Breaking: NVIDIA and SAP Deploy Security Layer for Autonomous AI Agents
Specialized AI agents are moving into enterprise systems where business decisions are made, data is accessed, and workflows run at scale—from finance and procurement to supply chain and manufacturing. Today at SAP Sapphire, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang joined SAP CEO Christian Klein’s keynote via video to announce an expanded collaboration that helps enterprises run specialized agents with robust security and governance controls.
Core Announcement: OpenShell Embedded into SAP Business AI Platform
SAP is embedding NVIDIA OpenShell, an open-source runtime for securely developing and deploying autonomous AI agents, directly into the SAP Business AI Platform. In addition, SAP engineers are codesigning OpenShell alongside NVIDIA, contributing back to the open-source project.
“OpenShell provides isolated execution environments, policy enforcement at the filesystem and network layers, and infrastructure-level containment that guards against damage when agent logic fails,” said a spokesperson for NVIDIA.
Within SAP Business AI Platform, OpenShell serves as the runtime security layer for all SAP AI agents, including custom agents built in Joule Studio—SAP’s environment for building and managing end-to-end enterprise agents.
Why This Change Matters for Enterprise Trust
For enterprises, the shift from AI assistants to autonomous agents changes the trust equation. An agent that can touch systems of record, cross application boundaries, and operate without review at every step needs boundaries, policy enforcement, and an audit trail before it can become part of production work. That’s what SAP and NVIDIA are collaborating to address.
Background: The Five-Layer AI Cake and the Application Layer
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has described AI as a five-layer cake: energy, chips, infrastructure, models, and applications. Applications sit at the top, where AI creates economic value and drives productivity for knowledge workers. SAP, as a global leader in enterprise applications and business AI, is an important catalyst in the application layer, running finance, procurement, supply chain, and manufacturing workflows where agents must operate within policy, identity, and process controls.
That makes SAP’s position at the core of enterprise operations a key driver for enterprise adoption of agentic AI. Business agents need to understand roles, processes, permissions, and data boundaries. They also need an execution environment that limits what an agent sees, what it can do, and where inference runs.
What This Means: Codeveloping the Agentic AI Foundation
NVIDIA brings its own perspective as a longstanding SAP customer—running finance, supply chain, and logistics on SAP. This gives both companies shared context for what enterprise-grade governance requires in practice.
SAP engineers are working alongside NVIDIA’s to further develop OpenShell’s open-source codebase, focusing contributions on what enterprises need to run agentic AI in production: runtime hardening, policy modeling, enterprise identity integration, and auditing and governance hooks. SAP and NVIDIA technologies work in unison to address important enterprise requirements for deploying trustworthy AI agents.
- Runtime hardening ensures agents operate securely in production environments.
- Policy modeling defines what agents can and cannot do.
- Identity integration links agents to enterprise roles and permissions.
- Auditing and governance create a full trail of agent actions for compliance.
Learn more about the background of this collaboration. Read what this means for the future of enterprise AI.