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InterviewCX Intelligence6 Oct 2026 · 5 min read

SAP Launches Autonomous CX AI Assistants at Connect 2026

SAP launches Autonomous CX assistants to connect marketing, commerce, sales, and service workflows with business data and customer context, designed to reduce CX friction. The launch comes as an index reveals 35% of consumers prefer AI recommendations to advice from friends and family.

Francesca Roche

Today, SAP has announced the launch of Autonomous CX, a suite of AI assistants designed to coordinate customer-facing workflows across the business and connect customer engagement with underlying operational systems.

Revealed at SAP Connect in Las Vegas, these assistants are intended to move AI beyond standalone chatbots and content-generation tools by coordinating workflows across marketing, commerce, sales, service and operations.

This announcement lands after launch of SAP Engagement Cloud Customer Loyalty Index, revealing AI is reportedly becoming a major source of influence when trust and human control remain in the journey.

Speaking with CX Today, Jessica Keehn, CMO at SAP CX, explained how Autonomous CX is designed to address the disconnect between how businesses organize CX and how customers actually experience it.

"Customer experience has historically been organized in separate functions and systems. Customers don't experience brands that way, though," she said.

“Autonomous CX means AI coordinates across those boundaries, so marketing, commerce, sales, and service can act across the entire customer experience.”

SAP Launches New CX AI Assistants

SAP has unveiled a new suite of Joule-based Autonomous CX assistants designed to connect customer engagement with the business operations that sit behind it.

With general availability planned for Q1 2027, this launch is aimed at addressing the handoffs that can create friction for customers.

This friction includes campaign promoting products that are unavailable, sales processes that are delayed by complex quote creation, or purchase experiences disrupted by disconnected processes.

“Our new CX assistants are designed around practical workflows with autonomous coordination,” Keehn explained.

“Campaign assistants, for example, can activate campaigns using customer and business signals from the ERP and from marketing systems.”

These assistants are designed to draw on shared business context before carrying out defined workflow steps

Campaign Assistant: Designed to make campaign activity timelier and more relevant by connecting marketing execution to what is happening across the business.

Content Assistant: Supports marketing teams in creating personalised, channel-ready content more quickly to reduce manual work in adapting content for different channels while keeping messaging consistent.

Shopping Assistant: Validates customer and product information to help teams prepare orders for fulfilment faster and with fewer errors.

Quoting Assistant: Helps sales teams create complex quotes and proposals to speed up quote generation while ensuring pricing, product details and terms are accurate and compliant.

Incentive Compensation Assistant: Helps sales operations teams manage incentive compensation processes to give them clearer visibility into compensation data and reduce administrative effort.

Service Planning and Operations Assistant: Connects customer service activity with planning, logistics and operational workflows to help teams coordinate the full journey.

Keehn emphasized:

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“We’re creating assistants that actually span those systems so a salesperson can very quickly create really complex quotes in order to meet the needs of their customers and provide accurate, effective quoting very quickly.”

Alongside these releases, SAP is also extending its Order Management Services across both SAP and non-SAP ERP environments to allow organizations to coordinate demand, inventory and fulfilment for a wide range of customers.

Furthermore, SAP Reltio, now generally available as part of SAP Business Data Cloud, is positioned as the data foundation for this approach, bringing customer, supplier and product records together to provide shared context for AI agents.

35% of Consumers Prefer AI-driven Advice

Having recently released the report, SAP's 2026 Customer Loyalty Index provides new customer insights into why the company is connecting AI assistants with broader business data and workflows.

Most notably, the research found that 35% of consumers prefer AI recommendations to advice from friends and family, while 32% regularly use AI to help decide what to buy.

A further 33% have purchased products recommended by AI, with the same proportion trusting AI to complete a purchase.

“People are really looking to help simplify the buying experience and they’re taking AI capabilities to actually reduce the noise and simplify the process of selection,” Keehn acknowledges.

However, the findings suggest that sole reliance on AI does not remove the need for brands to get the underlying experience right, as 30% of consumers said they had switched from a brand they were loyal to because of its use of AI, rising to 45% among Gen Z.

Whilst AI can become part of the experience, poor implementation can affect how customers perceive the wider brand.

As a result, CX teams need to ensure AI recommendations are consistently based on accurate and current information before adding more autonomous capabilities.

Keehn advises:

“The first thing that brands need to do is actually to fix the friction in the process.”

Along with the increase of poor AI experiences, customer control is becoming a significant part of the picture, as 60% of consumers want a shared-control model between humans and AI, while 56% want the ability to reverse an AI decision.

Furthermore, 48% expect human support to remain available, revealing autonomous CX systems need clear boundaries around what AI can do independently and where customers can intervene or request human assistance.

For businesses, connecting AI to operational systems can help ensure recommendations and actions reflect what the company can actually deliver.

Finally, brands that introduce personalization need to ensure it remains relevant without becoming intrusive, with 60% of consumers feeling more loyal to brands that make them feel personally valued, however 30% agree that irresponsible data use could cause them to leave.

“Good personalization isn’t about showing customers how much data you have about them. It can feel a little bit intrusive,” she warns.

For CX leaders, these results reveal a rising expectation for AI models built around accurate context, customer control and relevant personalization, with human support available when automated experiences reach their limits.

For more SAP Connect 2026 news, keep up with CX Today's social platforms to hear the latest updates. You can check out last year's SAP announcements now.