[Digital Today reporter Chi-gyu Hwang] SAP presented "Autonomous Enterprise" as the future of enterprise software at its Sapphire 2026 event.

The move is similar to Salesforce and ServiceNow in that it lays out a vision centred on AI agents, but details differ significantly.

Techzine recently reported that Salesforce and ServiceNow chose an open, headless architecture, while SAP focused on blocking external AI agents and routing everything through its AI assistant Joule.

More than 50 Joule assistants manage more than 200 specialist agents across finance, supply chain, human resources, procurement and customer experience. The new SAP Business AI platform integrates the SAP Business Technology Platform, SAP Business Data Cloud and SAP Business AI into a single environment based on the SAP Knowledge Graph. Techzine reported that SAP has held core business process data accumulated over 50 years in a single integrated system and that its data advantage is clear, but that it differs from Salesforce and ServiceNow on openness.

Salesforce and ServiceNow have declared full openness in recent weeks, while SAP is moving in the opposite direction, it said.

SAP explicitly banned AI systems from independently scheduling or executing API calls in clause 2.2.2 of its API policy updated in April 2026. That means external AI agents cannot use SAP APIs.

CEO Christian Klein (크리스티안 클라인) said, "Customers do not have to pay to access their own data." But that was only a verbal comment, and the API policy blocking external AI agent access remains in place, Techzine reported.

At Sapphire 2026, SAP Chief Customer Officer Thomas Saueressig (토마스 자우어에식) defended the API policy as governance needed for a multi-tenant platform. He also said A2A (Agent to Agent) through Joule is the only path for using agents. SAP's position is that open APIs are for connecting existing software, not for external AI agents.

Earlier, Salesforce announced "Headless 360" in April. It is an architecture in which data, workflows and actions can all be accessed through APIs, MCP tools and CLI commands. Users can use more than 60 MCP tools in MCP-compatible environments such as Claude Code and Cursor. The structure does not force the Salesforce AI interface as a mandatory gateway. If external agents directly call deterministic actions such as creating records and running reports, Salesforce executes them.

ServiceNow also unveiled "Action Fabric" last week at Knowledge 2026. It opened 20 years of accumulated workflows, playbooks, approval chains and business rules to all AI agents through REST APIs and MCP. It can be used without additional LLM inference. As both companies adopted a headless model, the platform became the execution layer and the choice of AI is up to customers.

SAP appears to be taking a different approach. In a Q&A, SAP's CTO defined APIs as outdated technology and A2A and MCP as new and modern technologies. SAP supports only A2A for external AI agents to communicate with Joule. MCP, which most of the industry uses as an open standard, is used only within Joule, and external agents are not allowed to directly access SAP through MCP.

As a result, external agents can access SAP, but must go through A2A and Joule. Direct access through APIs is blocked by policy. The structure could lead to double inference, according to criticism.

Techzine reported, "An external agent has already performed inference, but Joule does additional inference to understand the query and determine the required actions and data. Latency and costs double. It is an architectural requirement imposed by SAP, not a customer choice." Techzine also reported on an integrated suite MCP gateway scheduled for release in the second quarter, saying, "It provides the same API access as before through MCP, but an additional fee is charged per call. It is effectively an 'agent tax' on the use of external AI agents."