NVIDIA and SAP Expand Strategic Partnership to Secure Autonomous AI Agents with OpenShell Governance and Joule Studio Integration for Enterprises
During the SAP Sapphire conference NVIDIA's CEO Jensen Huang and SAP's CEO Christian Klein have expanded their partnership to bring security and governance to domain specific AI agents. Both companies are looking to shiftautonomous agents into systems of record across finance, procurement, and manufacturing.By embedding NVIDIA OpenShell into the SAP Business AI platform, they intend to provide a secured space where the AI can interact with sensitive data and perform tasks on a massive scale.
NVIDIA OpenShell is an open source runtime to securely build and execute autonomous agents. SAP plans to embed the solution directly into its Business AI platform where it will serve as a security runtime layer for agents. OpenShell provides a securely sandboxed execution environment to isolate the AI while enforcing rules on both the network and file systems. This structural approach, known as infrastructure level containment, aims to prevent an agent that makes a logical error or attempts an unauthorized access from causing damage to the underlying infrastructure. SAP engineers are even working with NVIDIA as a co developer on the OpenShell source code in order to contribute back to the community.
The transition from AI assistants to agents will require a different definition of digital trust. An agent that operates across application boundaries without human oversight will need rigid constraints and an auditable trail. NVIDIA OpenShell aims to provide technical safety by testing if the agent's proposed actions are safe to be executed within their containment unit. Simultaneously, The Joule Studio runtime from within the SAP platform controls the enterprise security layer by determining whether an action is permissible according to business permissions. This allows security to be addressed from multiple angles and fill gaps not addressed by application level protections alone.
Huang described the AI landscape as a "5 layer cake", where layer one is energy, then chips, infrastructure, models, and applications on top. SAP will likely operate at the highest application layer, and their value proposition will come from how AI contributes to business outcomes and productivity. Since SAP controls the systems of record for global supply chains and procurement, it can serve as a main driver for the adoption of agents. Business agents need to be able to understand complex roles and permissions at the application level to be secure and useful.
To facilitate quicker production for developers, SAP plans to integrate the availability of NVIDIA NemoClaw into the Joule Studio runtime. This will allow them to build agents and directly prepare them for secure and trusted production deployments. Developers will no longer have to piece together a separate security framework. SAP and NVIDIA hope this will allow custom agents to interact with systems of record while adhering to stringent enterprise requirements. SAP will leverage its customer position with NVIDIA to test exactly what corporate governance entails from a day to day perspective.
