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In the span of a few years, artificial intelligence (AI) has evolved from an emerging technology to taking center stage in companies of all sizes. This has been a consistent trend across industries, and adoption will continue to accelerate.

According to a recent study by IDC, “60% of Forbes’ Global 2000 companies will expand the use of artificial intelligence across all business-critical horizontal functions like marketing, legal, HR, procurement, and supply chain logistics by 2024.”*

AI is at the heart of SAP’s strategy to help customers become intelligent, sustainable enterprises. With SAP AI solutions, customers can realize their full potential by:

Let’s take a look at some of the recent AI innovations that help customers optimize every aspect of their business, with capabilities to streamline finance, workforce management, supply chain, sales, and marketing.

Turn Sourcing into Market-Leading Advantage

Finding, negotiating, and contracting suppliers can be complex. Rather than tasking employees to tackle this all by themselves, organizations can use an AI-powered source-to-pay process to optimize sourcing, drive cost savings, and create value.

Take the example of the accounts payable department: Finance teams often have to retrieve a large number of invoices, typically received as PDFs in e-mail, and manually enter that data into relevant systems. The process can be both error-prone and labor-intensive.

New AI capabilities in SAP Central Invoice Management simplify the management of high-touch invoices through multi-channel inbound handling, automatic data extraction, and centralized monitoring. These enhancements streamline invoice processing by reducing costs, eliminating manual invoice entry, and improving accuracy and employee productivity.

AI-powered invoice processing with SAP Central Invoice Management. Click to enlarge.

Turn Potential into Performance

A company’s greatest asset is its workforce. Understanding, managing, and aligning employees to business objectives is a challenge faced by organizations of all sizes.

By infusing AI throughout the recruit-to-retire process, organizations can identify top talent in less time with intelligent resumé screening, help their workforce reach full potential with personalized development recommendations, and align tasks and priorities with intelligent workforce management.

To take employee productivity to the next-level, we are introducing a new digital assistant in SAP SuccessFactors, available only through the SAP Early Adopter Care program for now, which enables an employee to quickly locate the right Web pages when looking to perform specific tasks and access pertinent information. For instance, instead of shifting through various pieces of documentation about compensation and rewards, an SAP SuccessFactors user can now ask the digital assistant to view their compensation statement and create a spot award for a colleague in a heartbeat.

Digital assistant in SAP SuccessFactors. Click to enlarge.

Turn Concepts into Competitive Advantage

In times of disruption, companies require a high degree of resilience in their supply chains and manufacturing operations to survive and thrive. To support resilient supply chains, organizations need to connect and optimize their design-to-operate processes such as designing, planning, manufacturing, and delivery.

AI-powered design-to-operate processes enable organizations to reliably predict sales with real-time demand sensing, improve quality management with anomaly detection and visual inspections, and streamline operations with predictive maintenance.

New AI capabilities for SAP Returnable Packaging Management in SAP S/4HANA enable organizations to forecast the number of containers their customers and suppliers will need in the coming months based on past delivery patterns. Companies can leverage these AI-powered forecasts to optimize circular logistic flows for returnable and reusable packaging material. Furthermore, new AI capabilities in SAP Integrated Business Planning for Supply Chain help customers optimize demand planning by building custom forecast models tailored to their specific use cases.

Turn Prospects into Lifelong Customers

When trying to deliver exceptional customer experiences, organizations often struggle to fully connect and act on the signals acquired throughout the lead-to-cash process, from initial contact to order fulfillment to service and support delivery.

AI-powered lead-to-cash capabilities enable companies to strengthen sales pipelines with better lead scoring, clear accounts receivables faster with intelligent payment processing, and personalize the entire customer journey with relevant recommendations.

Users of SAP’s industry cloud in the consumer products industry will soon be able to take advantage of AI-powered SAP Revenue Growth Optimization to maximize ROI for trade-spend, the amount a company needs to spend to increase demand of its products. The solution provides highly accurate recommendations to enhance sales promotion plans and help sales teams grow revenue more profitably. This improves the overall effectiveness of promotions with better insights, root cause analysis of poor performance, and optimization of trade spend budget.

Promotion plans monitoring in SAP Revenue Growth Optimization. Click to enlarge.

Get Started

No matter your industry or the role you play in your business, SAP AI solutions can help you excel by making processes more intelligent, efficient, and sustainable – all while supporting reliability and compliance.

SAP AI solutions chart
SAP AI solutions are built to transform every aspect of your business. Click to enlarge.

Bharat Sandhu is senior vice president of Application Development, Automation, and AI at SAP.

*IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Artificial Intelligence and Automation 2022 Predictions, Doc # US48298421, October 2021