SAP Business AI Innovations and Collaborations with Partners including Google Cloud, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral AI and NVIDIA Ignite Ingenuity

ORLANDO — At its annual SAP Sapphire conference, SAP unveiled generative AI innovations and partnerships that showcase how the company is taking business to the next level in the era of AI.

By infusing Business AI across an enterprise cloud portfolio that powers the world’s most mission-critical processes and partnering with companies pushing the edge of what’s possible with AI, SAP is igniting a new wave of insight and ingenuity in global business.

“The Business AI innovations we’re announcing at SAP Sapphire in 2024 will redefine the way businesses run,” says Christian Klein, CEO and member of the Executive Board of SAP SE. “Today’s AI announcements and partnerships build on our commitment to deliver revolutionary technology that drives real-world results, helping customers unleash the agility and ingenuity they need to succeed in today’s fast-moving business landscape.”

AI That Means Business

As SAP embeds Business AI across its enterprise solutions, it puts rich insights at users’ fingertips, empowering them to deliver better outcomes and elevate the creative problem-solving humans do best. Examples include AI-generated reports in SAP SuccessFactors solutions that give people managers responsibly sourced insights for compensation-related discussions as well as forecasting capabilities in SAP Sales Cloud solutions that predict combinations of salespeople and products most likely to drive sales. Meanwhile, the SAP Business Technology Platform is adding large language models from Amazon Web Services, Meta and Mistral AI to its generative AI hub. This capability in the SAP AI Core infrastructure makes it easier to build generative AI use cases for SAP applications.

SAP’s generative AI copilot Joule, which quickly sorts and contextualizes data from multiple systems to advance automation and improve decision-making, is expanding throughout the company’s solution portfolio. Joule launched in SAP SuccessFactors solutions last fall and is now embedded into SAP S/4HANA Cloud solutions and others including SAP Build and SAP Integration Suite. Further expansion by year-end will include SAP Ariba and SAP Analytics Cloud solutions. At Sapphire, SAP also announced plans to further broaden Joule’s scope by integrating it with Microsoft Copilot to surface even richer insights. This deep, bi-directional integration gives users a unified experience built right into the flow of work, enabling seamless access to information from interactions with business applications in SAP and Microsoft 365.

Reflecting Business AI’s increasing importance, SAP is redoubling its commitment to the principles of relevant, reliable, and responsible AI it pioneered. At Sapphire, SAP is adopting the 10 guiding principles of the UNESCO Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence, which aim to ensure that AI technologies are developed and used in ways that respect human rights, promote fairness and contribute to sustainable development.

Partnerships That Scale Innovation

SAP is partnering with best-in-class technology leaders to push the limits of what generative AI can do at an enterprise level. In addition to our expanded collaborations with AWS and Microsoft, partnerships with Google Cloud, Meta, Mistral AI and NVIDIA ensure SAP can harness the power of AI-ready technology to innovate at speed and deliver richer real-world results.

Google Cloud

SAP and Google Cloud are expanding their partnership, using Business AI to help enterprises better predict and mitigate supply-chain risks to minimize disruptions and maintain optimal inventory levels. The companies will integrate Joule and the SAP Integrated Business Planning for Supply Chain solution with Google Cloud’s Gemini models AI assistant and Google Cloud Cortex Framework’s data foundation.

Meta

SAP will leverage Meta Llama 3 to generate scripts that render highly customized analytics applications in SAP Analytics Cloud. Meta’s next-generation AI model excels at language nuances and contextual understanding, making it an ideal candidate for translating enterprise business requirements into tangible outcomes.

Mistral AI

SAP will also add new large language models from Mistral AI, a global company headquartered in Paris specializing in generative AI, to the generative AI hub capability in SAP AI Core.

NVIDIA

SAP and NVIDIA Corporation advance a cross-product partnership* to embed cutting-edge technologies into enterprise-ready business applications:

• As SAP trains Joule to serve as an AI assistant for the RISE with SAP solution implementations, NVIDIA’s state-of-the-art AI models sift through SAP consulting assets to provide relevant and precise answers to implementation-related questions;
• As SAP embeds Joule in the ABAP Cloud model to generate ABAP code for SAP developers, NVIDIA’s accelerated infrastructure will run, scale, and manage SAP’s generative AI model for ABAP code generation;
• As SAP infuses generative AI into the SAP Intelligent Product Recommendation solution, NVIDIA Omniverse Cloud APIs enable the simulation of complex manufacturing products and configurations as industrial digital twins.

Cloud Technology That Drives Agility and Sustainability

Business success in the era of AI means being in the cloud. SAP is making the move easier than ever with initiatives that help customers find partners with the expertise needed for complex SAP S/4HANA Cloud transformations. Further cloud innovations at SAP Sapphire include features that help the world’s organizations measure, manage and execute their sustainability strategies. SAP Sustainability Control Tower and SAP Sustainability Footprint Management solutions now track carbon footprints at scale and help businesses meet regulatory standards.

*NVIDIA blog link will be live by 10:00 a.m. ET/4:00 p.m. CEST on June 4

Learn more in the 2024 SAP Sapphire News Guide.

Visit the SAP News Center. Follow SAP at @SAPNews.

About SAP

As a global leader in enterprise applications and business AI, SAP (NYSE:SAP) stands at the nexus of business and technology. For over 50 years, organizations have trusted SAP to bring out their best by uniting business-critical operations spanning finance, procurement, HR, supply chain, and customer experience. For more information, visit www.sap.com.

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On April 1, 2024, SAP formed Customer Services & Delivery – a new Board area that will focus on maximizing innovation adoption and customer value in the cloud.

This is good news – not just for customers but also for the ecosystem. In recent months, SAP had already identified that when engineering teams deliver innovations, there is a corresponding need to provide customers with guidance on how they can swiftly adopt and consume innovation. Customer Services & Delivery was created to bring together the offerings that help customers tap the value of SAP’s integrated portfolio.

By virtue of its function, the Customer Support organization fits into this strategic setup quite naturally. To learn more about how Customer Support is owning and driving end-to-end customer support experiences powered by AI, I met with Stefan Steinle, executive vice president and head of Customer Support, SAP SE. 

Q: How would you describe the role of Customer Support in SAP’s success?

A: Customer support is a differentiating factor among companies that are equally positioned in functional richness, usability, quality, deployability, or configurability. While signing up a new customer is considered a huge win, being able to delight and retain the customer is equally important.

Support at SAP has been singularly impactful in advancing SAP’s customer success stories by proactively responding to customer needs and building long-term relationships. In addition to helping customers solve day-to-day problems, we are business partners who proactively work with customers toward achieving their business goals.

The Customer Support group encompasses much more than bug fixes. In addition to regular ticket resolutions, we use SAP Cloud ALM to help guide customers in application lifecycle management by enabling their transformation to the cloud and the operation of hybrid environments. We help customers help themselves through self-services and we proactively consult with our engineering teams to improve SAP products based on support-related feedback and learnings. Thanks to our support engineers, SAP has delivered over 1,000 improvements in the last 12 months. 

Q: How is SAP’s AI story shaping up when it comes to Customer Support? What is the AI strategy for Customer Support?

A: With our focus on value realization, the push to enhance support with AI has never been higher. To start with, we have invested in digitalizing mission-critical business processes with AI.

There are three parts toward bringing these business processes into the fold of AI-powered offerings. With the help of SAP Signavio Process Transformation Suite, we can measure metrics around the customer’s business processes to gauge efficiency, bottlenecks, and opportunities for improvement. Alternatively, customers can use this as a blueprint to review these metrics themselves. The next layer delivers business transformational AI services. And finally, we have a platform that provides tools to support a closed-loop approach for AI innovation in services and support.

Coming to the AI strategy for Customer Support, we believe that any innovations in AI must be in lockstep with application integration, meaning AI developments can only bring business value when they are infused and integrated into the applications used in a business process or scenario.

Q: In the context of Customer Support, could you give some examples of how AI brings business value?

A: While the real-world applications are countless, we could broadly classify them into three groups.

We use AI to correct – this means we use AI for the support experience, for personalization, and for data-driven decisions. We use AI to connect – here you find the platform, tools, and applications along customer touchpoints. We use AI to catalyze – this covers self-service, issue resolutions, and predictive and preventative support.

Q: How does SAP realize this?

A: We do this by taking advantage of our AI development platform that can bring all the data of services and support into one place. This platform helps bring endless possibilities based on the unique needs of customers’ businesses. On our part, we ensure that we explore the power of AI across business contexts.

By building AI models, we have the power to transform business in the way we want. We can plug these models into support systems and portals to extract the full value of AI in support. By collecting data and events from support systems and portals, we can even train AI models that can deliver value later. By processing the context and history of the customer, we can provide highly personalized support experiences – at runtime.

I could go on, but at this point I would urge you to follow the Customer Support tracks at SAP Sapphire & ASUG Annual Conference Orlando on June 3–5, 2024, to learn about the technologies and strategies that are shaping the future of Customer Support and business transformation. Be sure to bookmark your favorite topics from this guide: Your Ultimate Guide for SAP Sapphire Orlando in 2024.

Renuka Abraham is part of Customer Support at SAP.