Customer support is one of the cornerstones of a successful business, yet it remains one of the most complex and demanding areas of the knowledge economy. It requires synthesizing vast amounts of information — including customer business needs, industry specifics, technology, and governance — into actionable insights.
At SAP, we’ve harnessed the power of artificial intelligence (AI) and other data-driven technologies to revolutionize customer support, turning it into a seamless, efficient, and value-added experience.
The Evolution of the Knowledge Economy
Beyond resolving everyday challenges, we continue to serve our customers as true business partners, collaborating with them to help them achieve their broader business goals. While we live in a knowledge economy, where economic value is derived from that knowledge and how we apply it, this paradigm is changing. As humans, our role in the economy is evolving as AI systems increasingly replicate human cognitive skills — retrieving and using the right knowledge at the right time.
In this new paradigm, success will be determined not by how much you know, but by how effectively you can allocate and manage resources to get work done. In customer support, this means moving from simply resolving issues to orchestrating AI tools and human expertise to deliver optimal outcomes.
AI, including generative AI, becomes a collaborative partner, enabling support teams to allocate resources efficiently and focus on higher-value tasks. Recognizing this paradigm shift, we go beyond resolving everyday challenges and serve our customers as true business partners, collaborating with them to help them achieve their broader business goals — as the world changes.
AI Is the Perfect Partner for Customer Support Transformation
At SAP, AI is built into core business processes of customers, connecting finance, supply chain, procurement, sales, marketing, human resources, and IT. Data-driven technologies such as AI, robotic process automation (RPA), and process mining elevate support experiences for our customers. They do it by simplifying support access, addressing complex scenarios using AI agents, and enhancing automation to increase efficiency while delivering personalized solutions, as well as taking advantage of system metrics and process insights.
The Customer Support & Cloud Lifecycle Management organization at SAP also drives AI innovation to analyze process metrics collected from the customer’s systems to evaluate efficiency, bottlenecks, and opportunities for improvement; improve processes using domain-specific machine learning models; and build AI solutions that can be integrated into applications used in a business process or scenario.
Generative AI: Elevating Customer Support
Generative AI has been a game-changer for customer support. It empowers our support teams by enhancing the quality and speed of outcomes and enabling more personalized recommendations for customers. It also opens new possibilities for orchestrating AI services in combination with AI agents.
AI agents streamline support processes by automating time-consuming tasks, such as retrieving and assessing information, while enabling human-machine collaboration. This allows support professionals to focus on improving both customer satisfaction and operational efficiency.
Real-World Impact: AI Use Cases in Customer Support
SAP has developed more than 50 AI-driven use cases, showcasing the transformative power of AI in customer support. These include:
- Precise and fast generative AI-infused recommendations appear for customers while they type their requests. Customers also benefit from proactive recommendations on trending content and preventative recommendations like system health checks.
- Smart ticket routing ensures support tickets reach the right experts, quickly.
- Proactive issue identification detects and addresses potential problems before they escalate.
- Internal workflow enhancements deliver efficiency gains from workflows such as intelligent search, automated error categorization, clustering of tickets with the same root cause, or expert swarming for complex issues.
Other generative AI capabilities include summarizing tickets, assisting in knowledge creation, and improving communication with customers.
These advances not only elevate support experiences for SAP customers, but also create significant efficiencies for our support engineers.
The SAP Advantage
SAP’s AI-driven support strategy is structured around three key pillars:
- Capturing business opportunities with domain-specific AI models: By leveraging our domain expertise and historical data, we design machine learning models tailored to specific support challenges. These models enable precise and actionable recommendations.
- Gathering real-world process insights: Using tools like SAP Signavio, we capture and analyze detailed process insights. This provides a solid foundation for identifying improvement opportunities.
- Building and integrating AI solutions: We integrate AI-driven solutions into existing workflows, ensuring seamless application and measurable impact. Process insights guide ongoing refinements and enhancements.
And the numbers speak for themselves: SAP’s AI support scenarios are called up more than 1 million times by our customers on an average day. More than 35,000 end users use our AI capabilities per month.
The Road Ahead: Human-Machine Collaboration in Support
The future of customer support lies in human-machine collaboration. By combining the analytical power of AI with human expertise, we can deliver unparalleled support experiences. AI agents will play a pivotal role in this transformation, assisting with things like ticket triage, data analysis, and troubleshooting, thereby enabling support teams to focus on strategic activities. As AI continues to evolve, these agents will become even more capable of providing real-time insights and proactive solutions to anticipate customer needs before they arise.
SAP’s commitment to AI-driven innovation ensures that we remain at the forefront of customer support transformation. By continuously evolving our AI capabilities, we are setting the stage for a new era of value-driven, scalable, and efficient customer support.
But there is one thing that AI will never replace: the empathy, care, and passion of our support teams, ensuring every customer feels supported as we solve their challenges together. The future of customer support lies in blending AI’s analytical power with human expertise. By working together, we’re setting a new standard for customer success.
Thomas Saueressig is a member of the Executive Board of SAP SE leading Customer Services & Delivery.
Stefan Steinle is executive vice president and head of Customer Support & Cloud Lifecycle Management at SAP.
