SAP Teams With Nvidia To Boost GenAI Development Around Enterprise Applications

An alliance between the two companies, announced Monday at Nvidia’s GTC 2024 event, will help SAP customers to better leverage data generated by SAP cloud applications using customized LLMs deployed with Nvidia AI foundry services and the new Nvidia NIM microservices.

Software giant SAP and accelerated computing superstar Nvidia are teaming up to jointly develop generative AI and large language model technology that businesses and organizations can use across SAP’s broad portfolio of cloud services and applications.

Through the development alliance SAP and Nvidia will build and deliver software as part of the SAP Business AI portfolio, the company’s line of copilot tools for line-of-business functions, including finance, supply chain management, sales and human resources, and for vertical industries.

SAP described the Nvidia partnership as part of its ongoing efforts to build generative AI directly into the company’s applications and in a statement said the alliance “aims to help customers adopt generative AI capabilities at scale across their organizations.”

“Enterprise customers want to leverage state-of-the-art technology that delivers real business value,” said SAP CEO Christian Klein in a statement. “Strategic technology partnerships, like the one between SAP and Nvidia, are at the core of our strategy to invest in technology that maximizes the potential and opportunity of AI for business. NVIDIA’s expertise in delivering AI capabilities at scale will help SAP accelerate the pace of transformation and better serve our customers in the cloud.”

SAP and Nvidia plan to collaborate to integrate generative AI into SAP cloud systems including SAP Datasphere, the SAP Business Technology Platform and Rise with SAP.

“SAP is sitting on a gold mine of enterprise data that can be transformed into custom generative AI agents to help customers automate their businesses,” said Jensen Huang, Nvidia founder and CEO, in a statement. “Together, NVIDIA and SAP will bring custom generative AI to the thousands of enterprises around the world that rely on SAP to power their operations.”

The companies are collaborating to build and deliver SAP Business AI, including scalable, business-specific generative AI capabilities inside SAP’s Joule copilot and across SAP’s portfolio of cloud solutions and applications – all of which are underpinned by the SAP generative AI hub. (SAP launched the Joule copilot in September 2023.) The generative AI hub facilitates relevant, reliable and responsible business AI and provides instant access to a broad range of large language models (LLMs).

SAP will use Nvidia’s generative AI foundry service to fine-tune LLMs for domain-specific scenarios and deploy applications with new Nvidia NIM microservices. (AI foundry service features Nvidia DGX Cloud AI supercomputing, Nvidia AI Enterprise software and Nvidia AI Foundation Models. These new capabilities are designed to be the basis of SAP’s development and deployment of generative AI for customers and is expected to be accessible in the generative AI hub in SAP AI Core and SAP Datasphere.

SAP and NVIDIA plan to make the new integrated capabilities available by the end of 2024.

Additional generative AI initiatives SAP and Nvidia have in the works include using LLMs for SAP’s ABAP programming language, unifying AI data sources with SAP Datasphere, and providing new capabilities for the Joule copilot such as building retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) capabilities that can be deployed on hyperscalers or SAP’s own cloud.

Nvidia and SAP are also developing more than 20 generative AI use cases for SAP applications including SAP S/4HANA Cloud, SAP SuccessFactors and SAP Signavio.

Once models are ready for deployment in cloud solutions from SAP, SAP plans to use Nvidia AI Enterprise software, including NVIDIA NeMo Retriever microservices and the new Nvidia NIM inference microservices.