The opening keynote of SAP TechEd in 2024 clearly brought to life SAP’s vision to make customers’ lives easier, showing the SAP portfolio come together to deliver a suite-like experience with highly configurable software and meaningful AI. As Muhammad Alam, member of the Executive Board of SAP SE, SAP Product Engineering, put it: “Our innovations don’t exist in isolation; they are deeply embedded within our product portfolio. We’re making sure the technology isn’t just advanced, but it’s accessible and impactful.”
The keynote featured demos of new cross-portfolio solutions and innovations, showing how they can work together to tackle challenges like scaling and expanding into new markets, managing complexity, and delivering personalized experiences. “Innovation is only as powerful as the product experience it delivers,” Alam said. “It’s one thing to have cutting-edge tools at your disposal, but it’s another thing to integrate those technologies into the products you rely on every day to solve real-world challenges.”
Faster, Better, Automated
Since last year’s SAP TechEd, SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) has delivered more than 1,000 road map items, has a year-to-date overall availability again above 99.99%, and has grown an adoption rate over 60% year over year. The 27,000 customers and 2,800 partners are a testament to the huge demand we are seeing for SAP BTP.
This is why the platform’s availability is being expanded to eight SAP-managed data centers across the globe, in addition to running on infrastructure provided by our partners AWS, Microsoft, and Google. With that, we are bringing SAP BTP closer to customers.
Along with the expanded coverage comes more learnings, guidance frameworks, integration flows, and use cases. SAP Business Accelerator Hub and SAP Discovery Center will be bolstered with more assets and use case-specific guidance, especially around AI and business process transformation.
To further the developer experience, the next release of SAP Build solutions will include ABAP Cloud, making SAP Build the go-to for building extensions. Along with the new SAP Build extensibility wizard, which helps to create extensions in SAP S/4HANA, SAP is making it easier for customers to build extensions while keeping a clean core. This is critical to ensure that customers’ systems remain consistent, maintainable, and upgradeable.
SAP’s AI copilot Joule will also be integrated into SAP Build, so developers can be more productive and take advantage of the efficiencies and automation AI can provide. With Joule studio, the copilot will even be able to draw on structured data stored in third-party systems, better enabling developers to design custom skills for Joule in a low-code environment.
And to help developers ground large language models (LLMs) in the SAP semantical model and build business apps, the new SAP Knowledge Graph solution provides the connection between natural language and SAP’s metadata. The solution provides a deeper level of understanding across SAP’s data landscape, enabling more informed, data-based decision-making. Together with SAP HANA Cloud knowledge graph engine and SAP HANA Cloud vector engine, developers can build generative AI models rooted in SAP-specific business semantics, helping to build a more reliable, enterprise-ready AI experience accurately and effectively.
A New Level of Productivity
Not only are SAP Build solutions enabled with Joule, but SAP is continuing to integrate AI across its entire portfolio, including ERP, customer experience, human capital management, localization, spend management, sustainability, supply chain management, and more. As announced at SAP Sapphire in 2024, 80% of SAP’s most-used workflows will be covered by Joule by the end of this year.
Joule is going agentic, meaning it can use AI agents powered by LLMs to help solve complex business problems on its own through planning, self-reflection, logical reasoning, and collaboration. For example, Joule can help resolve a customer dispute about an overdue bill by calling on AI agents specialized in contracts, invoices, and payment history. With each AI agent doing what they do best, they can work together to solve more complex business problems across functions and break down silos.
AI is best when it can be used in the flow of work and when it is meaningfully embedded as part of a unified user experience across the portfolio. Sometimes this is on a desktop, but often we look to use AI on our mobile devices. To make AI accessible anytime and anywhere, SAP is introducing Joule into its mobile applications via SAP Mobile Start – while still maintaining enterprise-level security and privacy and staying true to the company’s values of relevant, responsible, and reliable AI.
Clear and Customer-Centric, Not Complex
Ultimately, all the innovations announced at SAP TechEd in 2024 and demoed in the opening keynote have one main goal: to make the lives of customers easier – whether it be through leveraging generative AI to accelerate development projects, making more informed business decisions with intelligent data applications, mitigating project management struggles with AI, confidently and compliantly localizing business operations, or enabling sales reps with intelligent selling tools to win deals.
“Technology should simplify, not complicate. It should bring clarity, not complexity,” Alam said. “This is why we’re constantly pushing the boundaries of what’s possible while keeping your business goals front and center.”
To learn more about all the solutions and innovations announced at SAP TechEd in 2024, watch the opening keynote replay, read the news guide, or explore more event news and coverage.
Gillian Hixson is an integrated communications specialist at SAP.