command.
Users can interact with Joule Assistants through Joule Work, SAP’s new conversational and dynamic workspace, describing what they want to achieve in natural language. Joule Work then:
- Understands the user’s goal
- Pulls together information from SAP CX, ERP, and connected systems
- Uses AI Assistants and Agents to handle routine tasks automatically
- Presents insights and recommended actions in one workspace
As a result, users focus on outcomes and decisions, while Joule handles coordination, repetitive work, and process execution.
Below are some examples of the Joule Assistants that customer-facing teams can leverage through Joule Work for a more cohesive, autonomous CX function.
Meet the New AI Assistants for Autonomous CX
SAP has released many Joule Assistants for customer-facing teams. Several examples stand out because they connect customer experience with SAP’s operational data.
Other CRM providers, outside of SAP and Oracle, would require a significant amount of tricky integration work to deliver such assistants.
Jessica Keehn, CMO of SAP CX, makes this point while isolating one of her favorite new Joule Assistants: the Order Management Assistant.
“The Order Management Assistant is an excellent example. It helps commerce teams anticipate fulfillment risks before they become customer issues. In many ways, that captures the core idea behind Autonomous CX: connecting customer experience to operational truth in real time.”
Additionally, commerce teams can now access a Merchandising Assistant to gauge product demand, evaluate operational insights, and make smarter inventory decisions. There’s also a Shopping Assistant that provides a personalized shopping experience.
Yet, there are many new AI assistants spanning service, sales, and marketing, as shared below.
Joule Assistants for Service
First up is a Self-Service Assistant that helps customers resolve issues independently by going beyond just CRM and contact center data, drawing on information such as:
- Order history
- Service entitlements
- Financial and billing records
- Subscription details
When the Assistant cannot resolve the matter automatically, it prepares the case for a warm transfer to a service rep, with the relevant context already captured.
Next is the Case Handling Assistant, which supports service reps by analyzing customer conversations and surfacing relevant information to accelerate resolutions in real time.
That information may include historical orders, entitlements, and financial data, enabling agents to work with a deeper understanding of the customer’s situation.
Then, the Case Management Assistant helps prepare cases and coordinate workflows across service operations, aiding the Self-Service and Case Handling Assistant.
Lastly, there is also a new Service Manager Assistant to track sentiment across the support team and share performance insights with contact center supervisors.
Joule Assistants for Sales
SAP has also released four new assistants for sales teams, aiming to help them move faster, work smarter, and streamline the revenue cycle.
The Deal Qualification Assistant helps accelerate lead-to-pipeline conversion by supporting lead qualification, routing, and conversion workflows. From there, the Sales Assistant helps manage pipeline activities.
Yet, the new Deal Closing Assistant is more differentiative. It helps automate quote generation, pricing workflows, order execution, and deal closure activities across SAP, not just within the CX ecosystem.
The Incentive Compensation Assistant also stands out. It supports compensation planning and payment inquiry workflows across the revenue cycle, helping reduce administrative effort and improve visibility into sales compensation processes.
Joule Assistants for Marketing
There are two Joule Assistants now available via Marketing Cloud: the Campaign Assistant and Content Assistant.
The Campaign Assistant helps teams identify priority audience segments, recommend targeting strategies, and design campaigns grounded in operational and customer data.
Meanwhile, the Content Assistant generates and personalizes content across channels based on audience behavior, performance signals, and campaign objectives.
“These are exciting because they build directly on the cross-platform agent model we've created with Google to link campaign strategy and content generation with operational context and performance signals to drive complex marketing projects.”
Moreover, according to Keehn, the agents will enable marketers to personalize content and customer journeys at a scale “we could have only dreamed of 2-3 years ago.”
What Comes Next for SAP CX Customers?
Autonomous CX will take shape through Joule Assistants spanning marketing, commerce, sales, and service, with planned availability windows across 2026.
However, more innovations are also coming to the platform, including payment capabilities for SAP Commerce Cloud and a new SAP Commerce Cloud ERP edition for mid-market organizations, per Keehn.
Additionally, the CMO said: “The SAP Unified Payment solution, new composable cart, and checkout services will connect pricing, promotions, loyalty, tax, payments, inventory, sourcing, and order management across SAP and non-SAP storefronts.”
Meanwhile, SAP plans to keep advancing its industry clouds. For instance, SAP S/4HANA Utilities will soon more closely align with specific tools, such as the field sales add-on, to ensure order-to-fulfillment and billing are tightly connected.
Yet, Keehn brings everything back to the Autonomous CX.
“In reality, what’s next is that CX becomes the most visible expression of the Autonomous Enterprise.”
More Big News Coming Out of SAP Sapphire
Overall, SAP has released 50 new AI Assistants. Yet, not all of those relate to customer experience. Use cases span its ecosystem, touching supply chain, finance, human capital management (HCM), and beyond.
That underscores a broader vision for Joule to become a layer for role-based assistants and purpose-built agents that execute multi-step workflows across the business.
In this sense, SAP isn’t only driving towards Autonomous CX; it aims to build the Autonomous Enterprise.
To support this mission, the tech giant also announced its Business AI Platform, unifying SAP Business Technology Platform, Business Data Cloud, and Business AI within a single, governed environment.
The SAP Knowledge Graph sits at the core, providing a map of each business entity, process, and relationship across a customer's SAP landscape, reducing the threat of AI sprawl.
Joule Studio represents another major announcement, which is SAP’s new hub for businesses to develop, deploy, and manage AI agents.
Similarly, the launch of SAP’s Industry AI is a significant step forward. This enables organizations to embed sector-specific logic, data models, and regulatory requirements across the autonomous workflows they build.
Yet, there are many more announcements coming out of SAP Sapphire. Catch up on all the latest news here.