SAP Sapphire 2026: SAP opens up for other vendors' agents
At Sapphire 2026, SAP announced MCP and A2A support, an AI Agent Hub and n8n inside Joule Studio. What it means for integration teams in SAP landscapes.
SAP’s message at Sapphire 2026 was the autonomous enterprise: more than 50 domain-specific Joule assistants that run whole processes in finance, supply chain, procurement, HR and customer service. For integration teams, the more important news was further down the list. SAP will let agents from other vendors call SAP’s agents, and SAP’s agents call theirs, through the open protocols MCP and A2A.
What SAP announced
SAP combines Business Technology Platform, Business Data Cloud and Business AI into one SAP Business AI Platform. On top of it, several announcements touch integration directly:
- MCP and A2A. According to SAP’s news guide, Joule Work will support MCP and two-way A2A, so that third-party agents can call Joule agents securely. This is planned for the fourth quarter of 2026.
- SAP AI Agent Hub. A vendor-neutral inventory of agents, language models and MCP servers, with automatic discovery, evaluation and access control. The core features are available now, and observability follows in the third quarter.
- Joule Studio. SAP’s tool for building agents gets support for frameworks such as LangChain, Pydantic AI and LlamaIndex, a managed runtime and an embedded, fully managed n8n for visual workflows.
- SAP Integration Suite. The roadmap includes exposing selected APIs as MCP servers (second quarter), a migration agent for SAP PI/PO (third quarter), and an AI gateway and agent orchestration (fourth quarter).
SAP also deepened its partnership with Anthropic, with Claude as a reasoning engine for agents in several business areas.
Why it matters
For many years, the rule in SAP landscapes has been that SAP data is reached through SAP’s own interfaces, and preferably through SAP’s own integration tools. Support for MCP and A2A changes that for agents. An agent built in Microsoft, Google or an iPaaS can in principle talk to a Joule agent in a standard way, without a custom integration for each case.
The choice of n8n inside Joule Studio is also worth noting. SAP is bringing a third-party workflow tool into its own platform instead of building everything itself.
How it compares
Most of the integration features have dates later in 2026, so this is a direction more than something customers can use today. SAP customers who also use an iPaaS will face the same question as others this year: which agent registry and which AI gateway should be the main one, when SAP, the cloud providers and the integration platform all offer their own.
What to ask
- What is available now? Separate what is generally available from what is planned for the third or fourth quarter before you plan projects.
- Where do SAP agents and other agents meet? Decide whether A2A traffic to Joule should pass through your existing gateway or go directly.
- PI/PO migration. If you still run SAP PI/PO, ask how the migration agent works and what it hands over to people for review.
Sources
This post was written with AI assistance and reviewed by the editor before publishing.