SAP is continuing its acquisition spree to help its enterprise customers address what it sees as one of the key challenges around scaling AI: giving Joule agents the appropriate context they need to reason across enterprise data and systems.
The enterprise software giant, late on Tuesday, said that it was signing an agreement to acquire Ghent-based AI startup TechWolf to augment its SuccessFactors HCM platform by giving its AI agents a more detailed understanding of how employees work and what skills they have.
The startup’s central offering is a data model called context graph for work, which it builds by using an AI model after analyzing data from HR and business systems. The graph creates a continuously updated view of the work employees perform and the skills they use, and connects that information with jobs, workforce requirements, and external labor-market data.
For SAP, that graph will serve as a grounding layer and provide additional context for Joule AI agents, allowing them to reason across skills, tasks, and workforce requirements when handling enterprise use cases such as skills-based hiring, workforce planning, and role redesign, the company said in a statement.
For enterprises, the additional context is likely to result in more accurate workforce-related agent responses, potentially reducing token consumption and, in turn, the cost of deploying workforce agents, the company added.
Earlier this year in March, SAP acquired Reltio, a master data management platform, to help enterprises unify and harmonize data across SAP and non-SAP systems, in turn making it easy for its AI agents with the context they need to reason across information spread across different systems.
Later in May, the company announced plans to acquire Dremio, an agentic lakehouse provider, to further help enterprises bring together data from different sources and make it available for AI workloads, giving its agents access to the data and context needed to reason across enterprise information.
While Reltio and Dremio address the context problem for SAP from the data side, TechWolf extends that approach to HCM.
However, there is a difference in how these acquisitions are being integrated into SAP’s portfolio. While Reltio and Dremio have been folded into SAP’s broader data platform, TechWolf, at least for now, will continue to operate independently, allowing it to serve both SAP and non-SAP customers while its technology is integrated with SuccessFactors and Joule.
TechWolf’s acquisition is expected to close by December this year, SAP said.
SAP isn’t alone in making acquisitions to address the context problem around enterprise AI.
Its CRM-focused rival Salesforce acquired Informatica in November last year to strengthen its Agentforce platform with data management, governance, metadata, and lineage capabilities, giving AI agents access to trusted enterprise data and the business context needed to reason and act across different systems.
Similarly, ServiceNow completed its acquisition of Moveworks in December last year, adding enterprise search, an AI assistant, and a reasoning engine to its platform to help AI agents access information spread across enterprise applications.
Workday, an HCM-focused rival, too, acquired Sana in November last year to combine its AI-powered search, agents and learning capabilities with Workday’s data and context around people and money, creating what the company described as a horizontal intelligence layer across the enterprise.
It later agreed to acquire Pipedream in November to connect Workday’s people and finance data to more than 3,000 business applications, allowing AI agents to retrieve data and execute tasks across the systems where work happens.