NVIDIA and SAP announced an expanded collaboration at SAP Sapphire on May 12, 2026, aimed at helping enterprises run specialized AI agents with security and governance controls.
The companies said NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang joined SAP CEO Christian Klein’s keynote by video during the event.
OpenShell becomes part of SAP Business AI Platform
According to the announcement, SAP will embed NVIDIA OpenShell, an open source runtime for securely developing and deploying autonomous AI agents, into SAP Business AI Platform. SAP engineers are also codesigning OpenShell with NVIDIA and contributing back to the open source project.
NVIDIA said OpenShell provides isolated execution environments, policy enforcement at the filesystem and network layers, and infrastructure-level containment intended to limit damage if agent logic fails.
Within SAP Business AI Platform, OpenShell will serve as the runtime security layer for SAP AI agents, including custom agents built in Joule Studio, SAP’s environment for building and managing end-to-end enterprise agents.
Why SAP says governance matters for agents
The companies said the move reflects a shift from AI assistants to autonomous agents that can touch systems of record, cross application boundaries and operate without review at every step. In that setup, they said enterprises need boundaries, policy enforcement and an audit trail before agents can be used in production work.
NVIDIA described AI as a five-layer stack that includes energy, chips, infrastructure, models and applications, and said applications are where AI delivers business value. SAP, which runs finance, procurement, supply chain and manufacturing workflows, sits at that application layer, according to the announcement.
The companies said enterprise agents need to understand roles, processes, permissions and data boundaries, along with an execution environment that limits what an agent can see, do and where inference runs.
What developers get next
For SAP customers building custom agents, NVIDIA said NemoClaw, a reference blueprint for developing and deploying autonomous agents, will be available directly in Joule Studio.
The companies said that should give development teams a path from initial build to production deployment without having to create security scaffolding from scratch.
NVIDIA said it also brings its own enterprise perspective as a long-time SAP customer, using SAP for finance, supply chain and logistics.
The companies did not provide a timeline for broader rollout in the material provided. For now, the collaboration centers on OpenShell integration, shared development work on the open source project and availability of NemoClaw through Joule Studio for SAP customers building agents.
Source: NVIDIA Blog