Philipp Herzig, SAP’s
recently appointed chief artificial intelligence (AI) officer, has presented the company’s AI strategy, which centers on integrating AI capabilities into its business applications to increase customer accessibility to AI.
Herzig, who directly reports to SAP’s CEO Christian Klein, told the media during a recent trip to Singapore that the core of SAP’s AI strategy is the company’s capacity to integrate data and workflows from several SAP apps to enable what it refers to as business AI.
“First and foremost, business AI refers to the integration of AI into our business applications, which include finance, supply chain, HR, procurement, travel, and expense management, among other business processes,” the speaker stated.
SAP has begun integrating AI capabilities into its Sales and Service Cloud and SuccessFactors HR suite. These capabilities include, for example, using generative AI to assist customer service teams in improving ticket resolution times and recruiters in creating job descriptions.
Additionally, it has created the Joule co-pilot, which enhances developer productivity by integrating code-generation capabilities for data models, application logic, and test script creation, in addition to providing contextualized information and support to users of SAP applications.
According to Herzig, SAP has established capabilities for over 30 AI use cases, and this year, these will be expanded to include over 100 use cases. “We’ve had a constant drumbeat of innovations around using Joule to generate job descriptions, and we are now expanding to even more use cases in HR,” Herzig added.
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“You can do a lot with AI, but if the value isn’t there, or if it’s too expensive, it will not get adopted,” Herzig stated when discussing how SAP prioritizes AI use cases. Whether it’s a component of our premium AI products or an extension of our current licensing, we carefully consider the return on investment for our clients.
Facilitating clients’ adoption of AI is equally crucial. SAP has “learned the hard way that if it’s not delivered as a service, and not through cloud and out of the box, adoption will not happen,” according to Herzig, regarding embedded AI.
Less than 1% of the 27,000 clients actively using SAP business AI today are on-premise, he continued, adding that customers using it as a service have already seen benefits. “This is the only way we will design AI going forward; otherwise, we will not be able to scale with the volume of customers we have.”
Additionally, SAP’s strategy opens up the use of AI capabilities to organizations that might need the know-how to put the technology into practice. “When we ship a model, for instance, and then you have to do the data cleansing and retrain that model, those are things that take a lot of skills, and many customers don’t have 100 data scientists,” explained Herzig.
However, using the SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP), which has pre-built connectors across SAP systems, organizations with the necessary expertise can play around with the technology to create a slightly customized version of an AI-enabled application.
Herzig stated, “Our clients and collaborators can slightly modify or customize the components we have designed to build their own versions of the applications,” and added that BTP makes integration easier and faster.
“You can create it on AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, and Amazon Web Services, but you’ll need to build your data pipelines, integrate identity management, and handle security, among other things. This is where our approach makes sense, as we had to work through those issues on our own. We are providing customers with BTP virtually as a byproduct so they may create their applications.
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