SAP and NVIDIA have expanded their enterprise AI partnership with the integration of NVIDIA OpenShell into SAP Business AI Platform, positioning runtime security and governance as foundational infrastructure for autonomous AI agents operating inside enterprise systems. Announced at SAP Sapphire during a keynote appearance by NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang alongside SAP CEO Christian Klein, the release embeds OpenShell as the runtime security layer for SAP AI agents, including custom agents developed in Joule Studio.
The announcement centers on cybersecurity and operational containment for agentic AI. OpenShell provides isolated execution environments, filesystem and network-level policy enforcement, and infrastructure-level containment designed to prevent agents from causing unintended system changes when autonomous logic fails. Within SAP Business AI Platform, the technology is intended to secure agents interacting with finance, procurement, manufacturing, and supply chain systems where access controls, permissions, and auditability are operational requirements.
SAP is also co-developing OpenShell with NVIDIA and contributing directly to the open source codebase. The companies said engineering work is focused on runtime hardening, enterprise identity integration, policy modeling, auditing, and governance controls required for production deployment. NVIDIA’s role as a long-term SAP customer running finance, logistics, and supply chain operations on SAP infrastructure was positioned as a practical reference point for enterprise deployment requirements.
The integration reflects a broader shift from AI assistants toward autonomous agents capable of interacting directly with systems of record across applications. In that environment, application-layer controls alone are insufficient. SAP positioned Joule Studio as the enterprise decision and policy layer governing whether actions should occur, while NVIDIA OpenShell governs whether actions can safely execute at runtime.
SAP also said NVIDIA NemoClaw, NVIDIA’s reference architecture for developing and deploying autonomous agents, will become available directly within Joule Studio to accelerate deployment of enterprise-grade agents without requiring customers to build security infrastructure independently.