How KPMG is redefining the future of SAP consulting on a global scale
Presented by SAP
SAP consulting projects today involve a vast 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 demand faster design cycles, continuous enhancements rather than big-bang rollouts, 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 expanding AI, data, and application landscape.
The result: consultants work more productively than ever before, with superior results, and deliver faster, high-quality SAP cloud transformations.
That promise attracted early attention from KPMG firms, which became some of the largest SAP enablers participating in the Joule early access program, and one of SAP's largest customers overall. The organization has onboarded 29 KPMG member firms around the world to this point, and now thousands of KPMG consultants are using Joule for Consultants in their daily work.
"For us it wasn’t about experimenting," says Valentino Koester, global head of the SAP360 and SAP AI program at KPMG International. "It was more about positioning our people and member firm clients at the forefront of AI-enabled consulting."
Knowledge on a global scale
"Competitive pressure is intense in the SAP implementation market," Koester says. "The core asset you have as a consultancy is knowledge and experience, bundled in all kinds of ways. AI and Joule for Consultants allow us to scale that knowledge instantly across our global network, making sure customers can access it from all over the world, no matter who they talk to in the organization."
Whether it's a junior consultant or a senior manager, Joule ensures SAP best practices, industry benchmarks, and the innovation an organization has invested in for years is not siloed somewhere in a team, or somewhere in a country where it can’t be shared at speed and with accuracy.
"This makes our teams more agile in responding to emerging client needs or regulatory shifts, when new market entrants emerge or technology changes," Koester says. "The agility our consultants gain allows us to advise customers not just reactively, but proactively. In many cases, it becomes a form of early forecasting."
For example, consultants can spot potential supply chain risks early through AI-enabled process mining they’ve implemented for a customer, or apply analytical capabilities with SAP Analytics Cloud before those risks actually materialize.
Overcoming challenges, alleviating pain points
KPMG customer transformations typically follow KPMG’s Transformation methodology, which is closely aligned with SAP’s RISE methodology. RISE moves through six SAP Activate phases: discover, prepare, explore, realize, deploy, and run, and each has recurring challenges that can slow momentum if not addressed early, Koester explains.
In the discover phase, teams invest heavily in business-case modeling, benchmarking, and stakeholder alignment — activities that are time-intensive and difficult to complete without full visibility. The prepare phase introduces extensive project mobilization, reporting demands, early risk identification, and governance setup, any of which can stall progress before execution begins.
During the explore and realize phases, long design workshops and piles of documentation can bog down decision-making. Defects and bottlenecks must be identified as early as possible, or they risk cascading downstream as rework. In the deploy and run phases, organizations must develop and deliver training content while overcoming change resistance, which requires sustained communication to maintain adoption. Once live, continuous KPI monitoring and process optimization helps prevent issues from settling into the operating model and eroding value over time. AI can help consultants perform these tasks, as well as any necessary review and corrections, with a higher degree of accuracy, and more quickly than ever before.
"By adopting tools like Joule for Consultants, we want to enhance the work our professionals do, making them more effective and more productive, so they have more time to focus on what matters most," Koester said. "That's the client relationship, strategic decision-making, and delivering measurable business outcomes. "
How AI changes the transformation approach
Joule for Consultants isn’t only reducing repetitive work; it’s also reshaping how KPMG approaches SAP-enabled transformations. The AI tool has surfaced insights that traditionally required deep expertise and immediate recall, enhancing consultants’ ability to respond to market dynamics and competitive pressure.
For example, in early design workshops with customers, unless there were highly experienced consultants on site who, in real time, could answer every question about business processes, as well as explain the design considerations and all the technical logic in the new system, consultants frequently had to defer answers or validate them later, especially when novel questions or edge cases came up, slowing the momentum of the transformation.
“With Joule for Consultants, we were hoping to validate the guidance our consultants can give on the spot, in real time, to maintain implementation momentum and strengthen client confidence in their SAP system and KPMG advisors," Koester said. "Our people can instantly surface SAP best practices, guidelines, and risk scenarios during workshops now, allowing our teams to move forward, helping reduce delay within the engagement."
They’re seeing the same success during internal learning and enablement or sales-related activities. Joule has supercharged KPMG's internal SAP University, a learning program for new employees. Recently, junior consultants have been able to prepare and present complex and technical RFP responses with confidence, despite limited experience, as Joule guided them through each step in a structured, high-quality way.
Creating a successful roll-out
To ensure a smooth internal roll out process to analysts, KPMG positioned Joule not as the introduction of a new tool, but as the adoption of a new way of working.
"We emphasized the organizational impact it would have, with Joule enabling smarter, more effective ways of working," Koester said. "Consultants quickly saw benefits, such as less time spent searching for technical information and more time to spend advising their customers and doing the functional work we’re very strong at."
Responsible AI remained a core pillar of the rollout. In addition to aligning the initiative with KPMG’s Trusted AI Framework, every participating KPMG firm conducted a risk assessment to mitigate potential risks for clients and ensure compliant, secure use of Joule for Consultants. Early adoption therefore began with awareness-building conversations across the network, helping teams understand what these “new ways of working” look like and where AI can genuinely support delivery. KPMG also appointed a dedicated enablement team to ensure Joule for Consultants is integrated into the broader organizational picture.
"We’re working week after week on increasing the active adoption by consultants, while also using the chance to get their feedback," he explains. "Our grassroots innovation feedback tools don't just ask what they like and dislike, but what successful use cases they're uncovering, and how much time they think they're saving."
The goal, he adds, isn’t to automate consulting, but to enable consultants to do their jobs better. And because Joule for Consultants is continuing to evolve, KPMG expects its role to expand significantly over time. SAP continues to enhance feature sets and response quality with each release, while it works on developing AI agents that collaborate with consultants and automate some portions of selected workflows intelligently. KPMG is collaborating closely with SAP to responsibly integrate these capabilities into more phases of transformation projects as they mature, so that Joule becomes a part of its overall approach to consulting.
“If early signals hold, Joule for Consultants isn’t just a helpful tool — it’s on track to become a standard in how SAP projects are delivered,” Koester says.
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