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SAP consulting projects today involve a large amount of documentation, multiple stakeholders and compressed timelines, which often require manual knowledge retrieval from online SAP documentation. At the same time, cloud ERP programs now require faster design cycles, continuous improvements rather than massive deployments, and near real-time decision making. Joule for Consultants, SAP’s conversational AI solution, was designed to help meet these expectations and support consultants throughout their daily tasks, from reconciling best practices and validating design considerations, to navigating SAP’s growing AI, data and applications landscape.
The result: Consultants work more productively than ever, with superior results, and deliver faster, high-quality SAP cloud transformations.
This promise caught the early attention of KPMG Companies, which became one of the largest SAP players participating in the Joule Early Access program, and one of SAP’s largest customers overall. The organization has so far onboarded 29 KPMG member firms around the world, and now thousands of KPMG consultants use Joule for Consultants in their daily work.
"For us, it wasn’t about experimenting," says Valentino Koester, global program leader for SAP360 and SAP AI at KPMG International. "It was more about positioning our people and our member firm clients at the forefront of AI-based consulting."
Knowledge on a global scale
"Competitive pressure is intense in the SAP implementation market," Koester said. "The main asset you have as a consultant is knowledge and experience, bundled in all kinds of ways. AI and Joule for Consultants allow us to scale this knowledge instantly across our global network, ensuring that clients can access it anywhere in the world, no matter who they speak to in the organization."
Whether a junior consultant or a senior executive, Joule ensures that SAP best practices, industry benchmarks and the innovation an organization has invested in for years are not siled somewhere within a team or in a country where they cannot be shared quickly and accurately.
"This makes our teams more agile to respond to emerging customer needs or regulatory changes, when new market entrants emerge or technology evolves," Koester said. "The agility acquired by our consultants allows us to advise our clients not only reactively, but also proactively. In many cases this becomes a form of early forecasting."
For example, consultants can quickly detect potential supply chain risks through AI-driven process mining they implemented for a client, or apply analytical capabilities with SAP Analytics Cloud before those risks actually materialize.
Overcoming challenges, alleviating problems
KPMG client transformations typically follow the KPMG Transformation methodology, which is closely aligned with SAP’s RISE methodology. RISE goes through six SAP Activate phases: discover, prepare, explore, realize, deploy and execute, and each has recurring challenges that can slow momentum if not addressed early, Koester says.
During the discovery phase, teams invest heavily in business case modeling, benchmarking, and stakeholder alignment – activities that are time-consuming and difficult to achieve without full visibility. The preparation phase introduces extensive project engagement, reporting requirements, early identification of risks, and the establishment of governance, all of which can stall progress before execution begins.
During the exploration and realization phases, lengthy design workshops and piles of documentation can bog down decision-making. Defects and bottlenecks must be identified as early as possible, otherwise they risk rippling downstream during rework. During the deployment and execution phases, organizations must develop and deliver training content while overcoming resistance to change, requiring sustained communication to maintain adoption. Once operational, continuous monitoring of KPIs and process optimization helps prevent problems from becoming entrenched in the operating model and eroding value over time. AI can help consultants complete these tasks, as well as make any necessary reviews and corrections, with a higher degree of accuracy and faster than ever before.
"By adopting tools like Joule for Consultants, we want to improve the work of our professionals, making them more efficient and more productive, so that they have more time to focus on what matters most," » said Koester. "It’s about customer relationships, strategic decision-making and achieving measurable business results. "
How AI is changing the transformation approach
Joule for Consultants not only reduces repetitive work; it also reshapes how KPMG approaches SAP-based transformations. The AI tool surfaced insights that traditionally required deep expertise and immediate recall, improving consultants’ ability to respond to market dynamics and competitive pressure.
For example, during early design workshops with clients, unless there were highly experienced consultants on site who, in real time, could answer all questions about business processes, as well as explain the design considerations and all technical logic of the new system, consultants often had to defer their answers or validate them later, especially when new questions or edge cases arose, slowing the momentum of the transformation.
“With Joule for Consultants, we hoped to validate on-site, in real time, the advice our consultants can give to maintain implementation momentum and build client confidence in their SAP system and in KPMG advisors," » said Koester. "Our people can now surface SAP best practices, guidelines and risk scenarios instantly during workshops, keeping our teams moving forward and helping to reduce engagement delays."
They see the same success during internal or sales-related training and enablement activities. Joule boosted KPMG’s internal SAP University, a training program for new hires. Recently, junior consultants were able to prepare and present responses to complex and technical tenders with confidence, despite limited experience, because Joule guided them through each step in a structured, high-quality manner.
Create a successful deployment
To ensure a smooth internal deployment process for analysts, KPMG positioned Joule not as the introduction of a new tool, but as the adoption of a new way of working.
"We highlighted the organizational impact this would have, with Joule enabling smarter and more efficient ways of working," » said Koester. "Consultants quickly saw benefits, such as less time spent searching for technical information and more time spent advising their clients and doing the functional work we are very good at."
Responsible AI remained a central pillar of deployment. In addition to aligning the initiative with KPMG’s Trusted AI Framework, each participating KPMG firm conducted a risk assessment to mitigate potential risks to clients and ensure compliant and secure use of Joule for Consultants. So early adoption began with awareness conversations across the network, helping teams understand what these “new ways of working” look like and where AI can truly support delivery. KPMG has also appointed a dedicated enablement team to ensure Joule for Consultants is integrated into the wider organizational framework.
"We work week after week to increase active adoption by consultants, while taking advantage of the opportunity to obtain their feedback," he explains. "Our core innovation feedback tools not only ask them what they like and don’t like, but also what successful use cases they’re discovering and how much time they think they’ll save."
The goal, he adds, is not to automate consulting, but to enable consultants to do their jobs better. And because Joule for Consultants continues to evolve, KPMG expects its role to expand significantly over time. SAP continues to improve functionality and response quality with each release, while working to develop AI agents that collaborate with consultants and intelligently automate parts of selected workflows. KPMG is working closely with SAP to responsibly integrate these capabilities into more phases of transformation projects as they mature, so that Joule becomes an integral part of its overall consulting approach.
“If early signals are borne out, Joule for Consultants is not only a useful tool: it is poised to become a standard in the way SAP projects are delivered,” says Koester.
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