SAP introduces Joule for Developers

SAP has added AI capabilities powered by its AI assistant, Joule, to SAP Build Process Automation and SAP Build apps, extending the existing AI capabilities in SAP Build Code and ABAP Cloud.

The announcement at this week’s SAPInsider event in Las Vegas, Nevada, “is designed to empower developers to build more efficiently, deliver precise, contextualized outcomes with purpose-built LMMs, and integrate new AI tooling for seamless development,” the company said in a release.

Joule for Developers is incorporated into SAP Build to assist developers with low code, pro code, and automation projects, but, Bharat Sandhu, SVP and chief marketing officer for SAP Business Technology Platform, emphasized, it is designed as a helper for developers, not a replacement.

It addresses two use cases for customers, he said: it makes developers more efficient by taking care of tedious work such as creating unit tests and generating test data, and it empowers new developers who might not be acquainted with business application development or SAP development.

The company said that Joule for Developers capabilities include:

Application creation: Generate code, UI, data models, and sample data across SAP programming models for Java, JavaScript, and ABAP.

Code optimization: Refactor code, create unit tests and generate code explanations, summarizations, and more with natural language queries and intuitive actions.

Process and workflow automation: Generate automation workflows and business rules using natural language queries.

It is powered by large language models (LLMs) tailored for SAP workloads, such as SAP’s ABAP, allowing it to do predictive code completion based on context, comments, and project heuristics, generate code explanations, assist in creating documentation, workflow development, and more.

“It leverages all the best practices and our SAP application programming models, which have been specially designed to extend and build around business applications,” Sandhu said, adding that a developer who has never built on SAP can give Joule for Developers a prompt and it will build the back end system, the front end UX, and the data model, allowing them to get started, “literally in minutes,” with a full application that they can customize. And if one of the more than 400 prebuilt line-of-business applications matches the functionality requested by the developer, Joule will recommend it.

He also pointed out that before the AI passes its output to the user, it runs it through internal checks to verify its accuracy and reduce the chance of hallucinations.

Joule for Developers differs from other AI coding assistants, noted Arnal Dayaratna, research vice president, of software development at IDC, in that “its deep specialization in ABAP that is attributable to SAP’s enhanced access to ABAP-specific training data.” Its integration with ABAP and SAP Build, he said, gives it “a unique capability” to support both pro code and no code developers.

He said, “These capabilities render it especially important for the SAP developer community and its associated ecosystem of ISVs.”

Jason Andersen, VP and principal analyst, Moor Insights & Strategy, agreed.

“Overall, it’s great news for the SAP developer community to have an AI assistant customized to their needs,” he said. “The key to this is training the model the assistant will leverage to specific SAP capabilities such as SAP Workflows and ABAP, since SAP has the knowledge to train a more precise AI assistant than a general-purpose coding model like that you would see from a cloud provider or an AI model. This is similar to what we are seeing from SaaS vendors who want something that will produce the best result for their ecosystem.”

He added, “What I find most refreshing about a solution like this is helping existing non-SAP developers with the onboarding process. Maybe it’s a new hire or a transfer from a different team. They will become more productive more quickly by using a tool like this.”

However, said Scott Bickley, an advisory fellow at Info-Tech Research Group, “Most enterprises are not going to invest in multiple AI platforms, so the race is on for which solution can do the most to bring them towards their goals. It is unrealistic to expect companies to invest in AI solutions from Salesforce, ServiceNow, SAP, and others. SAP has an advantage in that ERP solutions are the system of record and house a lot of critical data. SAP is banking on this fact to make it the system of choice and to use SAP Business Data Cloud to integrate non-SAP data sources into its AI ecosystem.”

And, he cautioned, “Prospective buyers should be cautious, however, as it is early days for all of these solutions. Nothing is proven at this point. Running proof of concept exercises while avoiding major financial commitments is critical at this stage. SAP’s solution is part of the BTP suite, so this is a consumption-based license model. This requires more investment on the front end of the evaluation process to ensure use cases are rock solid and consumption is predictable; if not, CFOs could be surprised by massive unforecasted invoices.”

For the time being, however, those invoices will not be a worry. Sandhu said that Joule for Developers is free, but pricing will be disclosed in a few months. “Right now, our mission is to get it in the hands of as many people as possible, get good usage, get good feedback from customers, and then we’ll figure out how to price for it afterward,” he said.