Revolutionizing Business Landscapes: The Impact of Generative AI within SAP’s Ecosystem

In the swiftly evolving landscape of technology, where artificial intelligence (AI) is no longer a distant goal but a clear accelerator of business processes, SAP stands at the front, showing signs of a new era of innovation. With the introduction of generative AI, we are on the edge of a revolution that promises to redefine the boundaries of creativity, productivity, and efficiency in the corporate world.

This blog embarks on an exploratory journey into SAP’s latest endeavors to harness the power of AI, focusing on the SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) and its AI Foundation.

SAP TechEd Announcements

At the last SAP TechEd, SAP unveiled numerous AI innovations, such as Joule, a new generative AI assistant and SAP Build Code, which introduces AI-powered productivity tools for developers, and new vector capabilities for SAP HANA Cloud. These innovations aim to enrich business data with unstructured data, enabling customers to derive insightful, relevant responses by integrating the intelligence of large language models with business-specific data. Additionally, the AI Foundation on SAP BTP has been expanded to include a generative AI hub in SAP AI Core, providing developers with instant access to a broad range of large language models from various providers​​. Now let’s delve little bit more into these improvements:

A New Generative AI Assistant : Joule

SAP’s strategic investment in generative AI is best exemplified by the introduction of Joule, a new generative AI assistant designed to integrate seamlessly with SAP’s suite of cloud services, including SAP SuccessFactors, SAP S/4HANA Cloud, and SAP Customer Experience, among others. It will harness the expansive range of SAP’s solutions along with data from external platforms, providing immediate, relevant insights that align with business contexts. Joule’s adeptness in sifting through diverse data systems and presenting intelligent insights empowers users to enhance their productivity and foster superior business results. Joule is part of SAP’s broader ambition to embed AI across its portfolio, enhancing the SAP Business AI offerings and ensuring that more than 26,000 SAP cloud customers have access to innovative AI scenarios. This initiative underscores SAP’s commitment to building an enterprise AI ecosystem that combines SAP’s own investments with collaborations with industry leaders like Microsoft, Google Cloud, and IBM​​.

Generative AI Hub and Open Source AI Models

The Generative AI Hub within SAP BTP facilitates the development of applications using generative AI by providing access to a wide range of Large Language Models (LLMs) from different providers. Notably, it includes models such as GPT-4 by Azure OpenAI and the open-source model Falcon-40b. This hub enables developers to orchestrate multiple models, either programmatically via SAP AI Core or through the SAP AI Launchpad, allowing for prompt engineering, experimentation, and the comparison of outcomes from different LLMs to identify the most suitable model for a given task​​​​.

AI Launchpad

AI Launchpad facilitates the transparent management of AI models, enabling connections to multiple AI runtimes and centralizing AI lifecycle management for AI scenarios with a user-friendly interface​​​​. Available on SAP BTP,  It allows you to connect to multiple AI runtimes, including SAP AI Core, and centralize AI lifecycle management for your AI scenarios with a convenient user interface.

SAP Translation Hub

SAP Translation Hub is an innovative solution designed to streamline the translation process for UI texts and documents. It utilizes an extensive repository of SAP-approved translations and terminology alongside machine translation technology. Developers can seamlessly integrate this service into their workflow, using a range of API methods or UI-based scenarios, to enhance the accuracy and efficiency of translations during the development phase.

SAP Document Information Extraction

The Document Information Extraction service, now available in a premium edition, harnesses the power of generative AI to intelligently process a wide range of document types across various business contexts. This advanced service eliminates the need for manual annotation and intensive machine learning training, allowing for the swift onboarding of business document processing use cases.

Ethical and Responsible AI

Besides implementing AI in a wide SAP ecosystem, SAP also places a strong emphasis on ethical and responsible AI practices. New features like the FairML function in the Predictive Analysis Library (PAL)  address fairness in machine learning model predictions, aiming to mitigate unfairness and ensure equity in decision-making across sensitive demographic groups​​.

Conclusion

SAP’s investment in generative AI extends to creating a vibrant ecosystem of partners and continued research to ensure the development of ethical, secure, and effective AI solutions. The partnership with entities like DataRobot and the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI underscores SAP’s commitment to advancing AI in a manner that aligns with business needs and ethical standards​​. Furthermore, SAP’s focus on integrating AI into its cloud services through SAP BTP and other initiatives reflects a forward-thinking approach to business technology. By leveraging generative AI, SAP is not only enhancing its existing offerings but also paving the way for future innovations that promise to transform how businesses operate, innovate, and engage with their customers. We are also looking forward to SAP Sapphire 2024, taking place in June 2024 in Orlando and Barcelona to be a pivotal event unveiling SAP’s newest Business AI innovations, setting the stage for future AI-driven enterprise transformation and global collaboration.