Artificial intelligence, particularly generative AI, continues to reinvent how we run our businesses and shape the ways people work.
With Gartner finding more than 80% of enterprises using generative AI application programming interfaces (APIs) or models, and/or deploying generative AI-enabled applications in production environments by 2026, we know there is vast opportunity ahead of us to build the tools and layout the pathways to enable every developer to make an impact.
We believe AI will have a profound effect on the way engineers and developers work in three fundamental ways.
- First, how we build our software and applications
- Second, what we build into the DevOps cycle tools and platform
- And finally, who can code using natural language conversations, extending programming beyond low coders to no coders
Development will become even more democratized to anyone with great ideas and creativity.
At SAP, we are at the forefront of business AI. SAP Business AI is about achieving real business results for the enterprise and making AI relevant, reliable, and responsible.
We have embedded AI capabilities into our solutions including Joule, our new generative AI copilot, which understands your business.
We are working relentlessly to bring these generative AI use cases to our customers, including educating SAP employees on best practices and providing AI tools internally to accelerate generative AI-embedded product development. We are doing the same for developers. Here are three specific ways SAP is empowering every developer to become an AI developer.
Joule: Natural Language Programming
Joule, our generative AI copilot, revolutionizes the way users interact with SAP business systems and data. With Joule, users can easily navigate across SAP applications, find information, execute transactions, collaborate with colleagues, and receive proactive recommendations.
Instead of conducting laborious manual searches, Joule users can reduce their average search and query time by up to 80% by asking natural language questions and receiving intelligent answers on the wealth of business data and insights available across the SAP portfolio.
SAP Build Code
Our new application development solution, SAP Build Code, draws on the power of Joule to create data models, application logic, and test scripts. SAP Build Code provides a simplified developer experience that drives productivity and supports fusion development by teams of professional and citizen developers.
AI Foundation on SAP Business Technology Platform
We believe that business AI capabilities need to be directly embedded into business applications and extensions. The AI Foundation on SAP BTP is a one-stop shop for developers to do exactly that, providing ready-to-use AI services and tools to accelerate the development of generative AI-infused applications, in a secure and trusted way.
AI Foundation includes everything developers need to run their business-ready AI in the applications they have built on SAP BTP, from ready-to-use AI services to AI runtime and lifecycle management. We provide the tooling for the management of generative AI capabilities and ensure business data connectivity. We designed it with security, governance, and trust from the ground up.
Looking Forward: The Right Model for the Right Business Need
In early 2024, the AI Foundation will also include a generative AI hub, giving developers instant access to a broad range of large language models (LLMs) from different providers, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Falcon-40b. We will soon add more models.
With this, developers can experiment by submitting a prompt to multiple LLMs to compare the generated outcomes and identify the best model for the task. They can then power mission-critical processes with complete control and transparency with features like built-in prompt history, all delivered with enterprise-grade security and data privacy.
Our generative AI hub will also provide tooling for developers to supercharge their generative AI development processes and access to tools and techniques to extract the most relevant information from business and other data.
To get the most value in traditional business areas such as finance, sales, or supply chain, some enterprise customers require foundation models designed specifically for business context. SAP is committed to fine-tuning generic LLMs on SAP anonymized data and, in the longer term, to creating proprietary foundation models based on our vast structured business data.
These models will be able to address questions that users face every day in business that LLMs cannot, such as predicting invoice payment dates and supplier delivery quality or proposing efficiencies to a business process.
At SAP, we are building the tools that will enable every developer to become a business AI developer, and in the process to become the true architects of the future.
Walter Sun is global head of AI at SAP.