This blog is co-authored by colleagues from SAP AI Factory @Samir_Rai, @Ananny_Tripathi . We have received considerable support from @HartmutStraub from AI RIG, @AnaghaDAnanth, @karthikeyan Mohanachandran and @ Rahul Jain from SAP CLE and @YihsuanLin from SAP J4C product management team.

1. Introduction

SAP Joule for Consultants is a generative AI copilot built specifically for the SAP consulting community. Grounded in over 9 terabytes of curated SAP knowledge — including 18+ million pages of SAP documentation, 100+ SAP certifications, and implementation guides — it delivers expert-level answers based on trusted SAP content.

But every consulting organization carries its own body of knowledge: internal delivery frameworks, proprietary accelerators, client-specific runbooks, architecture decisions, and hard-won lessons that simply don’t exist in SAP’s public content. Custom knowledge grounding is what bridges that gap — allowing you to connect Joule to your organization’s curated content so it can answer not just as an SAP expert, but as your team’s expert.

What Custom Knowledge Grounding Does

Custom Knowledge Grounding extends SAP Joule for Consultants with your organization’s own documents. The documents are uploaded to a data repository, indexed by SAP AI Core Document Grounding, and retrieved at runtime to ground SAP Joule for Consultants’ answers. Users get responses that combine the SAP-curated content SAP Joule for Consultants ships with and their firm’s own methodologies, policies, and delivery standards.

Configuring custom knowledge grounding manually, however, involves its own set of connected steps — setting up the right services, connecting knowledge sources, configuring trust and authorization, and ensuring everything is wired together correctly in the right sequence. Done manually, this takes considerable time and leaves room for misses and misconfiguration.

Cloud Integration Automation Service (CIAS) changes that. In this blog, we walk through how to use CIAS to automate the setup of custom knowledge grounding for SAP Joule for Consultants — end to end, in the correct order, with a guided workflow that replaces the manual overhead with a reliable, repeatable process.

2. The Role of CIAS Automation

Cloud Integration Automation service provides you a guided workflow to activate SAP cloud solutions. The guided workflow contains instructions for manual and automated tasks to enable an easy and quick integration configuration setup. The service is also used to integrate SAP Cloud solutions to on-premises solutions or other cloud solutions. It’s a free service available for the customers.

For SAP Joule for Consultants, CIAS plays a key role in simplifying activation. Instead of working across multiple tools separately — SAP BTP Cockpit, SAP Cloud Identity, SAP Central Business Configuration, and SAP for Me — and having to get the sequence right yourself, CIAS provides one guided workflow that handles these tasks end-to-end, in the correct order.

Here’s the advantage it brings compared to the manual activation:

3. Subscribing SAP Cloud Integration and Automation Service (CIAS)

If you already have CIAS activated in any of the existing BTP subaccount, you may skip this step. The service is available in the following regions.

To subscribe to a standard plan, following are the required steps:

1. Login into your global account in the cockpit.
2. Create a subaccount in the Cloud Integration Automation service supported regions.

   

    

3. In the filters area, select the All-Types filter, and from the dropdown menu, select Cloud Integration Automation Service.

4. In the left-side menu, choose Services → Service Marketplace. All the resources you are entitled to consume in the subaccount appears as tiles.

   

    

5. Choose the Cloud Integration Automation Service tile to see the Overview page. Here, you can find more information about the application including all the available plans.
6. Choose Create.
7. In the displayed window, select the Standard plan of type subscription and choose Create. A confirmation pop-up appears with the link to the Instances and Subscriptions page, where you can follow the status of your new subscription under the Subscriptions table.  
   
8. Once the application is subscribed, assign yourself the CIASIntegrationAdmin role so you can run the CIAS workflow. In your subaccount, go to Security > Users and select your user (default IDP or platform user). — click Role Collections on the right, then use the (…) menu and select Assign Role Collection to add the CIASIntegrationAdmin role.

   
   
   

9. The Go to Application link becomes available once the subscription is activated. Choose the link to launch the Cloud Integration Automation service and obtain its URL.

   

    

4. Prerequisites for Custom Knowledge Grounding Activation

• SAP Joule for Consultants — an existing instance. See Onboarding Guide for SAP Joule for Consultants | SAP Help Portal.
• SAP AI Core with the extended plan — required by Document Grounding. See SAP AI Core — SAP Discovery Center.
• Object Store (recommended for the initial setup) — the simplest data repository to start with, and the example used throughout this mission. See Object Store — SAP Discovery Center.

5.    Use CIAS to Set Up Joule for Consultants

5.1   Launch CIAS and Plan Integration Scenario

In the subaccount, go to Instances and Subscriptions and open the Cloud Integration Automation tool using the default identity provider.

This launches the CIAS instance. Select Plan Integration Scenarios.

In Plan Integration Scenarios, search for “ SAP Joule for Consultants Document Grounding Setup ” and click the arrow on the right of the result.

This opens the scenario details. Click Start to begin the guided workflow.

5.2 Select the Scope

Select the type of data source you want to use for grounding Joule for Consultants with your organization’s custom documents. Additionally, choose whether you want to reuse an existing AI Core instance by selecting Yes, or select No if you want the automation to create a new AI Core instance for you.

After that click on next step.

5.3   Select the Systems

Select the SAP BTP AI core instance that you want to use for creating the pipeline for document grounding. Also select the SAP Joule for consultants application for which you are setting up Custom Knowledge grounding.

5.4 Add the Task Parameter

Now add the following task parameters:

1. Create BTP Space:  Add admin credential for the BTP Global account where SAP Joule for consultants is provisioned.
2. Get Space Name for AI Core Subaccount: Provide AI core service instance name
3. Retrieve Existing Al Core Details and Create Key: Add admin credential for the BTP Global account where SAP AI core is provisioned.

   

    

4. Create Al Core resource group: Provide the name of the Resource group you want to give (e.g. J4c-custom-knowledge)
5. Create generic secret for J4C DG SharePoint in AI Core Subaccount: Provide the SharePoint Application ID, SharePoint App Client Secret, SharePoint Tenant IO, SharePoint URL
6. Create DG pipeline for Al Core SharePoint Data Source: Provide the SharePoint Side ID and If you have specific folders to be included for SAP Joule for Consultants custom Knowledge grounding, please check the include path checkbox and provide the path for the folder.

   

5.5 Review

Check the disclaimer checkbox and Review all the details ones and then click finish and wait for workflow to be created.

5.6 Monitor Integration Setup

Click on Monitor Integration Setup to open the workflow.

Ones the automation starts, wait for the automation tasks to be completed.

 Once all the automation tasks complete, there are 3 manual steps needs to be completed in SAP Joule for Consultants:

Enable custom knowledge grounding in SAP Joule for Consultants:

1. Select “Enable custom knowledge grounding” task from the workflow.

   

2. Select view integration task
   

    

3. Ones the task opens you will be able to see the steps mentioned for how to enable custom knowledge grounding in SAP Joule for consultants.
   1. Select SAP Joule for consultants console URL

      

   2. Select settings -> Custom Knowledge Grounding -> Toggle on the button for Enable custom Knowledge grounding.

      

       

   3.  Click on Complete task in CIAS automation.

      

       

Connect to the SAP Destination Service

Now we will be connecting SAP destination service with the SAP Joule for consultants.

1. Go to BTP subaccount and look for j4c-dest-inst and select 1 key.
   

    

2. Copy the JSON.

   

    

3. Go back to SAP Joule for consultant console and select Custom knowledge Grounding -> Sources & Pipelines-> and click on connect
   

    

4. Select the JSON format and paste the Destination service JSON that you copied from the SAP Joule for consultants subaccount and then click on next.
   

    

5. Select the sources and then click on Save.
   
6. Select the complete task from the CIAS automation tool  and then click on finish to complete the automation workflow.

   

    

   

    

   Congratulations! Custom knowledge grounding is enabled in SAP Joule for Consultants.

Manage Sources & Pipelines

• • Monitor document grounding sources and pipelines, review pipeline status and processing information, and manage source configuration and access control.

    Sources & Pipelines

    In the SAP Joule for Consultants Console the selected sources appear under Sources & Pipelines.

    The pipeline table displays the following information:

    Column	Description
    Pipeline ID	Unique identifier for the pipeline. Choose the link to open detailed processing logs.
    Indexed Documents	Total number of documents submitted for processing.
    Data Source	Type of connected data source, for example, S3.
    Last Sync	Timestamp of the most recent synchronization run.
    Status	Current pipeline status: Completed , Completed With Errors , or Processing .

    Manage Sources

    Use the action icons in the top-right corner of the page to manage the selected source:

  Note

  You can restrict access to each pipeline from this view using Manage Access Control. Available options are Allow All, Deny All, or Restricted to specific SAP Cloud Identity Services groups. New pipelines default to Allow All, which allows all authenticated users.

  For more information, see Managing Access Control for Custom Knowledge Grounding on the SAP Help Portal.

  Understand Pipeline Status

1. For details, check the documents in Bruno or in the SAP AI Launchpad. For support, open a ticket under component CA-ML-RAGE . Troubleshooting the AI Core Document Grounding pipeline is out of scope for SAP Joule for Consultants.

    Refresh the Pipeline View and Re-Index Data

    The Refresh icon in the console only refreshes the view. It does not re-index the data repository.

   To make newly uploaded documents available to SAP Joule for Consultants, re-run the AI Core Document Grounding pipeline. You can do this using either of the following methods:

   • Send the restart_pipeline request as described in AI Core Document Grounding with Bruno .
   • Choose the Synchronize icon on the pipeline page as described in AI Core Document Grounding with AI Launchpad .

   Newly uploaded documents are not indexed until the pipeline is run again and reaches FINISHED in AI Core or Completed in the SAP Joule for Consultants Console.

 This blog is co-authored by colleagues from SAP AI Factory @Samir_Rai, @Ananny_Tripathi . We have received considerable support from @HartmutStraub from AI RIG, @AnaghaDAnanth, @karthikeyan Mohanachandran and @ Rahul Jain from SAP CLE and @YihsuanLin from SAP J4C product management team.1. IntroductionSAP Joule for Consultants is a generative AI copilot built specifically for the SAP consulting community. Grounded in over 9 terabytes of curated SAP knowledge — including 18+ million pages of SAP documentation, 100+ SAP certifications, and implementation guides — it delivers expert-level answers based on trusted SAP content.But every consulting organization carries its own body of knowledge: internal delivery frameworks, proprietary accelerators, client-specific runbooks, architecture decisions, and hard-won lessons that simply don’t exist in SAP’s public content. Custom knowledge grounding is what bridges that gap — allowing you to connect Joule to your organization’s curated content so it can answer not just as an SAP expert, but as your team’s expert.What Custom Knowledge Grounding Does Custom Knowledge Grounding extends SAP Joule for Consultants with your organization’s own documents. The documents are uploaded to a data repository, indexed by SAP AI Core Document Grounding, and retrieved at runtime to ground SAP Joule for Consultants’ answers. Users get responses that combine the SAP-curated content SAP Joule for Consultants ships with and their firm’s own methodologies, policies, and delivery standards.Configuring custom knowledge grounding manually, however, involves its own set of connected steps — setting up the right services, connecting knowledge sources, configuring trust and authorization, and ensuring everything is wired together correctly in the right sequence. Done manually, this takes considerable time and leaves room for misses and misconfiguration.Cloud Integration Automation Service (CIAS) changes that. In this blog, we walk through how to use CIAS to automate the setup of custom knowledge grounding for SAP Joule for Consultants — end to end, in the correct order, with a guided workflow that replaces the manual overhead with a reliable, repeatable process.2. The Role of CIAS AutomationCloud Integration Automation service provides you a guided workflow to activate SAP cloud solutions. The guided workflow contains instructions for manual and automated tasks to enable an easy and quick integration configuration setup. The service is also used to integrate SAP Cloud solutions to on-premises solutions or other cloud solutions. It’s a free service available for the customers.For SAP Joule for Consultants, CIAS plays a key role in simplifying activation. Instead of working across multiple tools separately — SAP BTP Cockpit, SAP Cloud Identity, SAP Central Business Configuration, and SAP for Me — and having to get the sequence right yourself, CIAS provides one guided workflow that handles these tasks end-to-end, in the correct order.Here’s the advantage it brings compared to the manual activation:3. Subscribing SAP Cloud Integration and Automation Service (CIAS)If you already have CIAS activated in any of the existing BTP subaccount, you may skip this step. The service is available in the following regions.Service PlatformRegionAmazon Web Service (AWS)Europe (Frankfurt) EU10Europe (Frankfurt) EU Access EU11US East (VA) US10Australia (Sydney) AP10Japan (Tokyo) JP10Canada (Montreal) CA10Microsoft AzureEurope (Netherlands) EU20China (North 3) CN20Alibaba CloudChina (Shanghai) CN40 Amazon Web Service (AWS)Europe (Frankfurt) EU10Europe (Frankfurt) EU Access EU11US East (VA) US10Australia (Sydney) AP10Japan (Tokyo) JP10Canada (Montreal) CA10Microsoft AzureEurope (Netherlands) EU20China (North 3) CN20Alibaba CloudChina (Shanghai) CN40 To subscribe to a standard plan, following are the required steps:Login into your global account in the cockpit.Create a subaccount in the Cloud Integration Automation service supported regions. In the filters area, select the All-Types filter, and from the dropdown menu, select Cloud Integration Automation Service.In the left-side menu, choose Services → Service Marketplace. All the resources you are entitled to consume in the subaccount appears as tiles. Choose the Cloud Integration Automation Service tile to see the Overview page. Here, you can find more information about the application including all the available plans.Choose Create.In the displayed window, select the Standard plan of type subscription and choose Create. A confirmation pop-up appears with the link to the Instances and Subscriptions page, where you can follow the status of your new subscription under the Subscriptions table.  Once the application is subscribed, assign yourself the CIASIntegrationAdmin role so you can run the CIAS workflow. In your subaccount, go to Security > Users and select your user (default IDP or platform user). — click Role Collections on the right, then use the (…) menu and select Assign Role Collection to add the CIASIntegrationAdmin role.The Go to Application link becomes available once the subscription is activated. Choose the link to launch the Cloud Integration Automation service and obtain its URL. 4. Prerequisites for Custom Knowledge Grounding ActivationSAP Joule for Consultants — an existing instance. See Onboarding Guide for SAP Joule for Consultants | SAP Help Portal.SAP AI Core with the extended plan — required by Document Grounding. See SAP AI Core — SAP Discovery Center.Object Store (recommended for the initial setup) — the simplest data repository to start with, and the example used throughout this mission. See Object Store — SAP Discovery Center.5.    Use CIAS to Set Up Joule for Consultants5.1   Launch CIAS and Plan Integration ScenarioIn the subaccount, go to Instances and Subscriptions and open the Cloud Integration Automation tool using the default identity provider.This launches the CIAS instance. Select Plan Integration Scenarios.In Plan Integration Scenarios, search for ” SAP Joule for Consultants Document Grounding Setup ” and click the arrow on the right of the result. This opens the scenario details. Click Start to begin the guided workflow.5.2 Select the ScopeSelect the type of data source you want to use for grounding Joule for Consultants with your organization’s custom documents. Additionally, choose whether you want to reuse an existing AI Core instance by selecting Yes, or select No if you want the automation to create a new AI Core instance for you.After that click on next step.5.3   Select the SystemsSelect the SAP BTP AI core instance that you want to use for creating the pipeline for document grounding. Also select the SAP Joule for consultants application for which you are setting up Custom Knowledge grounding. 5.4 Add the Task ParameterNow add the following task parameters:Create BTP Space:  Add admin credential for the BTP Global account where SAP Joule for consultants is provisioned.Get Space Name for AI Core Subaccount: Provide AI core service instance nameRetrieve Existing Al Core Details and Create Key: Add admin credential for the BTP Global account where SAP AI core is provisioned. Create Al Core resource group: Provide the name of the Resource group you want to give (e.g. J4c-custom-knowledge)Create generic secret for J4C DG SharePoint in AI Core Subaccount: Provide the SharePoint Application ID, SharePoint App Client Secret, SharePoint Tenant IO, SharePoint URLCreate DG pipeline for Al Core SharePoint Data Source: Provide the SharePoint Side ID and If you have specific folders to be included for SAP Joule for Consultants custom Knowledge grounding, please check the include path checkbox and provide the path for the folder.5.5 ReviewCheck the disclaimer checkbox and Review all the details ones and then click finish and wait for workflow to be created. 5.6 Monitor Integration SetupClick on Monitor Integration Setup to open the workflow.Ones the automation starts, wait for the automation tasks to be completed. Once all the automation tasks complete, there are 3 manual steps needs to be completed in SAP Joule for Consultants:Enable custom knowledge grounding in SAP Joule for Consultants:Select “Enable custom knowledge grounding” task from the workflow.Select view integration task Ones the task opens you will be able to see the steps mentioned for how to enable custom knowledge grounding in SAP Joule for consultants.Select SAP Joule for consultants console URLSelect settings -> Custom Knowledge Grounding -> Toggle on the button for Enable custom Knowledge grounding.  Click on Complete task in CIAS automation. Connect to the SAP Destination ServiceNow we will be connecting SAP destination service with the SAP Joule for consultants. Go to BTP subaccount and look for j4c-dest-inst and select 1 key. Copy the JSON. Go back to SAP Joule for consultant console and select Custom knowledge Grounding -> Sources & Pipelines-> and click on connect Select the JSON format and paste the Destination service JSON that you copied from the SAP Joule for consultants subaccount and then click on next. Select the sources and then click on Save.Select the complete task from the CIAS automation tool  and then click on finish to complete the automation workflow.  Congratulations! Custom knowledge grounding is enabled in SAP Joule for Consultants.Manage Sources & PipelinesMonitor document grounding sources and pipelines, review pipeline status and processing information, and manage source configuration and access control.Sources & PipelinesIn the SAP Joule for Consultants Console the selected sources appear under Sources & Pipelines.The pipeline table displays the following information:ColumnDescriptionPipeline IDUnique identifier for the pipeline. Choose the link to open detailed processing logs.Indexed DocumentsTotal number of documents submitted for processing.Data SourceType of connected data source, for example, S3.Last SyncTimestamp of the most recent synchronization run.StatusCurrent pipeline status: Completed , Completed With Errors , or Processing .Manage SourcesUse the action icons in the top-right corner of the page to manage the selected source:NoteYou can restrict access to each pipeline from this view using Manage Access Control. Available options are Allow All, Deny All, or Restricted to specific SAP Cloud Identity Services groups. New pipelines default to Allow All, which allows all authenticated users.For more information, see Managing Access Control for Custom Knowledge Grounding on the SAP Help Portal.Understand Pipeline StatusFor details, check the documents in Bruno or in the SAP AI Launchpad. For support, open a ticket under component CA-ML-RAGE . Troubleshooting the AI Core Document Grounding pipeline is out of scope for SAP Joule for Consultants. Refresh the Pipeline View and Re-Index Data The Refresh icon in the console only refreshes the view. It does not re-index the data repository.To make newly uploaded documents available to SAP Joule for Consultants, re-run the AI Core Document Grounding pipeline. You can do this using either of the following methods:Send the restart_pipeline request as described in AI Core Document Grounding with Bruno .Choose the Synchronize icon on the pipeline page as described in AI Core Document Grounding with AI Launchpad .Newly uploaded documents are not indexed until the pipeline is run again and reaches FINISHED in AI Core or Completed in the SAP Joule for Consultants Console. Read More Technology Blog Posts by SAP articles 

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