The spokesman for the board of SAP, here in an archive picture, announces numerous specific AI features at the Sapphire in-house exhibition.
(Photo: dpa)
Orlando Formulate detailed job advertisements from tight job profiles and identify problems in the logistics chain: On Tuesday at its Sapphire customer conference, SAP gave an initial insight into how the new generation of artificial intelligence (AI) is to be used in the business software of the Dax group.
Generative AI, which can generate and analyze content such as text and program code, will change how users work with software, emphasized CEO Christian Klein in Orlando. The vision: One day, SAP’s programs should be able to answer any questions about the business and make suggestions for decisions.
“Embedding AI in SAP’s software will have tremendous value for your business,” the top executive said to customers in the audience. According to the group, around 80 usage scenarios with generative AI are in the works.
Every year, SAP uses the conference as a stage to present new developments. It should come as no surprise that this time there is a focus on artificial intelligence: Since the ChatGPT language model made technological advances visible to the world, a hype has broken out in the economy – especially in the software industry.
Companies like Microsoft and Google, Salesforce and Adobe have announced products with generative AI in the past few weeks. There should be programs that summarize long documents or develop proposals for presentations. They should also pre-formulate emails to customers or distill handy advice from manuals.
SAP, the “unknown AI giant”
“Many software vendors have been integrating AI into their products for some time and have various use cases,” Akshara Naik Lopez, analyst at Forrester, told Handelsblatt. However, ChatGPT has raised awareness of the technology among the general public – which is suddenly driving demand.
The pressure is also high on the capital market. SAP waited a long time for earlier trends such as cloud computing and only reacted to pressure from the market environment, said Markus Golinski, fund manager at Union Investment, recently at the Annual General Meeting – now management must “finally act proactively and with foresight”.
>> Read also: SAP raises medium-term targets, announces share buyback program
SAP has been integrating AI into its portfolio for several years. According to the company, there are currently 130 scenarios used by around 23,000 customers. The software group is “the unknown AI giant in Germany,” said product development director Thomas Saueressig. Generative AI is therefore only the “next iteration”.
SAP does not develop the basic technology itself – these come from partners such as Google and Microsoft or the German start-up Aleph Alpha. However, Saueressig emphasized that the in-house development team optimizes these models for business purposes using the large amounts of data in the systems.
An example of this cooperation: HR professionals can create a job description from a job profile or have questions suggested for an interview. The data comes from the SAP system Success Factors, the paperwork is done by the co-pilot from Microsoft. That should speed up the work. The control, according to SAP, lies with the people.
However, companies need patience, many products are still under development. And some existing customers will first have to introduce a new software generation: Little works without current solutions such as S/4 Hana, which has been on the market since 2015 – and above all without the cloud.
More: Role model SAP – The company uses AI with caution.