SAP, Microsoft Integrating AI Assistants

SAP and Microsoft are integrating their respective AI copilot tools, which will include opportunities for users to work across the two platforms while using SAP Concur, SAP announced at its Sapphire conference on Tuesday.

The two companies are creating a “bi-direction integration” with SAP’s Joule and Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365, which at first will allow users to use both at the same time and ultimately will enable users to get the same experience from either tool, according to SAP chief AI officer Philipp Herzig. The integration, which will begin later this year, will combine enterprise data in SAP alongside data from Microsoft tools including Teams, Outlook and Word.

Among the use cases detailed by SAP, an employee that books a flight with the help of Joule in SAP Concur then could see Joule automatically block the dates of their travel in their Outlook calendar. A leader managing internal meetings in Teams could use Joule to access the skill profiles of employees on the team to figure out how to coordinate better business activities, according to SAP. 

“Unlocking the massive potential AI has to offer requires capabilities that are high-value, reliable and available in-context in the applications that people use today,” SAP head of product engineering Muhammad Alam said in a statement. “We’re enabling employees to get more done in the flow of their work through seamless access to information from business applications in SAP as well as Microsoft 365.”