AI on SAP ECC without the cloud commitment
SAP has announced that its AI assistant Joule will be available for older systems, ECC and on-premises, only to customers who move at least half of their maintenance spend to cloud services. You do not have to be pushed into that decision. AI over your SAP system is possible without the commitment: custom Joule skills through SAP BTP, or a Claude layer over your SAP data through MCP, with the same permissions and approvals your SAP users already have.
Two paths, depending on your SAP
- Cloud editions (RISE, GROW): native Joule. Activation, configuration and custom extensions, including agents built in Joule Studio.
- ECC or on-premises: the third way, without a commitment. Custom Joule skills through SAP BTP, or a Claude layer over data from SAP through OData and RFC.
Processes where it pays from the first month
- Exceptions on incoming invoices: the agent compares invoice, purchase order and delivery note, prepares the posting and presents the exceptions for approval.
- Master data cleansing: duplicates, incomplete records and inconsistent fields found and prepared for correction, with a person confirming each change.
- Month-end close preparation: reconciliations, variance checks and management overviews, with links back to the source data.
The rule that does not change
An AI agent always inherits the SAP authorisations of the specific user who started it. It never sees more than that person would. Every write to the system is approved by a person. This is our standard, not a paid extra.
The integration runs through MCP, an open standard through which the AI reads data and triggers actions in SAP and in the systems around it. Because the standard is open, the layer is not tied to one vendor and can be moved when your SAP roadmap changes.
What we ask in the first conversation
Which SAP edition you run and what your maintenance roadmap looks like. Where you run cloud and company identities today. Whether you require data processing in the EU. Which two or three processes hurt most this quarter. From those answers we propose a path that a later change of decision does not turn into a new project.
Questions we get asked
Is the third way supported by SAP?
SAP BTP is SAP's own extension platform and custom skills on it are a supported pattern. A Claude layer over SAP data through OData and RFC uses interfaces SAP provides for exactly this purpose. Neither path modifies the ECC core.
Will this block a later move to S/4HANA?
No. The AI layer sits beside SAP, reads through standard interfaces and inherits SAP authorisations. When you move to S/4HANA, the layer points at the new system, and native Joule becomes an option alongside it.
Can the agent post documents in SAP?
It can prepare them. Every write is approved by a person, and the audit trail records the proposal, the approver and the change. Fully automatic posting is a decision you make per process, later, with the record to support it.
Does our data leave the company?
That depends on the deployment you choose. With AWS Bedrock in Frankfurt or Google Vertex AI in EU regions the model runs in your own cloud account, and personal data is masked before it reaches the model in every variant.
Talk to us.
A 30-minute consultation on your scenarios. You will leave with a concrete assessment, whether we work together or not.