SAP Launches Multi-Pronged Effort To Make Business AI A Core Component Of Its Cloud Software

In opening-day keynotes at the Sapphire conference Tuesday SAP executives unveiled new and extended alliances with AI tech leaders, including Nvidia, AWS and Microsoft, and detailed plans to expand integrations of the company’s Joule generative AI copilot with more SAP products.

Application software giant SAP is vowing to infuse AI technology and capabilities across a broad swath of the company’s cloud software portfolio, leveraging the company’s own Joule generative AI copilot and SAP AI Core offerings and AI technology and expertise from a number of leading IT vendors and strategic service providers.

Plans for the ambitious AI offensive were the focus of keynote speeches by CEO Christian Klein, other SAP executives and executives from technology partners – including Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang – on the first day of the SAP Sapphire conference in Orlando.

“We are entering a new phase of AI with endless possibilities for all of us,” Klein (pictured) said early in his keynote speech. Noting the impact SAP applications have historically had on business operations, Klein spoke about plans to embed “generative AI across our [software] stack to once again revolutionize how businesses are run and how end-users will work in the future.”

Many of those plans revolve around making SAP’s Joule generative AI copilot, which launched in September 2023, a ubiquitous digital assistant. “Joule will become our new front end, our new UX [user experience], and will turn your words into action to become the biggest productivity engine for every SAP end user,” Klein said.

Joule is already embedded in S/4HANA Cloud software, SAP Build, SAP Integration Suite and the SuccessFactors human resource management application suite. By the end of this year Joule will be added to SAP Ariba procurement applications and SAP Analytics Cloud software. The latter will make it possible to integrate generative AI into more planning and analytics workflows.

Klein said SAP has been analyzing what tasks the 300 million people who use SAP applications everyday perform and he said that by the end of this year “80 percent of the most used tasks will be managed via Joule.” Tapping into data generated by SAP users, Klein said Joule will also serve as “a very powerful analytical engine” to create reports for various business operations such as finance and HR.

“Joule is ready for prime time and will be delivered out of the box to all our cloud customers,” Klein said.

The CEO announced plans to integrate Joule with Microsoft’s Copilot for Microsoft 365, saying that the deep bi-directional integration will allow workers to get more done by linking workflows that access data in both SAP and Microsoft 365 applications.

SAP is also accelerating its efforts to build AI capabilities into its software around specific business processes and workflows. Today the company already has more than 50 such AI use cases and the goal is to double that number by the end of 2024, the CEO said. Ongoing AI development efforts also focus on tasks performed by specific “personas” or roles within organizations such as CIOs, CFOs, HR managers and supply chain managers.

But SAP’s AI initiatives go beyond its own AI development. Tuesday the company unveiled a number of new and expanded alliances with IT industry giants and leading IT service providers that will help SAP extend its AI capabilities.

SAP and chip designer Nvidia have formed a “cross-product partnership” to help embed AI technology into SAP software. In one example, as SAP adds generative AI into its SAP Intelligent Product Recommendation application, Nvidia Omni verse Cloud APIs will enable the simulation of complex manufacturing products and configurations as industrial digital twins. In another case, as SAP embeds Joule into the ABAP Cloud development model, Nvidia’s accelerated infrastructure will run, scale and manage SAP’s generative AI model for generating ABAP code.

Nvidia is an SAP application customer in addition to being a technology partner. In a live video feed from Taiwan, Nvidia CEO Huang noted that Nvidia builds some of the most complex systems in the world – it’s Blackwell system has 600,000 parts – and therefore has “one of the most complex supply chains in the world…And all of that entire supply chain, all of our bill of materials, all of our forecasting systems, all of our build plans, all of those 600,000 parts, some 40 different manufacturers

[are] all managed under SAP,” Huang said.

SAP previously unveiled an expanded relationship with Amazon Web Services under which the AWS Bedrock generative AI platform is being integrated with the SAP Generative AI Hub, giving SAP customers access to high-performing large language models (LLMs) and foundation models for building generative AI applications. SAP has also committed to using AWS Graviton3 processors to support HANA Cloud and train and deploy future SAP Business AI offerings.

SAP also announced that it is partnering with LLM developer Mistral AI to provide SAP customers with access to Mistral’s latest LLMs through the generative AI hub in SAP AI Core – part of the SAP Business Technology Platform. SAP is also integrating the Meta Llama 2 and Meta Llama 3 models into the generative AI hub.

And SAP and Google Cloud said they are expanding their partnership, integrating Joule and SAP Integrated Business Planning for Supply Chain software with Google Cloud’s Gemini models AI assistant and Google Cloud Cortex Framework’s data foundation.

SAP is also working closely with its system integration and strategic service partners to help customers get the most out of AI. Accenture, No. 1 on the 2024 CRN Solution Provider 500, said in a Sapphire announcement that while customers were largely experimenting with generative AI in 2023, this year it is working with SAP and clients scale up those efforts by combining AI with enterprise data, embedding AI capabilities, adding business insights to business functions, and accelerating revenue growth using SAP products such as Joule, generative AI Hub, Datasphere, and SAP HANA Cloud vector engine.

Outside of AI initiatives, Klein, during his keynote, announced the next steps in the company’s Rise with SAP product and service offerings for migrating legacy on-premises systems to cloud applications. Klein said SAP will now assign an enterprise architect to every current and future Rise customer to help with the entire Rise with SAP lifecycle. Klein said that there are currently more than 6,000 Rise with SAP customers.