NVIDIA and SAP Bring Trust to Specialized Agents
NVIDIA and SAP expand collaboration to embed NVIDIA OpenShell security runtime into SAP Business AI platform, enabling enterprises to run autonomous AI agents with security and governance controls.
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Key points
- SAP integrates NVIDIA OpenShell into SAP Business AI Platform for isolated execution and policy enforcement of AI agents.
- NVIDIA and SAP co-develop OpenShell, focusing on runtime hardening, identity integration, and auditing for production use.
- The shift from AI assistants to autonomous agents requires boundaries, policy enforcement, and audit trails, which SAP and NVIDIA address.
Why it matters
This matters because SAP integrates NVIDIA OpenShell into SAP Business AI Platform for isolated execution and policy enforcement of AI agents.
Technical impact
May affect model selection, inference cost, product capability, and evaluation benchmarks.
May 12, 2026 — From finance and procurement to supply chain and manufacturing, specialized AI agents are moving into the enterprise systems where business decisions are made, data is accessed and workflows run at scale.
Announced today at SAP Sapphire — where NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang joined SAP CEO Christian Klein’s keynote by video — SAP and NVIDIA’s expanded collaboration helps enterprises run specialized agents with security and governance controls.
SAP embeds NVIDIA OpenShell — an open source runtime for securely developing and deploying autonomous AI agents — into SAP Business AI Platform. In addition, SAP engineers are codesigning OpenShell alongside NVIDIA, contributing back to the open source project.
OpenShell provides isolated execution environments, policy enforcement at the filesystem and network layers, and infrastructure-level containment that guards against damage when agent logic fails.
Within SAP Business AI Platform, OpenShell is the runtime security layer for all SAP AI agents, including custom agents built in Joule Studio — SAP’s environment for building and managing end-to-end enterprise agents.
For enterprises, the shift from AI assistants to autonomous agents changes the trust equation. An agent that can touch systems of record, cross application boundaries and operate without review at every step needs boundaries, policy enforcement and an audit trail before it can become part of production work. That’s what SAP and NVIDIA are collaborating to address.
Why the Application Layer Matters
Huang has described AI as a five-layer cake: energy, chips, infrastructure, models and applications.
Applications sit at the top, where AI creates economic value and drives productivity for knowledge workers. As a global leader in enterprise applications and business AI, SAP is an important catalyst in the application layer, running finance, procurement, supply chain and manufacturing workflows where agents must operate within policy, identity and process controls.
That makes SAP’s position at the core of enterprise operations a key driver for enterprise adoption of agentic AI.
Business agents need to understand roles, processes, permissions and data boundaries. They also need an execution environment that limits what an agent sees, what it can do and where inference runs.
Codeveloping the Agentic AI Foundation
NVIDIA brings its own perspective as a longstanding SAP customer — running finance, supply chain and logistics on SAP, giving both companies shared context for what enterprise-grade governance requires in practice.
SAP engineers are working alongside NVIDIA’s to further develop OpenShell’s open source codebase, focusing contributions on what enterprises need to run agentic AI in production: runtime hardening, policy modeling, enterprise identity integration, and auditing and governance hooks.
SAP and NVIDIA technologies work in unison to address important enterprise requirements for deploying trustworthy agents.
NVIDIA OpenShell asks: Can this agent action safely execute?
Joule Studio runtime — the enterprise control layer within SAP Business AI Platform — asks: Should this action happen at all?
Together, they close a gap that application-layer security alone cannot.
A Faster Start for Agent Builders
SAP customers building custom agents will have a faster path to production. NVIDIA NemoClaw — a reference blueprint for developing and deploying autonomous agents — will be available directly in Joule Studio. This means development teams get a structured route from initial build to trusted production deployment, without having to engineer security scaffolding from scratch.
AI agents will create value only when enterprises can trust them with their data.
For many organizations, that data is in SAP — which houses the systems of record across finance, procurement and supply chain that run their business.
Together, SAP and NVIDIA are making agents ready to act, while staying within the boundaries enterprises require.
Source: Justin Boitano, NVIDIA
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