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SAP’s New AI Innovations and Partnerships Deliver Real-World Results

Business people high fiving in a coffee shop

SAP Sapphire is always a time of excitement, but this year has truly been remarkable, especially with our incredible progress in AI. Since Q4 last year, we have delivered 50 new AI innovations, and we are on track to ship more than 100 AI use cases in 2024.

Taking Business to the Next Level in the Era of AI

SAP Business AI is center stage at the show and top of mind for our customers. These innovations are not just about technological excellence; they’re about delivering real-world results.

Our goal is to provide clear and meaningful value with AI. More than 27,000 customers are already experiencing the substantial impact of SAP Business AI. For example, Team Liquid, a leader in the competitive esports and gaming world, saves approximately 10,000 hours per year on manual analysis. But we’re not stopping here. With SAP Business AI, we are both changing how businesses operate and revolutionizing how users interact with SAP software.

Generative AI copilot Joule is rapidly becoming the natural language interface across the portfolio as we continue to embed AI across SAP applications at an accelerated pace. Our focus on advancing AI means that customers benefit from effective solutions that drive real-world results.

Sandra Voeller, CEO of Agilita AG, agrees. “Using SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition and SAP SuccessFactors with Joule copilot poises Agilita to redefine industry standards,” she said. “These tools are not just innovations; they are our future — unlocking unprecedented business agility and intelligence. I’m thrilled for the transformative journey ahead.” 

We have also engaged our robust partner ecosystem with business AI to offer customers more choices to tackle their specific business needs. Over 60 ecosystem partners are working on more than 80 use cases built on AI Foundation on SAP BTP, including the generative AI hub. This same foundation powers innovation for our development teams and customers, ensuring tailored enterprise-class AI solutions that address real business challenges and opportunities.

Dive into the latest AI capabilities and ecosystem innovations we are presenting this week at SAP Sapphire, all aimed at delivering real-world results:

New Business AI Capabilities and Ecosystem Innovations

Joule

Video: Make every touchpoint count and every task simpler with Joule

Joule is transforming how users interact with SAP business systems, making every touchpoint count and every task simpler. Business users can execute transactional tasks 90% faster and access SAP Help Portal content 95% quicker without leaving their SAP applications.

Since its launch in September 2023, Joule has quickly become pervasive across the SAP portfolio, streamlining operations, improving decision-making, and boosting efficiency across various business functions. Today, Joule is already embedded in HR, finance, ERP, sales, services, marketing, and commerce applications, transforming how employees, managers, accountants, field personnel, and front-office professionals work. By the end of this year, 80% of the most frequently performed transactions across SAP business applications will be fully automated with Joule.

Joule is also integrated with multiple components of SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP), enhancing everything from application development to integration and data management. In the second half of this year, we plan to expand Joule’s reach to supply chain management, analytics, and planning solutions through integration with SAP Ariba, various supply chain management solutions, and SAP Analytics Cloud. Joule will also support several additional languages, including German, Spanish, French, and Portuguese. With a multilingual Joule integrated across the SAP portfolio, businesses around the globe will be able to work faster and smarter and achieve better outcomes.

Achieve faster insights with Joule in German, Spanish, French, and Portuguese (available later this year)

We are also enhancing Joule with additional capabilities to help the ecosystem streamline SAP implementations. Joule will provide consultants with vital information through natural language interactions, drawing from insights in more than 200,000 pages of product documentation and knowledge shared by the SAP community. Once rolled out to an ecosystem of more than 5 million consultants, this capability has the potential to save up to 600 million working hours per year. This is especially critical for supporting customers transitioning to SAP S/4HANA Cloud as part of RISE with SAP, helping them accelerate implementations and save money.

The SAP partner ecosystem is embracing AI innovations that accelerate customer value. “We’re embracing Joule and Joule’s SAP Consulting capabilities to help our clients build the organizational agility needed to continuously transform with a generative AI-enabled digital core,” shared Lan Guan, chief AI officer at Accenture.

This capability will be available later this year.

In the future, save implementation time with Joule’s SAP Consulting capabilities

Human Resources

Transforming HR with AI creates dynamic, inclusive, and future-ready workplaces. With Joule integrated into the SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting solution, hiring managers can create compelling, bias-free job descriptions 90% faster, significantly enhancing hiring efficiency and outcomes.

We have also expanded Joule capabilities across the SAP SuccessFactors HCM suite to enhance the employee experience. Employees will soon be able to get instant answers to HR policy questions and complete HR processes using natural language. Joule’s advanced document grounding capabilities will enable comprehensive responses by accessing business documents in SAP and third-party repositories such as Microsoft SharePoint.

Instant answers to HR policy questions with Joule

A new generative AI writing assistant capability helps employees draft personalized and measurable performance goals, development plans, and feedback reports more effectively and consistently. This saves employees up to 30% of the time spent crafting written communications and reduces the time people managers spend defining individualized development goals by 60%.

Managers also benefit from AI-assisted person insights that summarize complex compensation data, make recommendations, and provide talking points for discussions with employees — saving time and improving retention rates. Similarly, recruitment becomes more productive with the new AI-assisted applicant screening capability, which helps identify the most promising candidates by matching skills extracted from resumes with those in job descriptions.

Provide actionable feedback to employees quickly in SAP SuccessFactors HCM

These AI-driven enhancements empower organizations to build a connected, data-driven, and employee-centric workforce, leading the way in HR innovation and efficiency.

Finance

With SAP Business AI, we’re enhancing performance across a range of financial activities, from payments and expense management to financial close, invoice management, auditing, and forecasting.

For example, financial collection departments are leveraging generative AI in SAP Enterprise Service Management to automate processes, analyze and summarize correspondence, prioritize urgent issues, and generate automated replies. These capabilities reduce costs by up to 70% and accelerate service requests by up to 30%, enhancing customer satisfaction.

Accelerate service request resolution with SAP Enterprise Service Management

Billing specialists are now using Joule integrated into SAP Advanced Financial Closing to unlock unstructured content from inbound customer correspondence, improving the accuracy of risk determinations. Joule also generates summaries of project profitability, prioritizes projects for further analysis, and proposes actions for project improvement. Additionally, SAP Fiori apps now feature Joule-enabled insights, allowing the copilot to summarize available data and produce visual data narratives.

Joule in SAP Fiori applications summarize available data (available later this year)

Later this year, new generative AI capabilities in SAP Advanced Financial Closing will automate error detections and root cause analysis, helping users quickly resolve common closing errors. With up to two hours saved per error remediation, customers will be able to accelerate closing times while lowering support and compliance costs. Financial controllers will be able to also take advantage of personalized video data stories, highlighting top projects based on key metrics such as recognized revenue, utilization rates, and margins. Collections specialists using SAP Billing and Revenue Innovation Management will be able to mitigate risk of late customer payments by analyzing customer behavior and business correspondence to predict the likelihood of delayed payments.

SAP Advanced Financial Closing will help to quickly resolve common closing errors (available later this year)

Integrating AI into finance helps businesses streamline processes, reduce costs, and drive meaningful business outcomes.

Supply Chain

SAP Business AI is empowering companies to create risk-resilient and sustainable supply chains. By leveraging AI, customers can increase supply chain agility and efficiency.

For instance, generative AI-powered capabilities in SAP Transportation Management will expedite freight verification and documentation, enabling companies to achieve up to 50% faster inbound delivery note processing and reduce truck idle time at the gate by 40%. The system will automatically extract, post, and check critical information from delivery notes, streamlining the validation of freight orders.

Joule will play a crucial role in enhancing supply chain management. Later this year, supply chain planners will benefit from integration with SAP Integrated Business Planning for Supply Chain by getting detailed analyses of planning runs. Joule will identify the root causes of order delays and suggest corrective measures. Logistics providers will be able to use Joule to expedite transportation planning and the intake of goods in SAP S/4HANA Supply Chain for transportation management, enhancing overall logistics efficiency.

Joule gathers new product ideas and searches for product similarities

For manufacturers, SAP Business AI will significantly improve quality management. SAP Quality Issue Resolution will allow users to address recurring issues faster by using AI to bundle similar quality incidents and identify effective problem-solving processes. Furthermore, AI in SAP Asset Performance Management will aid technicians, inspectors, and managers in visually inspecting asset conditions. Images collected from visual inspections will be able to be easily annotated, displayed, and compiled into inspection alerts, facilitating timely and accurate maintenance decisions.

These advancements will make supply chain management more agile, efficient, and sustainable for customers.

Procurement

With SAP Business AI, we’re transforming procurement into a proactive, data-informed, and agile operation.

For example, AI in SAP Ariba Category Management allows procurement organizations to reduce the onboarding time for new category managers and accelerate category strategy and planning development by as much as 56%, improving operating margins and outcomes. 

External Workforce
We have added new generative AI capabilities to the SAP Fieldglass portfolio, enabling procurement departments to streamline the recruitment of external workers. Hiring managers can generate and maintain effective job descriptions faster, while project managers can deliver detailed statements of work more rapidly. This enables businesses to quickly identify and engage contractors with the right skills and qualifications. Job descriptions can be easily translated into 21 different languages, and a new resume-ranking capability can surface the most promising candidates, leading to as much as a 15% reduction in work orders. This flexibility allows customers to quickly react to fluctuating workloads and rapidly fill expertise gaps.

Develop comprehensive job descriptions quickly in SAP Fieldglass

Buyer Journey
A new generative AI feature in the buying 360 capability for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition will make procurement more intelligent, allowing buyers to bundle products and services into a single transaction. Users will be able to describe their purchasing needs using natural language, and the system will generate a recommended bundle of products and services ready for purchasing. This will save users considerable time spent searching catalogs for individual items while also enhancing the efficiency of the procurement process. These capabilities are planned for later this year.

Sourcing
By the end of the year, sourcing managers will be able to leverage intelligent product and supplier recommendations to create requests for proposals much faster with Joule integration in SAP Ariba Sourcing . These recommendations will consider cost-effectiveness, carbon footprint impact, local compliance regulations, and past transactions, optimizing spend management performance.

Create RFPs faster with Joule in SAP Ariba Sourcing (available later this year)

Through these enhancements, SAP Business AI is making spend management more efficient, responsive, and cost-effective.

Sales, Services, Marketing, and Commerce

SAP Business AI is revolutionizing sales, services, marketing, and commerce operations, significantly improving productivity and customer engagement. For instance, the SAP CX AI Toolkit provides a comprehensive, configurable AI solution for e-commerce, marketing, sales, and service teams. These professionals can use it to streamline content creation tasks and analyze data from across the enterprise – with e-commerce teams experiencing productivity increases of 50%, larger average order values, and higher conversion rates.

Sales Productivity
New AI capabilities enhance the productivity of sales professionals using SAP Sales Cloud. Sales teams can benefit from predictive forecasting, which predicts the likelihood of closing deals across the entire business portfolio. This gives chief revenue officers more comprehensive revenue forecasting, enabling better strategic decisions.

In addition, predictive recommendations will enhance sales efforts by suggesting the best people to involve in a deal and the most suitable products for each customer. This will eliminate manual extensive research on customer needs and preferences, allowing sales teams to focus on selling. AI account summaries and lead boosters will automatically generate detailed reports about sales prospects, combining company details, industry context, and relevant news. As such, we can reduce the manual effort needed for information gathering, giving salespeople more time to close deals.

Reduce lead information gathering efforts with lead boosters in SAP Sales Cloud

Digital and User Experiences
Today, a generative AI tool builder already enables system administrators to create customized AI tools for business users leveraging data from SAP Commerce Cloud, SAP Sales Cloud, and SAP Service Cloud solutions. These tools can help personalize content to meet specific customer experience needs.

By the end of this year, SAP CX AI Toolkit will also introduce new AI features to enhance customer interactions. An AI shopping assistant will allow shoppers to ask questions using everyday conversational language and receive accurate product information and personalized product recommendations on sites powered by SAP Commerce Cloud. This will enable consumers to find products faster and improve their overall shopping experience.

Build custom tools for specific use cases with the AI tool builder in SAP CX AI Toolkit

SAP CX AI Toolkit will make marketing and sales teams more productive. Later this year, a new image creation feature will allow business users to generate new product images for their SAP Commerce Cloud catalog using natural language prompts, significantly reducing image production times. They will also benefit from an AI expert recommendations feature, which will identify experts within their organization who can provide needed answers and insights. Instead of wasting time browsing through emails and organizational charts, these professionals will be able to use natural language to express their needs and instantly find the right experts. This capability will be generally available later this year.

Generate new product images using natural language in SAP CX AI Toolkit (available later this year)

These advancements in SAP Business AI are transforming sales, services, marketing, and commerce operations, making them more efficient, personalized, and successful.

IT and Platform

SAP Business AI embedded in SAP BTP empowers IT professionals and business experts to extend SAP solutions and drive faster, better decision-making throughout the enterprise while accelerating customers’ digital transformations.

For example, professional developers are leveraging generative AI capabilities in SAP Build Code to accelerate application development by 30%. They can generate data models, services, and samples with a few simple prompts and use natural language to automate business logic and testing.

Application Development
Joule continues to increase developer productivity and simplify the extension of SAP applications. Integration with ABAP Cloud will revolutionize the work of the 5 million-strong ABAP developer community, accelerating the development of extensions that interact with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition, and SAP BTP, ABAP environment. Trained on over 250 million lines of ABAP code, Joule will be able to outperform industry-leading general-purpose code assistants. We expect more than 10% efficiency increase, based on initial studies and benchmarking. Early adopters are using this innovation to generate ABAP business objects and will soon be able to complete and explain code and create unit tests. The first capabilities will become available later this year.

Joule continues to strengthen SAP Build Code capabilities by enabling developers to use generative AI to quickly build SAP Fiori front ends for SAP S/4HANA Cloud, greatly simplifying clean-core extensions.

These advancements in SAP Business AI are empowering IT professionals and business experts to innovate faster, streamline operations, and drive meaningful business outcomes.

Accelerate the creation of ABAP Cloud apps with Joule’s ABAP Developer capabilities (Labs preview; available later this year)

Process Innovation
We are continuously strengthening SAP BTP with new AI capabilities that accelerate process innovation. Joule integration with SAP Build Process Automation empowers process experts to generate automation and workflows using natural language requests without IT intervention. Similarly, Joule integration with the SAP Signavio portfolio enables users to leverage natural language requests to generate process models. By empowering users with varying levels of expertise to innovate, customers can accelerate time-to-value and free IT professionals to focus on more strategic tasks.

Process AI solutions from SAP Signavio introduce a new collection of generative AI capabilities trained on a large language model (LLM) comprised of expert business process knowledge and more than 5,000 SAP best practices. Later this year, the process recommender feature will provide ready-to-use, AI-generated business process model recommendations and suggest the most influential measures to assess the performance of a business process. This will offer vital insights into streamlining operations and reducing overhead. A prompt-based process mining feature will automatically generate business-relevant charts and metrics in response to natural language requests for business insights, dramatically lowering the effort for business users who need answers to complex business questions.

The process recommender feature in SAP Signavio offers insights to streamline operations (available later this year)

Integration
System integration is foundational to the success of enterprise automation initiatives and effective ecosystem collaboration, but connecting heterogeneous systems inside and outside the enterprise is an onerous task. Later this year, developers will be able to take advantage of Joule integration with SAP Integration Suite and use natural language to accelerate the design of integration flows across SAP and third-party applications.

A new AI-powered anomaly detection capability will recommend remedial actions when API usage patterns or performance fall outside desired thresholds due to unusual errors, traffic surges, suspicious API access, or unusual latency. With performance insights and support for identifying causes and effects, administrators of complex technology landscapes will be able to act faster, achieving greater operational efficiency at a lower total cost of ownership.

Accelerate the design of integration flows with the Joule integration with SAP Integration Suite

Content Creation and Compliance
IT administrators, training managers, and content developers will be able to cut the time spent writing content by up to 20% with automatic content generation and enrichment in SAP Enable Now. Customers use the digital adoption platform to improve the adoption, productivity, and efficiency of their software by providing in-application help and e-learning content to users. New generative AI capabilities will add to this value, enabling companies to free up resources for more critical tasks and accelerating knowledge transfer within organizations.

SAP Enable Now improves the adoption, productivity, and efficiency of software

Compliance and IT professionals can leverage Joule for enhanced productivity and precision. Joule integration with the new regulatory change manager tool on SAP BTP enables these professionals to evaluate numerous regulatory updates within the context of their business and SAP solutions. With insights and quick answers on the typically more than 1,000 annual regulatory changes, users can save 70% of the time usually spent on understanding local and global regulations. The tool provides impact analysis across SAP products and solutions, helping customers maintain compliance and seamlessly manage their day-to-day operations. Compliance and IT professionals can also use AI in localization as a self-service for SAP S/4HANA Cloud to automate tasks such as payment format localization and form localization, reducing processes that once took days to just a few hours.

Administration
With Joule integrated in SAP BTP cockpit, administrators can automate tasks and onboard new users more easily. They can search for information 95% faster and execute transactional tasks or navigation 90% more quickly. The business impact is substantial, as the cockpit helps these professionals manage resources, services, and security, monitor application metrics, and perform actions on cloud applications.

Accomplish tasks and onboard new users easily with Joule in SAP BTP cockpit

Redefining the capabilities of IT and platform management positions SAP customers at the forefront of technological advancement and operational excellence.

Industries

SAP is delivering trusted AI and machine learning across industries to manage complexity, overcome challenges, and help customers modernize. AI-driven solutions empower businesses to streamline operations and focus on strategic outcomes, driving significant value in their respective fields.

Oil, Gas, and Energy, Agribusiness, and Metals and Mining
Commodities traders and business operators will soon be able to eliminate repetitive data entry tasks with SAP S/4HANA for commodity management for physical contracts. With Joule, business operators will be able to create new commodities deals by simply describing the deal using conversational language. Planned for later this year, the capability will allow traders to focus more on producing better commercial outcomes for their clients rather than getting bogged down by administrative tasks.

Industrial Manufacturing
Sales engineers in the manufacturing sector will benefit from more precise product configuration recommendations for complex, configurable products through SAP Intelligent Product Recommendation. By simply describing requirements in natural language, sales engineers can generate tailored recommendations that better meet customer needs. Generative AI services can analyze text from diverse sources, such as emails and notes captured in SAP Customer Experience solutions or multi-page specification documents such as request for proposals or requests for quotations. SAP Intelligent Product Recommendation also provides suggestions based on estimated parameters for lead times and CO2 footprints, enhancing accuracy and efficiency of product configurations, and ultimately improving customer satisfaction and operational efficiency.

Quickly gather product configuration recommendations with SAP Intelligent Product Recommendation

Public Sector and Higher Education
Later this year, Joule will be enhanced with budget and grant management business context for the public sector, higher education, and research industries. With this new context awareness, Joule will streamline and improve the user experience for these regulated industries, enabling users to navigate their financial systems more efficiently and make better strategic decisions. For example, SAP S/4HANA users will be able to ask Joule for definitions, summaries, or how-to guidance, saving time and reducing the demand on IT departments. This enhancement will help government organizations and higher education institutions manage their budgets and grants more effectively, reducing extensive training typically required during financial system rollouts.

Breakthrough AI Innovations

SAP is pushing the boundaries of AI with the new SAP Foundation Model for structured data, investing in this cutting-edge AI technology to unlock the value of generative AI technology advancements for structured business data. The goal is to deliver a foundation model that is business-centric by design, providing actionable, job-specific insights directly within SAP applications customers use daily.

Traditional AI models require significant effort, expertise, and training data to handle specific tasks on structured data effectively. In contrast, we are developing SAP Foundation Model to adapt to multiple use cases with minimal or no fine-tuning. Ultimately, we aim to bring the same transformative power to structured business data that LLMs have brought to text. While LLMs like GPT-4 excel with unstructured text and images, they struggle with the structured data typical in enterprises, often performing between 20 to 50% worse than narrow AI methods. SAP Foundation Model will bridge this gap, focusing on structured business data to deliver more accurate predictions and insights while maintaining the versatility of foundation models.

Early benchmark tests are promising, showing SAP Foundation Model outperforming narrow AI models by up to 15% on customer datasets after a quick fine-tuning round. This superior performance, combined with its deep understanding of complex business processes, promises to enable businesses to reap the rewards of AI faster and more efficiently.

With SAP Foundation Model, we aim to set a new standard for AI in the business domain, transforming how enterprises leverage data to achieve remarkable outcomes. Learn more here.

Responsible AI

At SAP, innovation goes hand in hand with responsibility. We are committed to ensuring that AI technologies are not only innovative but also ethical, secure, and sustainable. The strategic use of business data is integral to the success of AI, and by leveraging business data responsibly, we not only enhance the capabilities of AI solutions but also improve outcomes for customers.

SAP remains firm in its commitment to prioritize data privacy and security as it releases new AI capabilities. The same rigorous standards that govern all SAP product development extend to AI offerings. Strong security, product, and data privacy protocols are applied to help ensure AI solutions are developed responsibly, with all AI use cases reviewed by an AI ethics committee.

Building on the fundamental dedication to responsible AI that we started back in 2018, this year, SAP is proud to further the commitment by affirming the 10 guiding principles of the UNESCO Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence. These principles cover proportionality, safety, fairness, sustainability, privacy, human oversight, transparency, responsibility, awareness, and multi-stakeholder collaboration, ensuring that AI solutions respect human rights and contribute to sustainable development.

In line with this commitment, sustainability is a key pillar of SAP’s corporate strategy. We are determined to harness the benefits of AI while minimizing its energy footprint and helping customers manage theirs. For example, a new AI-enabled capability in SAP Sustainability Footprint Management enhances the accuracy and speed of carbon footprint calculations through automated, intelligent emission factor mapping recommendations, reducing manual effort and improving precision.

Accurately speed up carbon footprint calculations with SAP Sustainability Footprint Management

By integrating responsible AI practices into innovations, we continue to drive meaningful and sustainable business outcomes for customers.

New AI Partnerships

The vast SAP partner ecosystem is fully engaged with SAP Business AI. Leading up to and at SAP Sapphire, we have announced groundbreaking new and expanded partnerships to accelerate AI adoption across business processes:

To learn more about how SAP Business AI delivers real-world results, visit the SAP Business AI area of sap.com.


Philipp Herzig is chief artificial intelligence officer of SAP.

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