Presented by SAP
In the midst of the AI revolution, fake podcasts and chatbots may get the most hype, but the transformative power of AI lies in the heart of the business. It’s in the day-to-day operations where businesses can realize the potential of AI: automating and improving workflows, gaining intelligent insights and driving efficiency.
SAP, the global powerhouse behind many leading enterprise applications and business AI, is one of the pioneers in applying the latest AI technology to the challenges of running an enterprise. They are folding the technology into their stack across all levels including SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition, a cloud-based ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) solution that is customizable to meet unique business needs. ERP tools have long allowed business leaders to manage models of their business processes and now they’ll have the option to leverage time-saving assistance from AI.
Joule, SAP’s generative AI copilot, is differentiated by direct integration across SAP’s broad set of business applications. Consider the basic example of a sales manager who oversees customer orders. Since Joule is integrated across SAP’s business applications, the sales manager will be able to use Joule to check inventory status and potential supply chain issues causing a delay and ask Joule to monitor and resolve the issue quickly, improving workflow and customer experience.
An AI copilot named Joule
“Joule is the copilot throughout SAP’s cloud portfolio, including ERP,” explained Vinay V, cloud ERP solution expert for SAP. “Joule is the front end to the vast amounts of data and rich process information that resides within SAP. Joule will help to uncover and provide those insights for the end users.”
The potential of Joule can be found throughout SAP’s solutions. A finance team, for instance, can automate fiscal decisions by using the AI to analyze past results, compare projected and actual financial performance, and make actionable recommendations for budget management. Supply chain management teams can ask Joule for smart predictions to optimize inventories and order fulfillment.
The power of AI is even more apparent when it can reach across disciplines, divisions and silos in organizations and coordinate the response. These cross-disciplinary opportunities may offer the greatest advantages for enterprises because they can unlock synergies that weren’t being tapped before.
“We’re seeing and developing multiple use cases across each of these application areas,” explained V. “This is where we see there is a huge potential for making an impact and liberating the technology to help, running through these processes much more efficiently. We see this across finance, in supply chain, including manufacturing, delivery management, production-related activities and also in asset management.”
While many of these complex opportunities are just beginning to be explored, AI will have obvious applications for the front-line teams that manage customers, both existing and future. SAP wants to marry their deep reservoir of transaction data with the ability of LLMs to add a more human layer to personalized responses. The ability of large language models to work with human languages opens up the possibilities for humans to work more naturally and efficiently with the underlying SAP systems as well.
“With Joule, the end users, irrespective of their know-how, irrespective of their background or their familiarity with the systems, can use natural language to interact.” said V. “That’s a significant change in the way that end users will not only be able to interact, but be able to uncover greater insights on what’s happening within the system.”
Embracing the cloud
In essence, SAP is driving a foundational change for its customers. While end-user AI applications may be the most visible, SAP is also using generative AI to help customers migrate to the cloud faster. Moving to the cloud can help simplify operations and reduce costs for businesses. At SAP’s annual TechEd event, the company announced a new generative AI functionality to encourage and support customers to speed up this transition.
“Customers moving their ERP systems from on-premise to the cloud is a significant endeavor. No jokes about that,” explained Pratibha Kumar Sood, vice president of cloud ERP product marketing at SAP. That is why SAP is investing in generative AI capabilities to help customers get proactive guidance and task automation to help them on their journey.
While this generative AI capability is still in beta, SAP plans to roll out this feature more broadly in Q1 of 2025 through its RISE with SAP program and has developed a rigorous process to help customers along the path of embracing the cloud — and any of the AI that’s available there.
“This is where the RISE with SAP methodology comes in to help with SAP expert support, tools and best-practice guidance” said Sood. “The methodology is not just theory — here are the steps and here are the phases — but it’s SAP providing expert guidance. We will have our architects, our SAP team of advisors to support the RISE customers right from day one.”
SAP is also enhancing tools like SAP Build with generative AI capabilities that allow both developers and business users to create scalable, secure and stable extensions to their cloud ERP. These capabilities are designed to promote developer productivity with tools for automated code generation and code explanation.
AI is also strengthening the process of data governance in organizations by bringing continuity to their business. “We’re leveraging AI to flag and quickly summarize the various changes that are made, or that are pending for a particular master data object,” explained V.
In the end, all of the seemingly magical powers of AI depend entirely on the quality of the data. The enterprises that rely upon SAP have been using it as a stable platform for back-office tasks like recording transactions or tracking inventory. Now they’re able to unlock new answers sealed away in this data to uncover trends and patterns with the complex analytical AI algorithms.
To learn more, register for SAP’s RISE Into the Future virtual event taking place on October 22, 2024.
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