By integrating artificial intelligence at the core of its business applications, SAP, through its SAP Business AI approach, deploys a wide range of solutions tailored to each industry and sector, covering finance, procurement, supply chain management, sales, and many other areas.
All these AI applications are available in the latest SAP solutions such as S/4HANA and SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP).
SAP Business AI : Business Solutions Enhanced by AI
In constant pursuit of innovation, SAP has incorporated artificial intelligence into several of its solutions to meet the wide range of needs and demands of its customers across different business departments. This progress has manifested itself in its SAP BTP platform, the development of its Joule assistant, the integration of generative AI within multiple applications and much more.
Here is an overview of the use of AI across these solutions :
AI for Finance :
SAP has integrated artificial intelligence into its dedicated finance solutions, transforming the financial landscape by improving performance and automating tasks. This technology has an impact on areas such as payment management, expense management, financial closing, invoice management, auditing and forecasting. Its impact can be seen in the simplified reconciliation between invoices and payments, significantly speeding up the processing of receivables.
AI for the Supply Chain :
The integration of AI offers a considerable set of benefits: it makes the supply chain more sustainable and better prepared to face potential risks. The insights and recommendations generated by AI provide key information and automate several aspects of the supply chain. SAP Business AI modernizes processes from design to operations, enabling informed decisions and reliable anticipation of customer demand. Moreover, it optimizes demand forecasting, intelligently detects anomalies to ensure better quality, and offers advanced visual inspections.
AI for Procurement :
Integrating AI into procurement processes makes this function proactive, agile, and data-driven. Through AI-driven automation, recommendations and advice, procurement operations are significantly improved. This technology simplifies processes through accurate purchasing forecasts and easier contract management. Decision-makers benefit from AI-generated recommendations, for better process streamlining and informed decision-making. Moreover, through guided sourcing, AI recommends quality suppliers based on their history and intelligent data analysis. By providing users with real-time information and relevant searches based on historical data, AI effectively guides purchasing actions.
AI for HR :
SAP integrates artificial intelligence into its human resources management solutions for various applications. In HR departments, AI plays a crucial role in facilitating the recruitment process, promoting the development of skills and identifying internal talent. It can also be used to create personalized development paths to help each employee reach their full potential. Moreover, AI is used to spot and attract the best talents for new vacancies by detecting gender biases. By simplifying workflows, it allows HR teams to focus on critical tasks, to allow for smarter and more efficient people management.
AI for Sales and Marketing :
This approach personalises the entire customer journey through AI-powered recommendations, strengthens sales pipelines through intelligent prospect assessment to build loyalty, and improves the customer experience through personalised agent assistance, individualised responses to queries, customer scoring, and detection of incomplete orders. In addition, SAP anticipates customer behaviour to provide relevant recommendations, automates recurring tasks to exceed customer expectations, and personalises each stage of the customer journey using operational and contextual data.
AI for Information Technology :
This technology enriches applications through the use of pre-trained AI models based on company-specific data. AI also facilitates the automation of data management tasks by offering data attribute recommendations for faster management. These applications of AI in information technology enhance operational efficiency and process performance within the company.
Industry-specific AI :
Industry-specific AI solutions offers considerable opportunities for businesses They allow companies to manage operational complexity, overcome industry challenges, and modernize their business practices. By offering offering a range of tools from predictive analytics to the provision of intelligent insights, SAP Business AI automates planning, improves forecast accuracy, and simplifies decision-making processes.
How Does SAP Integrate Generative Artificial Intelligence into Its Solutions ?
Integration of Large Language Models (LLM) in SAP Applications :
The Large Language Models (LLM) integrated into SAP Business AI are designed to adapt to the specific needs of each company, particularly in terms of security, ensuring integrity and compliance with strict data protection regulations. These LLM-enabled SAP tools can analyse and generate text as well as answer complex questions in natural language. Thanks to this advanced technology, companies can speed up their data analysis and improve its interpretation, for example by checking official documents, creating content (job descriptions, for example) or identifying KPIs tailored to their needs.
One of the main benefits of these LLMs offered by SAP is compliance with European Union standards for data processing, ensuring healthy and ethical use of AI by businesses.
Joule: SAP’s Generative AI Assistant :
SAP Joule, the generative AI assistant, is a significant advancement for SAP, available within its systems. It is a chat-type interface for smooth natural language communication. Joule is characterized by its ability to adapt to users. It adjusts its functionalities according to their specific roles while respecting user authorizations. This innovative functionality will initially be deployed in SuccessFactors and SAP Start for SAP S/4HANA Cloud, Public Edition, starting this year.
Joule is set to be gradually rolled out across the entire SAP portfolio. This integration will ensure that artificial intelligence is used seamlessly and in a personalized way within SAP solutions, enhancing the user experience and making it easier to access key information.
How Does SAP BTP Integrate Artificial Intelligence into Its Applications ?
SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) offers a range of integrated AI solutions, including SAP Build Code, SAP Build Process Automation and many more. Each of these solutions plays a specific role in the SAP BTP ecosystem. Each of these solutions plays a specific role in the SAP BTP ecosystem.
Through its all-in-one AI Foundation toolkit, SAP BTP provides developers with ready-to-use artificial intelligence that can be customised, integrated with business data and supported by the latest generative AI data models. Here is a brief overview of these solutions :
SAP Build Code :
This solution is based on generative AI with the Joule copilot, optimised specifically for the development of Java and JavaScript applications. It provides developers with advanced assistance, helping them to create code using contextual suggestions and recommendations.
SAP Build Process Automation :
This solution represents a significant advancement thanks to its optimized artificial intelligence and ease of use without requiring coding skills It simplifies workflow management and enables the creation of RPA-based automations, with an intuitive interface and user-friendly drag & drop functions.
Management of Generative AI Models in SAP BTP :
The management of generative AI models in SAP BTP allows the use and extension of the best base models. This solution enables the orchestration of several large language models from a central location. Moreover, it provides tools to accelerate and enhance the engineering, experimentation, and optimization of models.
By leveraging vector functionalities, it facilitates the retrieval of exact data and helps reduce errors, offering an integrated approach for managing generative AI models within the SAP BTP environment.
SAP BTP Integrates Pre-trained AI Models :
With the intelligent “Document Information Extraction” solution, manual efforts are significantly reduced, which enables efficient process automation. Moreover, pre-trained AI models provide data attributes and personalized recommendations to assist users in making informed decisions. These models have the capability to automatically and easily translate content into multiple languages.
Possibility to Train AI Models at Scale :
SAP BTP offers the possibility to train AI models, allowing users to develop, deploy, and run these models while respecting data confidentiality and ensuring performance. This solution enables the training and serving of models across multiple access points, thus offering increased flexibility. Moreover, thanks to robust Machine Learning Operations (MLOps), the lifecycle of this application is accelerated, promoting unprecedented operational efficiency. This application also allows for continuous monitoring of model performance statistics with the possibility of retraining if necessary.
Artificial intelligence has transformed multiple operational practices within companies. Aware of this evolution, SAP has integrated this cutting-edge technology into its solutions, thus offering considerable advantages to numerous industries. This integration enables improved business processes and a greater response to customer needs, paving the way for increased efficiency and an optimized customer experience.
