SAP Business AI

SAP Business AI gets beyond the hype, helping customers bring out their best by building cutting-edge AI innovation directly into the systems that power much of the world’s business. This week at Sapphire, SAP is announcing extensive new integrations of our natural language generative AI copilot Joule and unveiling a swathe of new Business AI capabilities throughout our comprehensive portfolio of business applications.

SAP Embeds AI Copilot Joule Throughout Its Enterprise Portfolio

SAP announced the ongoing extensive integration of Joule – its natural-language, generative AI copilot – throughout the company’s technology platform and portfolio of business applications. By quickly sorting and contextualizing data from multiple systems to surface smarter insights, Joule helps people get work done faster and drives better business outcomes in a secure, compliant way.

 

Joule was announced in September 2023 with initial integrations in SAP SuccessFactors and SAP Start. Since then, SAP has integrated Joule into SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition and SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition, as well as in multiple products including SAP Customer Data Platform, SAP BTP Cockpit, SAP Build, SAP Build Code, and SAP Integration Suite.

 

In the second half of 2024, Joule is also planned to be available in SAP Ariba, SAP Analytics Cloud and in multiple supply chain management solutions from SAP. Additionally, Joule will be able to understand and respond to queries in a growing number of languages, including German, Spanish, French and Portuguese, making it even more useful for global organizations.

 

Further integration of Joule across the SAP enterprise portfolio includes the following areas:

 

ERP and Finance

 

Customers can use Joule to optimize financial processes in various SAP solutions:

  • Billing specialists can use Joule with SAP Advanced Financial Closing to unlock the unstructured content of inbound customer correspondence for collections, improving the accuracy of risk determinations. Joule can also generate a summary of project profitability, prioritizing projects for further analysis and proposing actions for project improvement.
  • SAP Fiori applications now benefit from Joule-enabled insights, with the copilot able to summarize available data and produce visual data narratives.

Human Resources

 

Employees can use Joule to get answers to natural-language questions about their organization’s HR policy documents in SAP SuccessFactors, saving time and enhancing the overall employee experience. And Joule provides an easy, conversational way for employees to ask questions and complete HR processes related to their personal HR and talent data.

 

These benefits are enabled by Joule’s new document grounding capability, which can provide more comprehensive responses by drawing from business documents located in SAP and third-party repositories such as Microsoft SharePoint. This capability deepens how Joule reliably delivers answers grounded in customers’ structured and unstructured business data.

 

Industries

 

Commodities traders and business operators will be spared from repetitive data entry tasks in the SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition, commodity management for physical contracts solution. With Joule, business operators can create new commodities deals by simply describing the deal using conversational language, giving them more time to focus on producing better commercial outcomes for their clients. This capability is planned to be available in the second half of this year.

 

IT and Platform

  • Business analysts, IT professionals and process owners can rapidly automate business processes at scale using generative AI capabilities made possible by Joule. New capabilities that support enterprise automation include:
    • Joule copilot integration with SAP Build Process Automation, which allows customers to generate automations and workflows using natural language requests in addition to the standard no-code visual editor.
    • Joule copilot integration with SAP Signavio, which supports natural language requests to generate process models in addition to the manual process editor.
    • Customers using SAP Integration Suite can create integration flows and connect to any application using simple natural language with Joule.
  • Compliance and IT professionals will be able to leverage Joule with the regulatory change manager tool, a cloud application built on SAP BTP. This tool evaluates a vast number of regulatory updates, putting them into the context of a customer’s business and their SAP solutions. It also provides impact analysis across SAP products and solutions to help customers maintain compliance and run their day-to-day business without disruption.
  • SAP is introducing ABAP Developer capabilities in Joule that let software developers write ABAP code using generative AI. The first feature available for beta release and planned for general availability in the second half of this year lets software developers create ABAP business objects using generative AI in SAP BTP, ABAP Environment. Additional ABAP Developer capabilities in Joule, planned for early next year, will be available for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition and SAP BTP, ABAP Environment. Additionally, to help developers generate, complete, and test ABAP code efficiently, SAP is fine-tuning a model on its proprietary ABAP code, leveraging NVIDIA NeMo microservices.
  • Joule powered SAP Build Code now lets customers be more agile by quickly building Fiori front-ends to their SAP S/4HANA Cloud systems using generative AI, simplifying SAP S/4HANA Cloud extensions.

Sourcing and Procurement

 

Sourcing managers can create requests for proposals from suppliers or vendors much faster in SAP Ariba Sourcing, thanks to intelligent product and supplier recommendations from Joule. These recommendations consider cost-effectiveness, carbon footprint impact, local compliance regulations and past transactions. This capability is planned to be available in the second half of this year.

 

Supply Chain

  • Supply chain planners can interact with SAP Integrated Business Planning for Supply Chain by relying on Joule’s detailed analysis of supply chain planning runs. This analysis will identify root causes behind delays in filling orders and suggest corrective measures.
  • Logistics providers can use Joule to speed up the process of receiving goods and planning transportation in SAP S/4HANA Supply Chain for transportation management.
SAP Business AI Innovations Bring Out Customers’ Best

Even beyond Joule, SAP continues helping customers deliver real-world results as it embeds business AI capabilities throughout its comprehensive portfolio of business applications.

 

Customer Experience (CX)

  • Sales professionals can benefit from business AI innovations in SAP Sales Cloud, including:
    • Predictive forecasting capabilities, which predict the likelihood of deals closing across a company's entire business portfolio and give chief revenue officers more comprehensive revenue forecasting.
    • Predictive product and people recommendations that empower sales teams by recommending individuals within a prospect’s organization that can help close deal and product combinations that the prospect is likely to purchase, eliminating hours of research on the needs and preferences of potential customers.
    • AI account summaries and lead boosters, which automatically generate reports about sales prospects by pulling together individual prospect details, industry business context and relevant news. These AI-generated reports significantly decrease the need for manual information gathering, giving salespeople more time to focus on closing deals.
  • The CX AI Toolkit will also include new AI features, such as:
    • An AI shopping assistant that will let shoppers ask questions using everyday conversational language and receive personalized answers and product recommendations on sites powered by SAP Commerce Cloud. This will help consumers find the products they're looking for faster, creating a better overall shopping experience. This capability is planned to be generally available in the second half of this year.
    • A generative AI tool builder, which lets system administrators create customized AI tools for business users from data in SAP Commerce Cloud, SAP Sales Cloud and SAP Service Cloud. These tools can be used to personalize content that meets specific customer experience business needs.
    • An AI image creation feature designed to reduce image production time in SAP Commerce Cloud. Rather than having to use external image editing software, business users will be able to generate new product images using natural language prompts from within the solution or remove backgrounds behind product images and replace them with solid colors. This capability is planned to be generally available in the second half of this year.
    • An AI expert recommendations feature that will be able to connect people within an organization to internal experts who can provide answers and insights. Instead of searching through emails and organizational charts, business users will be able to simply ask their questions using natural language and receive the names of suggested experts. This capability is planned to be generally available in the second half of this year.

ERP and Finance

  • New generative AI capabilities in SAP Advanced Financial Closing automate error explanations and guide users to fast resolution of common errors. The new capability also delivers personalized video data stories to financial controllers, highlighting top projects based on key metrics such as recognized revenue, utilization rates and margins.
  • Collections specialists using SAP Billing and Revenue Innovation Management can offset the risk of late customer payments by analyzing customer behavior and business correspondence to predict the likelihood of delayed payments.

Human Resources

  • People managers responsible for making compensation decisions will benefit from AI-generated reports in SAP SuccessFactors that provide people managers with responsibly-sourced insights to have informed compensation discussions.
  • Employees who need to draft performance goals, development goals, feedback reports and similar documentation will be able to take advantage of a new generative AI writing assistant across the SAP SuccessFactors HCM suite. The AI assistant will help employees write faster, more effectively and more consistently.
  • HR and procurement professionals responsible for hiring external workers in SAP Fieldglass will be able to rapidly create job postings with generative AI, using information such as the job title, job description and qualifications. Generative AI can also be used to translate job postings into other languages.
  • Additional generative AI capabilities in SAP SuccessFactors include:
    • Candidate skill matching, which enables recruiters to quickly screen and filter candidates by matching skills extracted from candidate resumes with those included in job descriptions.
    • Creating specific and measurable performance goals for individual employees.

Industries

 

Sales engineers in manufacturing industries can now generate product and configuration recommendations quickly and accurately in SAP Intelligent Product Recommendation. Powered by generative AI, this solution also provides estimations of key parameters such as power requirements, size, lead time, and carbon emissions.

 

Additionally, with a new integration of NVIDIA Omniverse Cloud APIs, SAP Intelligent Product Recommendation allows plant managers to interact with a physically based digital twin of a complex product within a larger, industrial digital twin of the entire factory. This helps ensure that the product – with all of the selected configurations – fits within the allocated space and is optimized to achieve the factory’s objectives.

 

IT and Platform

  • Automatic content generation and enrichment in SAP Enable Now cuts the time IT administrators, training managers and content developers spend writing content by up to 80%.
  • Compliance and IT professionals can use AI in localization as a self-service for SAP S/4HANA Cloud to automate manual tasks such as payment format localization and form localization, reducing what once took days to a matter of hours.

Procurement

 

HR and procurement professionals producing job postings for external workers and statements of work (SOWs) for external services will be able to leverage generative AI capabilities in SAP Fieldglass. This makes it easier to produce effective job descriptions and comprehensive SOW descriptions to quickly identify needed skills and qualifications. Rapid, cost-effective translations of these job descriptions are available in over 20 languages.

 

Supply Chain

  • Manufacturers who rely on the SAP Quality Issue Resolution solution can speed up the resolution of reoccurring issues by using AI to bundle similar quality incidents and find similar problem-solving processes.
  • New AI capabilities in SAP Asset Performance Management will aid technicians, inspectors and managers as they visually inspect asset conditions. Images collected from visual inspections can easily be annotated, displayed and compiled into inspection alerts.
SAP Unveils New Consulting Capability for Joule, Streamlining SAP Implementations with Generative AI

SAP is bringing new consulting capabilities to Joule, its generative AI copilot, aimed at simplifying SAP implementations for partners. The new consulting capability, leveraging the NVIDIA NeMo Retriever microservice, draws insights from SAP product documentation and the SAP community to provide consultants with vital information through natural language interactions. This capability is especially critical for supporting customers transitioning to SAP S/4HANA Cloud as part of the RISE with SAP program, helping to accelerate implementation projects and save money.

 

Joule's new consulting capabilities have been tested through multiple SAP certification exams. Price Waterhouse-Coopers and Deloitte, having evaluated the upgraded features, are set to deploy these capabilities for more efficient execution. This advancement is expected to reduce time and resource use for their clients moving to RISE with SAP solutions, demonstrating the traction and value of Joule’s enhancements.

 

This capability is planned to be available in the second half of this year.

AWS and SAP Unlock New Innovation with Generative AI

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and SAP announce an expanded, strategic collaboration to transform modern cloud enterprise resource planning experiences and help enterprises drive new capabilities and efficiencies with generative AI. Together, SAP and AWS are striving to make it easier for customers to adopt the RISE with SAP solution on AWS, to improve the performance and efficiency of SAP workloads running in the cloud, and to embed generative AI into an enterprise’s entire portfolio of business-critical applications.

Learn more about the expanded collaboration between AWS and SAP
SAP Expands Business AI Portfolio with Meta AI Models

SAP announced it will leverage the Meta Llama 3 large language model to generate scripts that render highly customized analytics applications in SAP Analytics Cloud. SAP will also make the Llama 2 and Llama 3 large language models by Meta available in the generative AI hub in SAP AI Core. Meta’s next-generation AI model excels at language nuances and contextual understanding, making it an ideal candidate for translating enterprise business requirements into tangible outcomes.

Learn more about the expansion of the SAP Business AI portfolio
SAP and Microsoft to Integrate their AI Assistants

At Sapphire, SAP also announced plans to further broaden Joule’s scope by integrating it with Microsoft Copilot to surface even richer insights. This deep, bi-directional integration gives users a unified experience built right into the flow of work, enabling seamless access to information from interactions with business applications in SAP and Microsoft 365.

Learn more about the AI assistants and business applications integration
Mistral AI Lends Its Models to SAP’s Growing Repository

SAP and Mistral announce the addition of large language models from Mistral AI to SAP’s growing repository of world-class AI models in the generative AI hub, a capability within SAP AI Core which makes it simple to build generative AI use cases for SAP applications.

Learn more about Mistral AI lending language models to SAP's repository
SAP Taps NVIDIA AI and Omniverse for Next-Gen Business Operations

SAP and NVIDIA announce a number of collaborations involving NVIDIA technology and SAP enterprise applications. SAP is using NVIDIA AI Enterprise software, including NVIDIA NIM and NeMo Retriever microservices, for Joule’s SAP Consulting capabilities and ABAP Developer capabilities. Additionally, to help streamline the selling and buying process of complex products, SAP is also integrating NVIDIA Omniverse Cloud APIs into SAP Intelligent Product Recommendation, enabling salespeople to visualize 3D products via digital twins.

Learn more about the collaborations on the NVIDIA blog
SAP and Google Accelerate AI-Powered Supply Chains

SAP and Google have expanded their strategic partnership, focusing their combined resources to better predict and mitigate supply chain risks in an unpredictable and volatile global context.

 

To help businesses more easily understand the impact of marketing campaigns on product sales, the companies are integrating generative AI assistant Joule and SAP Integrated Business Planning for Supply Chain with Google’s Gemini AI assistant and Google Cloud Cortex Framework’s Data Foundation based on BigQuery. This integration will increase forecast accuracy and allow supply chain business users to react faster to demand signals that were previously hard to capture.

 

The new partnership also makes it easier to predict and react to potential supply chain disruptions. SAP Integrated Planning for Supply Chain now includes AI-driven alerts about potential disruptions retrieved via Google Cloud Vertex AI. The solution also integrates additional contextual data, such as weather and search trends from Cortex Framework, which can provide an early warning about potential disruptions. With these new capabilities, SAP Integrated Planning for Supply Chain will be able to generate alternative scenarios and re-plan entire supply chains to offset disruption risks.

SAP Announces Strategic Partnerships to Accelerate Business AI Adoption

SAP announced engagements with its vast network of partners aimed at helping organizations quickly incorporate and adopt AI into their business processes:

  • Accenture and SAP are helping clients transform business models, processes, and customer and employee experiences while realizing value through data and AI. At SAP Sapphire 2024, Accenture is announcing its plans to embrace Joule’s SAP Consulting capabilities and ABAP Developer capabilities in compressed Cloud ERP transformations. Additionally, Accenture and SAP are teaming on SAP Signavio and SAP LeanIX solutions to help customers with insights, governance and capabilities to achieve their transformation outcomes. Learn more here.
  • McKinsey Consulting unveiled an expansion of its Value Bridge consulting offering. Powered by SAP Signavio, Value Bridge aligns an organization’s strategy, operating model, business processes, data and technology to produce continuous business value. In this expanded edition, McKinsey Consulting aims to add AI value drivers into scope as well. Learn more here.
  • Boston Consulting Group announced a new offering with SAP which recommends opportunities to maximize digital transformation investments using SAP Signavio and SAP LeanIX. The offering allows companies to navigate continuous change and prioritizes ways to onboard AI-based innovations. Learn more here.
SAP Commits to UNESCO Ethics in Artificial Intelligence Principles

SAP has updated its global AI ethics policy by adopting the 10 guiding principles of the UNESCO Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence. SAP’s policy was first published in 2018. It governs the company’s use and sale of AI, ensuring that customers remain aligned with global AI principles while SAP Business AI delivers fully on its promise of relevance, reliability and responsibility.

 

The UNESCO guiding principles govern various aspects of AI ethics, including proportionality, safety, fairness, sustainability, privacy, human oversight, transparency, responsibility, awareness and multi-stakeholder collaboration. They aim to ensure that AI technologies are developed and used in ways that respect human rights, promote fairness and contribute to sustainable development.