Disclaimer. these are my own thoughts, not those of my employer. I noted the things I picked up as new, interesting, or different. BUT all of that is necessarily subjective, and a lot more happened than I’ve mentioned here. See in particular the official Sapphire News Guide:.
Not surprisingly, one of the first big topics was the rise of Artificial Intelligence. SAP has been implementing AI for many years now in many different areas such as logistics, finance, travel receipts and more. Most of them are already accepted because “it just works”. But of course, recent technological changes mean new business opportunities, and the main SAP AI product page has been updated to include new AI application examples and posts.
So why are you interested in using SAP’s Business AI technology? Well, because it’s “Made for Business”
- Built into your processes. Make agile decisions, unlock valuable insights, and automate tasks in your end-to-end business processes with embedded AI.
- According to you: Experience AI trained on your industry and company data, guided by SAP process expertise and available solutions you use every day.
- Reliable and responsive AI. Run on responsible AI based on leading ethics and data privacy standards while maintaining end-to-end governance and lifecycle management across your organization.
Or as Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said. “Business context matters.” — and SAP is about business data and end-to-end business processes. For example, Microsoft is a huge user of SAP SuccessFactors, and the keynote included a demonstration of how HR professionals can use Microsoft Copilot with relevant, reliable data from SAP systems.
A new one Generative AI Roadmap page and more details blog post give some examples of how generative AI can benefit existing business flows, including helping to deal with shipping documents (in SAP Transportation Management), writing job descriptions (in SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting), or finding the best matching processes (SAP in Signavio Process Transformation Suite). .
I was particularly interested in two of them.
- SAP Analytics Cloud’s new Just Ask feature, powered by AskData technology, Acquired by SAP last year. This is an extension/replacement of an existing one Search-to-Insight feature. These types of interfaces are designed to completely transform how people access data, and there have been some amazing examples of people using them ChatGPT with code translator, do things that no analytics software has ever imagined it could do before, like “take this lighthouse data file and turn it into a .gif file that animates the flashing beacons on the map.” Clearly, it’s a whole new disruptive world for analytics. Regardless of what happens to AI engines, SAP’s strengths will be providing the right data and actually using it as part of efficient, compliant, reliable business workflows.
- SAP’s new digital assistant. “Currently in alpha, SAP’s Digital Assistant for CX application uses generative AI to provide holistic insights, generate recommendations and create personalized content so you can offer a better customer experience.” It’s clear that such interfaces will be a must-have part of any enterprise application software, and it’s only a matter of time before you’ll be able to chat and experiment with digital assistants in every aspect of your business workflows.
The keynote highlighted what SAP has always focused on; pragmatic, real-world optimization of business processes, application of the latest new technologies. This included a tour of on-farm Sapphire showcases with Unilever and a vaccine manufacturing supply chain at Pfizer using the SAP Business Network.
SAP’s new CFO Dominique Assam spoke to Schneider Electric about the challenges of making sustainability actionable and carbon accounting, becoming more granular and proactive in providing valuable data to business leaders and along the supply chain. SAP is supporting these new initiatives with a number of new solutions detailed in the SAP News Guide. Solutions help bring carbon accounting directly into transaction-level systems, for example, the SAP Sustainability Data Exchange application helps collect actual carbon data directly from their suppliers, rather than having to estimate emissions.
A big challenge with any use of artificial intelligence is getting the right data in the first place. By nature of ERP, SAP systems usually contain an organization’s most important, valuable and reliable data. But accessing it is difficult. SAP had already announced a new Business Data Fabric solution called SAP Datasphere. It included strategic partners such as Databricks, Collibra, Confluence and Data Robot, and recently expanded to include Google’s data solutions. Google head Thomas Kuryan was discussing new opportunities on stage.
Christian opened the RISE discussion with SAP with a cautionary tale about the dangers of raising and moving to the cloud without rethinking and standardizing business processes. He highlighted the power of SAP Signavio, which is now natively integrated into the SAP product portfolio. It can analyze your systems in minutes, identify bottlenecks and opportunities, then propose solutions from the new Business Accelerator Hub and leverage SAP Build; we are on the road to “automating automation”.