Joule Studio: who builds what

Functional consultants hear "Joule Studio" and wonder whether they should learn to build agents. Some should; most should learn to specify and test them. This lesson explains what Joule Studio is, who does which part of the work, and what a functional consultant contributes.

Two editions

Joule Studio, classic edition runs in SAP Build: developers create skills and agents in the SAP Build lobby with low-code builders, connect them to SAP APIs, and deploy them to Joule. The new Joule Studio, announced at Sapphire 2026, is intent-based: you describe the outcome in plain language and it generates requirements, a specification, the solution, tests and a deployment to an SAP-managed runtime. On 8 October 2026 SAP called the new Joule Studio "soon to be generally available", with free design-time access under fair use through the end of 2026. Course sap-ai-207 teaches the build.

What a functional consultant contributes

• The business problem in one paragraph, with the people and volumes involved.
• The rules: what the agent may do, must refuse, and when it must escalate, in the language of the process (for example: purchase orders over $25,000 need approval, so the agent must never approve one).
• The data: which SAP objects and fields matter, and which configuration drives behavior (document types, blocks, approval workflows).
• Examples: 30 to 60 realistic questions with the correct answers, taken from the real work.
• Acceptance: what result is good enough to use, and what result blocks go-live.

A worked example: the specification Omar’s idea becomes

Omar’s request (“approve purchase orders that look normal”) turns into a safer and more useful specification once the procurement consultant writes it down. Problem: approvers spend time opening each purchase order over $25,000 for Lakeside Components and other suppliers to check price, quantity and history. Proposed agent: a pre-approval reviewer that summarizes each pending purchase order for the approver, compares the price with the last three orders and the contract, flags deviations (for example the rotor CMC-RTR-200 at $42.00 against a $40.00 standard), and recommends approve or query. Rules: the agent never approves or rejects; the approver decides in the flexible workflow. Examples: 40 real purchase orders from the last quarter with the approver’s actual decision. Acceptance: the summary is correct for every case, and every flagged deviation is real. That specification can be built, tested and signed; the original sentence could not.

Reading an agent design as a consultant

You do not need to build an agent to review one well. Ask the developer for four things and read them like a functional specification: the agent’s description and instructions, its list of tools with what each one can read or change, the documents it is grounded in, and the evaluation set. Then look for the gaps a process expert sees and a developer might not.