SAP Conversational AI (SAP CAI) has been retired. If you landed here looking for a chatbot-building guide, that ship has sailed. SAP’s strategic direction for conversational AI is now SAP Business AI and Joule. This guide explains what changed, what replaces it, and how to plan the move.

What SAP Conversational AI Was

SAP Conversational AI started life as Recast.AI, an independent chatbot-building platform SAP acquired back in 2018. Rebranded and folded into the SAP portfolio, it became SAP’s end-to-end bot-building tool: train it, build it, deploy it across channels, connect it into SAP Business One and other backend systems. For a few years it was SAP’s answer to “how do we do chatbots?”

It didn’t last. SAP removed it from the list of eligible cloud services in mid-2023, and it’s been formally on the way out ever since. The reason is fairly straightforward: SAP decided conversational AI shouldn’t be a bolt-on product sitting next to the business system, it should be built into the business system itself. That’s Joule.

What Replaces It

Joule is SAP’s AI copilot, embedded directly into S/4HANA, SuccessFactors, Ariba, BTP, and most of the rest of the SAP portfolio. Rather than building a standalone bot and connecting it to SAP, Joule already sits inside the applications and understands the business processes running through them. It’s had a fairly rapid few years of expansion, including collaborative multi-agent capabilities that let several specialised agents work together on a task rather than one bot trying to do everything.

If you need to build something more custom than what Joule offers out of the box, there are two places to look:

• Joule Studio, part of SAP Build, is where you design and assemble custom AI agents, wire them up to data sources, and give them specific skills for your own processes
• Generative AI hub, running on SAP AI Core within BTP, is where you go for custom LLM-based applications, with access to a range of foundation models rather than being locked to one

Between the two, most of what SAP Conversational AI used to do (and a fair bit more) is covered.

Migration Path

If you’ve still got live SAP CAI bots or integrations, here’s the practical version of what to do:

1. Audit what’s actually running. Find every bot, skill, and webhook still pointing at SAP CAI. It’s often more than people expect, especially where a bot was built once and forgotten.
2. Map each bot’s job to its replacement. Simple FAQ and task bots embedded in an SAP application are usually a straight swap to Joule’s native capability. Anything more bespoke, custom workflows, non-standard integrations, is a candidate for Joule Studio.
3. Rebuild, don’t lift-and-shift. There’s no automated migration path from SAP CAI to Joule. Treat this as a rebuild using current tools, not a like-for-like port.
4. Retire the old bots properly. Once the replacement is live, decommission the SAP CAI bot and any webhooks or credentials tied to it, rather than leaving it running unmaintained.

If none of this is currently on your roadmap, it’s worth putting there. SAP CAI isn’t coming back, and the longer an unsupported integration sits in production, the more it becomes someone’s problem to deal with under pressure. For a fuller picture of what Joule Studio and the generative AI hub sit on top of, our SAP BTP ultimate guide covers the AI pillar in more detail.