SAP is embedding Nvidia $NVDA's OpenShell runtime into SAP Business AI Platform, giving AI agents built on the platform a security and governance layer designed for enterprise production environments, the companies announced at SAP Sapphire.
OpenShell is an open-source runtime for developing and deploying autonomous AI agents. Within SAP Business AI Platform, it functions as the security layer for all SAP AI agents, including custom agents built in Joule Studio, SAP's environment for building and managing enterprise agents, according to SAP. The runtime provides isolated execution environments, policy enforcement at the filesystem and network layers, and infrastructure-level containment designed to limit the damage if an agent's logic fails.
SAP engineers are also working alongside Nvidia's team to develop OpenShell's open-source codebase, with contributions focused on runtime hardening, policy modeling, enterprise identity integration, and auditing and governance. Nvidia is itself a longstanding SAP customer, running finance, supply chain, and logistics operations on SAP systems.
The integration addresses a specific problem that arises as enterprises move from AI assistants to autonomous agents: an agent that can access systems of record, cross application boundaries, and act without human review at each step requires defined limits and an audit trail before it can be trusted in production. The two companies describe their tools as complementary — OpenShell evaluates whether an agent action can execute within safety constraints, while Joule Studio's runtime determines whether the action should happen at all.
Developers building custom agents in Joule Studio will also have access to Nvidia NemoClaw, a reference blueprint for developing and deploying autonomous agents, the companies said. The goal is to give development teams a structured path from initial build to production deployment without having to engineer security scaffolding independently.
SAP and Nvidia made the announcement at SAP Sapphire, where Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang joined SAP CEO Christian Klein's keynote by video.
The Nvidia partnership is one of several SAP announced alongside its broader Autonomous Enterprise platform, which combines a unified AI platform with an autonomous suite spanning finance, supply chain, procurement, human resources, and customer experience. Anthropic was brought in as a foundation model option under the broader launch, alongside data integration and agent interoperability agreements covering AWS, Google $GOOGL Cloud, and Microsoft $MSFT. A €100 million fund was established to back partner deployments, and SAP cited its agent-led migration tooling as capable of cutting the time and effort required for ERP transformations by over a third.