Assistants and agents

The difference between a Joule Assistant and a Joule Agent is the most common confusion in SAP AI conversations, and SAP's documentation now answers it clearly. Assistants "serve as the primary user interaction and orchestration layer, while agents work behind the scenes to provide specialized business capabilities." The relationship is many-to-many: "an assistant may coordinate multiple agents to complete a business process, and an agent may be shared across multiple assistants."

Joule Agents

SAP describes Joule Agents as built with deep knowledge of SAP processes and data. They understand business context, coordinate activities across systems and automate multi-step workflows by selecting and orchestrating tools, services or other agents. Three capabilities recur in the documentation: business context awareness (using SAP data and the SAP Knowledge Graph), decision support (analyze, flag risks, recommend) and workflow automation (execute approved tasks).

Some agents are orchestration agents. The Accounts Receivable Orchestration Agent receives a natural-language request, works out the intent, plans the action and hands it to a specialized agent. For any action that changes data, such as creating a dispute case, SAP's documentation says the agent asks for the user's confirmation first.

Joule Assistants

Assistants are role-aware and business-context-aware. Based on the user's role and permissions, an assistant shows relevant insights and actions. Configuration happens at the assistant level: when an assistant is enabled, its agents become available, and role-based permissions then decide which agents each user may actually use. In SAP's setup guide, administrators activate assistants per autonomous domain in SAP for Me under Portfolio & Products > My Product Packages. The domains listed are Finance Agents, HCM Agent Package, Spend Management Agents, Supply Chain Management Agents and CX Agents.

Users reach an assistant from the Joule conversation. SAP's documentation describes two ways: type @ followed by the assistant's name, or pick it from the @ menu. That small detail matters for training and testing: a request typed without the @mention may be answered by a general Joule skill instead of the assistant's agents.

How agents get started

Agents don't only wait for a chat message. SAP's documentation shows three triggers. A user can ask in Joule. A schedule can start an agent: the Procurement Contract Compliance Monitoring Agent can run from a scheduled job in SAP Ariba Contracts. And an event can start it: the same agent uses event-driven monitoring for obligations that depend on something happening. The same documentation is explicit that "you remain in control": the agent highlights risks and suggests actions, and the user takes the final action.

SAP-delivered, partner and custom agents

SAP-delivered agents come with the Autonomous Suite and SAP's applications. Partners also build agents: SAP announced a €100 million fund at Sapphire 2026 to help partners build and deploy assistants and agents on the platform. Customers can build their own custom agents in Joule Studio when no SAP-delivered agent covers the need. SAP AI Agent Hub then gives IT one inventory of all of them, SAP or not.

Not every agent sits under a business assistant. The SAP Discovery Center lists agents for SAP Cloud ALM, including a Test Scoping Agent (finds the scope to test from configuration, process models and RICEFW objects and highlights coverage gaps), a Test Preparation Agent and a Test Data Management Agent. SAP's 2026 demos group this work under a Joule Test Management assistant that defines risk-based test scope, generates test cases in SAP Cloud ALM and creates test data, aimed first at ECC-to-Cloud-ERP migrations. Priya should know these exist; she should also check their status before planning around them, because SAP's demo and event pages give no general availability date.