SAP has spent the last two years turning Joule from a chat assistant into the front door of what it calls the “autonomous enterprise” over 40 specialized agents, more than 2,400 skills, and an agent-to-agent protocol spanning more than 35 SAP solutions, from finance and HR to supply chain and procurement. On paper, that’s one of the most aggressive AI rollouts in ERP history. In practice, almost none of it is being used.
DSAG’s 2026 Investment Survey found that only 3% of SAP customers run SAP Business AI in production, while 77% of AI-active enterprises rely on non-SAP tools like Microsoft Copilot instead. That gap isn’t really about awareness most SAP customers know Joule exists. It’s structural: Joule is exclusively available to RISE with SAP or GROW with SAP customers, which means every organization still running ECC or an on-premise S/4HANA install is locked out regardless of how ready they are. With ECC 6.0 mainstream support ending December 31, 2027, more than 10,000 organizations worldwide are now facing that exact decision under a hard deadline, often for the first time discovering that their AI roadmap and their infrastructure roadmap are the same decision.
Even among customers with cloud access, adoption stalls for a second, less obvious reason: Joule’s value depends entirely on which of its 2,400+ skills get configured against a company’s actual processes, role permissions, and data model and most organizations have no internal methodology for making that selection. Activating Joule without that work just produces a generic assistant bolted onto unchanged workflows, not the agentic automation SAP is marketing.
The opportunity cost of getting this wrong is real. In SAP’s own Oxford Economics survey of 1,600 executives, organizations using AI are already seeing an average 16% return on AI investment, with leaders expecting that to nearly double within two years, and 94% report AI is measurably improving innovation inside their organization. Gartner separately projects that 40% of enterprise applications will include task-specific AI agents by the end of 2026, up from under 5% in 2025 meaning the gap between Joule-ready organizations and everyone else is about to widen quickly, not stay flat.
This is precisely the readiness work Lean IT does before a single Joule agent goes live: assessing RISE/GROW eligibility and licensing implications, mapping which Joule Agents and skills actually fit existing business processes instead of activating the full catalog by default, and building the permission and governance model that lets agentic actions run safely inside finance, HR, and supply chain workflows the part of agentic AI adoption that SAP’s own research shows organizations are most cautious about getting right.
Joule isn’t a feature you switch on. It’s an operating model decision that touches licensing, governance, and process design before it touches a single user. Most SAP customers are discovering that the hard way.
Schedule a consultation call with Lean IT to assess what Joule could actually do inside your environment and what needs to happen first to make it work.