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This week at SAP Sapphire, four industry-leading companies joined SAP Executive Board Members Scott Russell and Thomas Saueressig on stage in Orlando to discuss how they are using SAP technology to deliver high-value results for their businesses.
Taking Business to the Next Level in the Era of AI
Russell told the crowd that customer stories and conversations is what SAP Sapphire is all about, saying that what makes the event special is having “a collective group that comes together, both here in the room and virtually, and being able to understand how SAP can bring out your best.”
Russell emphasized that the news from SAP Sapphire is a “demonstration of our commitment to continually innovate, to continually strive to bring more creative value to your business.”
He noted that a perfect example of this is the announcement that SAP has entered into an agreement to acquire WalkMe, a leader in digital adoption platforms. Reflecting on the acquisition, Russell said “We are obsessed not only about great applications and great platforms to deliver value for your business, we also care passionately about the transformation journey to get there.”
SAP AI Core is set to transform enterprise operations through a strategic partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS). This collaboration integrates advanced generative AI models from Amazon Bedrock into SAP AI Core, enabling businesses to streamline processes, enhance efficiency, and drive innovation across their operations. SAP SE and Amazon Web Services (AWS) have announced a […]
In their SAP Sapphire Orlando keynote, Executive Board Members Muhammad Alam, SAP Product Engineering, and Juergen Mueller, chief technology officer, shared how the latest SAP innovations will help businesses drive true, end-to-end digital transformation and address their toughest business challenges.
Taking Business to the Next Level in the Era of AI
In the keynote, which featured several real-world product demos by SAP employees, Alam and Mueller touted the value of SAP’s best-of-breed solutions with an outlook of what the next 50 years of innovation by SAP may look like.
Who better to inspire the keynote than Hasso Plattner, co-founder and recently retired chairman of the SAP Supervisory Board, who both Alam and Mueller invoked during the session. To spell out SAP’s legacy and vision for the future, Mueller quoted Plattner’s farewell message: “Keep innovating, keep pushing boundaries, and keep making a difference in the lives of our customers and the world at large.”
Keep Innovating
To kick off his first SAP Sapphire appearance as the head of SAP Product Engineering, Alam began by describing the importance of harnessing innovation to deliver an end-to-end picture across all business functions and unlock true value.
Simply put, businesses exist to build and deliver products and services to customers, he explained. But the materials, assets, people, and processes that come together to achieve this task is far from simple. “The reality is that each part of the business is deeply and intricately connected to all the others,” Alam said, meaning a pain point in one area impacts the rest. That’s why SAP’s modular cloud ERP approach is so successful: “We allow our customers to drive true digital transformation as opposed to running systems integration projects disguised as digital transformation,” he added.
Alam presented GROW with SAP as an example of this composability and extensibility, as it can work for and scale to many sizes and types of business. And now, SAP Sales Cloud and Concur Expense are natively integrated into GROW with SAP, making the offering even more comprehensive. Sinit Foto, product manager for UX, Cloud ERP at SAP, joined Alam on stage to show how GROW with SAP and SAP Business AI can help achieve integrated processes, demoing use cases such as communicating with customers about sales quotes, creating expense reports, and supporting financial analyses. In fact, Alam announced that SAP is implementing the demoed application internally to manage sales worldwide. And Mueller emphasized: “We are committed to helping you in this transformative AI moment by creating business outcomes that were unthinkable before. That’s why we’re embedding SAP Business AI deeply in our processes and analytics.”
Keep Pushing
AI was woven throughout the entire keynote, with both Alam and Mueller discussing SAP’s strategy and product enhancements in this space. AI must be high value, easy to adopt into the flow of work, and trustworthy for it to truly transform how we do business, Alam said. “Equally important is whether it’s done in a way where it keeps your data secure and private – and is executed in a responsible manner,” he added. “And that is really the core promise of SAP Business AI.”
There’s no doubt that AI is a powerful technology, which is why it’s essential that businesses view it as a “responsibility” not just an “opportunity,” Alam said. Megan Fife, executive solution advisor for SAP SuccessFactors, showed how SAP executes on its responsible, reliable, and relevant business AI by demoing how SAP’s AI copilot Joule in SAP SuccessFactors HCM can help fill skills gaps and collaborate across teams, among other meaningful tasks. Key to this endeavor is SAP’s expanded partnership with Microsoft announced earlier in the day, which Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of Cloud and AI at Microsoft, discussed with Alam on stage.
Mueller echoed the importance of responsible AI, saying that the technology depends highly on data that is reliable and that allows customers to look at their business end-to-end. Here, SAP Datasphere and SAP Spend Control Tower – which was demoed by Orla Cullen, product marketing manager for Data and Analytics at SAP – can help simplify data management and view and manage spend and sustainability data holistically.
This transformation is supported by SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP), and Mueller demonstrated the newest generative AI features in SAP Analytics Cloud, SAP Integration Suite, and SAP Build solutions. He showed how Joule can help create and summarize financial reports for controlling teams; generate integration flows between SAP and non-SAP applications; and create custom skills and content based on specific business needs. Greater insights, faster reaction times, and increased productivity are the result. Soon, Mueller added, it will even be possible to enhance and extend Joule’s knowledge by creating custom skills using SAP Build and having the copilot interact with data housed in SAP and non-SAP systems, helping businesses run even more efficiently.
SAP BTP is the key to being “innovation-ready,” maintaining a clean core, and tailoring standard offerings to unique needs, Mueller explained. More than 24,000 companies running live on SAP BTP, including Blue Diamond Growers and Lufthansa Technik, can attest to this.
“SAP BTP’s extensibility and enterprise automation capabilities can help businesses turn process insights into actual improvements,” Mueller said. Cecilia Huergo, product manager for SAP BTP, showed this in her demo on how identifying improvement opportunities, realizing needed changes while maintaining a clean core, and gaining an up-to-date view of your IT landscape can be enabled with the combined power of SAP Signavio solutions, SAP LeanIX, and SAP BTP.
Keep Making a Difference
The innovations demoed and discussed in Alam and Mueller’s keynote, in addition to the many others announced at SAP Sapphire in 2024, are just the latest steps forward in SAP’s journey to bringing out the best in its customers. “The future is here, and it’s defined by those who innovate first,” Mueller said. “And we are here to give you the right tools at hand, such that you can be a leader not just today, but also tomorrow.”
The SAP Sapphire 2024 conference heralds a new era of business transformation, with SAP introducing a suite of generative AI innovations and strategic partnerships designed to elevate enterprise operations. By seamlessly integrating Business AI throughout its enterprise cloud portfolio, SAP is not only enhancing mission-critical processes but also partnering with industry leaders to harness the […]
SAP CEO Christian Klein kicked off SAP Sapphire this week with an upbeat keynote that highlighted the company’s latest business AI innovations, products, and partnerships, which he said will change how people work.
Taking Business to the Next Level in the Era of AI
“This year is a very special Sapphire,” Klein said. “We are entering a new phase of AI, with endless possibilities for us all.”
Klein and Chief Marketing and Solutions Officer Julia White used the keynote to outline how AI will deliver real business benefits for different corporate functions and “Bring Out Your Best,” this year’s event theme.
Delivering on an AI Promise
Klein emphasized how SAP has delivered on its promise to infuse generative AI throughout its business portfolio, has enabled customers to exploit the potential of business AI, and has positioned the Joule copilot as the new front end for SAP applications.
SAP Sapphire is always a time of excitement, but this year has truly been remarkable, especially with our incredible progress in AI. Since Q4 last year, we have delivered 50 new AI innovations, and we are on track to ship more than 100 AI use cases in 2024.
Taking Business to the Next Level in the Era of AI
SAP Business AI is center stage at the show and top of mind for our customers. These innovations are not just about technological excellence; they’re about delivering real-world results.
Our goal is to provide clear and meaningful value with AI. More than 27,000 customers are already experiencing the substantial impact of SAP Business AI. For example, Team Liquid, a leader in the competitive esports and gaming world, saves approximately 10,000 hours per year on manual analysis. But we’re not stopping here. With SAP Business AI, we are both changing how businesses operate and revolutionizing how users interact with SAP software.
Generative AI copilot Joule is rapidly becoming the natural language interface across the portfolio as we continue to embed AI across SAP applications at an accelerated pace. Our focus on advancing AI means that customers benefit from effective solutions that drive real-world results.
Sandra Voeller, CEO of Agilita AG, agrees. “Using SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition and SAP SuccessFactors with Joule copilot poises Agilita to redefine industry standards,” she said. “These tools are not just innovations; they are our future — unlocking unprecedented business agility and intelligence. I’m thrilled for the transformative journey ahead.”
We have also engaged our robust partner ecosystem with business AI to offer customers more choices to tackle their specific business needs. Over 60 ecosystem partners are working on more than 80 use cases built on AI Foundation on SAP BTP, including the generative AI hub. This same foundation powers innovation for our development teams and customers, ensuring tailored enterprise-class AI solutions that address real business challenges and opportunities.
Dive into the latest AI capabilities and ecosystem innovations we are presenting this week at SAP Sapphire, all aimed at delivering real-world results:
New Business AI Capabilities and Ecosystem Innovations
Joule
Video: Make every touchpoint count and every task simpler with Joule
Joule is transforming how users interact with SAP business systems, making every touchpoint count and every task simpler. Business users can execute transactional tasks 90% faster and access SAP Help Portal content 95% quicker without leaving their SAP applications.
Since its launch in September 2023, Joule has quickly become pervasive across the SAP portfolio, streamlining operations, improving decision-making, and boosting efficiency across various business functions. Today, Joule is already embedded in HR, finance, ERP, sales, services, marketing, and commerce applications, transforming how employees, managers, accountants, field personnel, and front-office professionals work. By the end of this year, 80% of the most frequently performed transactions across SAP business applications will be fully automated with Joule.
Joule is also integrated with multiple components of SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP), enhancing everything from application development to integration and data management. In the second half of this year, we plan to expand Joule’s reach to supply chain management, analytics, and planning solutions through integration with SAP Ariba, various supply chain management solutions, and SAP Analytics Cloud. Joule will also support several additional languages, including German, Spanish, French, and Portuguese. With a multilingual Joule integrated across the SAP portfolio, businesses around the globe will be able to work faster and smarter and achieve better outcomes.
Achieve faster insights with Joule in German, Spanish, French, and Portuguese (available later this year)
We are also enhancing Joule with additional capabilities to help the ecosystem streamline SAP implementations. Joule will provide consultants with vital information through natural language interactions, drawing from insights in more than 200,000 pages of product documentation and knowledge shared by the SAP community. Once rolled out to an ecosystem of more than 5 million consultants, this capability has the potential to save up to 600 million working hours per year. This is especially critical for supporting customers transitioning to SAP S/4HANA Cloud as part of RISE with SAP, helping them accelerate implementations and save money.
The SAP partner ecosystem is embracing AI innovations that accelerate customer value. “We’re embracing Joule and Joule’s SAP Consulting capabilities to help our clients build the organizational agility needed to continuously transform with a generative AI-enabled digital core,” shared Lan Guan, chief AI officer at Accenture.
This capability will be available later this year.
In the future, save implementation time with Joule’s SAP Consulting capabilities
Human Resources
Transforming HR with AI creates dynamic, inclusive, and future-ready workplaces. With Joule integrated into the SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting solution, hiring managers can create compelling, bias-free job descriptions 90% faster, significantly enhancing hiring efficiency and outcomes.
We have also expanded Joule capabilities across the SAP SuccessFactors HCM suite to enhance the employee experience. Employees will soon be able to get instant answers to HR policy questions and complete HR processes using natural language. Joule’s advanced document grounding capabilities will enable comprehensive responses by accessing business documents in SAP and third-party repositories such as Microsoft SharePoint.
Instant answers to HR policy questions with Joule
A new generative AI writing assistant capability helps employees draft personalized and measurable performance goals, development plans, and feedback reports more effectively and consistently. This saves employees up to 30% of the time spent crafting written communications and reduces the time people managers spend defining individualized development goals by 60%.
Managers also benefit from AI-assisted person insights that summarize complex compensation data, make recommendations, and provide talking points for discussions with employees — saving time and improving retention rates. Similarly, recruitment becomes more productive with the new AI-assisted applicant screening capability, which helps identify the most promising candidates by matching skills extracted from resumes with those in job descriptions.
Provide actionable feedback to employees quickly in SAP SuccessFactors HCM
These AI-driven enhancements empower organizations to build a connected, data-driven, and employee-centric workforce, leading the way in HR innovation and efficiency.
Finance
With SAP Business AI, we’re enhancing performance across a range of financial activities, from payments and expense management to financial close, invoice management, auditing, and forecasting.
For example, financial collection departments are leveraging generative AI in SAP Enterprise Service Management to automate processes, analyze and summarize correspondence, prioritize urgent issues, and generate automated replies. These capabilities reduce costs by up to 70% and accelerate service requests by up to 30%, enhancing customer satisfaction.
Accelerate service request resolution with SAP Enterprise Service Management
Billing specialists are now using Joule integrated into SAP Advanced Financial Closing to unlock unstructured content from inbound customer correspondence, improving the accuracy of risk determinations. Joule also generates summaries of project profitability, prioritizes projects for further analysis, and proposes actions for project improvement. Additionally, SAP Fiori apps now feature Joule-enabled insights, allowing the copilot to summarize available data and produce visual data narratives.
Joule in SAP Fiori applications summarize available data (available later this year)
Later this year, new generative AI capabilities in SAP Advanced Financial Closing will automate error detections and root cause analysis, helping users quickly resolve common closing errors. With up to two hours saved per error remediation, customers will be able to accelerate closing times while lowering support and compliance costs. Financial controllers will be able to also take advantage of personalized video data stories, highlighting top projects based on key metrics such as recognized revenue, utilization rates, and margins. Collections specialists using SAP Billing and Revenue Innovation Management will be able to mitigate risk of late customer payments by analyzing customer behavior and business correspondence to predict the likelihood of delayed payments.
SAP Advanced Financial Closing will help to quickly resolve common closing errors (available later this year)
Integrating AI into finance helps businesses streamline processes, reduce costs, and drive meaningful business outcomes.
Supply Chain
SAP Business AI is empowering companies to create risk-resilient and sustainable supply chains. By leveraging AI, customers can increase supply chain agility and efficiency.
For instance, generative AI-powered capabilities in SAP Transportation Management will expedite freight verification and documentation, enabling companies to achieve up to 50% faster inbound delivery note processing and reduce truck idle time at the gate by 40%. The system will automatically extract, post, and check critical information from delivery notes, streamlining the validation of freight orders.
Joule will play a crucial role in enhancing supply chain management. Later this year, supply chain planners will benefit from integration with SAP Integrated Business Planning for Supply Chain by getting detailed analyses of planning runs. Joule will identify the root causes of order delays and suggest corrective measures. Logistics providers will be able to use Joule to expedite transportation planning and the intake of goods in SAP S/4HANA Supply Chain for transportation management, enhancing overall logistics efficiency.
Joule gathers new product ideas and searches for product similarities
For manufacturers, SAP Business AI will significantly improve quality management. SAP Quality Issue Resolution will allow users to address recurring issues faster by using AI to bundle similar quality incidents and identify effective problem-solving processes. Furthermore, AI in SAP Asset Performance Management will aid technicians, inspectors, and managers in visually inspecting asset conditions. Images collected from visual inspections will be able to be easily annotated, displayed, and compiled into inspection alerts, facilitating timely and accurate maintenance decisions.
These advancements will make supply chain management more agile, efficient, and sustainable for customers.
Procurement
With SAP Business AI, we’re transforming procurement into a proactive, data-informed, and agile operation.
For example, AI in SAP Ariba Category Management allows procurement organizations to reduce the onboarding time for new category managers and accelerate category strategy and planning development by as much as 56%, improving operating margins and outcomes.
External Workforce We have added new generative AI capabilities to the SAP Fieldglass portfolio, enabling procurement departments to streamline the recruitment of external workers. Hiring managers can generate and maintain effective job descriptions faster, while project managers can deliver detailed statements of work more rapidly. This enables businesses to quickly identify and engage contractors with the right skills and qualifications. Job descriptions can be easily translated into 21 different languages, and a new resume-ranking capability can surface the most promising candidates, leading to as much as a 15% reduction in work orders. This flexibility allows customers to quickly react to fluctuating workloads and rapidly fill expertise gaps.
Develop comprehensive job descriptions quickly in SAP Fieldglass
Buyer Journey A new generative AI feature in the buying 360 capability for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition will make procurement more intelligent, allowing buyers to bundle products and services into a single transaction. Users will be able to describe their purchasing needs using natural language, and the system will generate a recommended bundle of products and services ready for purchasing. This will save users considerable time spent searching catalogs for individual items while also enhancing the efficiency of the procurement process. These capabilities are planned for later this year.
Sourcing By the end of the year, sourcing managers will be able to leverage intelligent product and supplier recommendations to create requests for proposals much faster with Joule integration in SAP Ariba Sourcing . These recommendations will consider cost-effectiveness, carbon footprint impact, local compliance regulations, and past transactions, optimizing spend management performance.
Create RFPs faster with Joule in SAP Ariba Sourcing (available later this year)
Through these enhancements, SAP Business AI is making spend management more efficient, responsive, and cost-effective.
Sales, Services, Marketing, and Commerce
SAP Business AI is revolutionizing sales, services, marketing, and commerce operations, significantly improving productivity and customer engagement. For instance, the SAP CX AI Toolkit provides a comprehensive, configurable AI solution for e-commerce, marketing, sales, and service teams. These professionals can use it to streamline content creation tasks and analyze data from across the enterprise – with e-commerce teams experiencing productivity increases of 50%, larger average order values, and higher conversion rates.
Sales Productivity New AI capabilities enhance the productivity of sales professionals using SAP Sales Cloud. Sales teams can benefit from predictive forecasting, which predicts the likelihood of closing deals across the entire business portfolio. This gives chief revenue officers more comprehensive revenue forecasting, enabling better strategic decisions.
In addition, predictive recommendations will enhance sales efforts by suggesting the best people to involve in a deal and the most suitable products for each customer. This will eliminate manual extensive research on customer needs and preferences, allowing sales teams to focus on selling. AI account summaries and lead boosters will automatically generate detailed reports about sales prospects, combining company details, industry context, and relevant news. As such, we can reduce the manual effort needed for information gathering, giving salespeople more time to close deals.
Reduce lead information gathering efforts with lead boosters in SAP Sales Cloud
Digital and User Experiences Today, a generative AI tool builder already enables system administrators to create customized AI tools for business users leveraging data from SAP Commerce Cloud, SAP Sales Cloud, and SAP Service Cloud solutions. These tools can help personalize content to meet specific customer experience needs.
By the end of this year, SAP CX AI Toolkit will also introduce new AI features to enhance customer interactions. An AI shopping assistant will allow shoppers to ask questions using everyday conversational language and receive accurate product information and personalized product recommendations on sites powered by SAP Commerce Cloud. This will enable consumers to find products faster and improve their overall shopping experience.
Build custom tools for specific use cases with the AI tool builder in SAP CX AI Toolkit
SAP CX AI Toolkit will make marketing and sales teams more productive. Later this year, a new image creation feature will allow business users to generate new product images for their SAP Commerce Cloud catalog using natural language prompts, significantly reducing image production times. They will also benefit from an AI expert recommendations feature, which will identify experts within their organization who can provide needed answers and insights. Instead of wasting time browsing through emails and organizational charts, these professionals will be able to use natural language to express their needs and instantly find the right experts. This capability will be generally available later this year.
Generate new product images using natural language in SAP CX AI Toolkit (available later this year)
These advancements in SAP Business AI are transforming sales, services, marketing, and commerce operations, making them more efficient, personalized, and successful.
IT and Platform
SAP Business AI embedded in SAP BTP empowers IT professionals and business experts to extend SAP solutions and drive faster, better decision-making throughout the enterprise while accelerating customers’ digital transformations.
For example, professional developers are leveraging generative AI capabilities in SAP Build Code to accelerate application development by 30%. They can generate data models, services, and samples with a few simple prompts and use natural language to automate business logic and testing.
Application Development Joule continues to increase developer productivity and simplify the extension of SAP applications. Integration with ABAP Cloud will revolutionize the work of the 5 million-strong ABAP developer community, accelerating the development of extensions that interact with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition, and SAP BTP, ABAP environment. Trained on over 250 million lines of ABAP code, Joule will be able to outperform industry-leading general-purpose code assistants. We expect more than 10% efficiency increase, based on initial studies and benchmarking. Early adopters are using this innovation to generate ABAP business objects and will soon be able to complete and explain code and create unit tests. The first capabilities will become available later this year.
Joule continues to strengthen SAP Build Code capabilities by enabling developers to use generative AI to quickly build SAP Fiori front ends for SAP S/4HANA Cloud, greatly simplifying clean-core extensions.
These advancements in SAP Business AI are empowering IT professionals and business experts to innovate faster, streamline operations, and drive meaningful business outcomes.
Accelerate the creation of ABAP Cloud apps with Joule’s ABAP Developer capabilities (Labs preview; available later this year)
Process Innovation We are continuously strengthening SAP BTP with new AI capabilities that accelerate process innovation. Joule integration with SAP Build Process Automation empowers process experts to generate automation and workflows using natural language requests without IT intervention. Similarly, Joule integration with the SAP Signavio portfolio enables users to leverage natural language requests to generate process models. By empowering users with varying levels of expertise to innovate, customers can accelerate time-to-value and free IT professionals to focus on more strategic tasks.
Process AI solutions from SAP Signavio introduce a new collection of generative AI capabilities trained on a large language model (LLM) comprised of expert business process knowledge and more than 5,000 SAP best practices. Later this year, the process recommender feature will provide ready-to-use, AI-generated business process model recommendations and suggest the most influential measures to assess the performance of a business process. This will offer vital insights into streamlining operations and reducing overhead. A prompt-based process mining feature will automatically generate business-relevant charts and metrics in response to natural language requests for business insights, dramatically lowering the effort for business users who need answers to complex business questions.
The process recommender feature in SAP Signavio offers insights to streamline operations (available later this year)
Integration System integration is foundational to the success of enterprise automation initiatives and effective ecosystem collaboration, but connecting heterogeneous systems inside and outside the enterprise is an onerous task. Later this year, developers will be able to take advantage of Joule integration with SAP Integration Suite and use natural language to accelerate the design of integration flows across SAP and third-party applications.
A new AI-powered anomaly detection capability will recommend remedial actions when API usage patterns or performance fall outside desired thresholds due to unusual errors, traffic surges, suspicious API access, or unusual latency. With performance insights and support for identifying causes and effects, administrators of complex technology landscapes will be able to act faster, achieving greater operational efficiency at a lower total cost of ownership.
Accelerate the design of integration flows with the Joule integration with SAP Integration Suite
Content Creation and Compliance IT administrators, training managers, and content developers will be able to cut the time spent writing content by up to 20% with automatic content generation and enrichment in SAP Enable Now. Customers use the digital adoption platform to improve the adoption, productivity, and efficiency of their software by providing in-application help and e-learning content to users. New generative AI capabilities will add to this value, enabling companies to free up resources for more critical tasks and accelerating knowledge transfer within organizations.
SAP Enable Now improves the adoption, productivity, and efficiency of software
Compliance and IT professionals can leverage Joule for enhanced productivity and precision. Joule integration with the new regulatory change manager tool on SAP BTP enables these professionals to evaluate numerous regulatory updates within the context of their business and SAP solutions. With insights and quick answers on the typically more than 1,000 annual regulatory changes, users can save 70% of the time usually spent on understanding local and global regulations. The tool provides impact analysis across SAP products and solutions, helping customers maintain compliance and seamlessly manage their day-to-day operations. Compliance and IT professionals can also use AI in localization as a self-service for SAP S/4HANA Cloud to automate tasks such as payment format localization and form localization, reducing processes that once took days to just a few hours.
Administration With Joule integrated in SAP BTP cockpit, administrators can automate tasks and onboard new users more easily. They can search for information 95% faster and execute transactional tasks or navigation 90% more quickly. The business impact is substantial, as the cockpit helps these professionals manage resources, services, and security, monitor application metrics, and perform actions on cloud applications.
Accomplish tasks and onboard new users easily with Joule in SAP BTP cockpit
Redefining the capabilities of IT and platform management positions SAP customers at the forefront of technological advancement and operational excellence.
Industries
SAP is delivering trusted AI and machine learning across industries to manage complexity, overcome challenges, and help customers modernize. AI-driven solutions empower businesses to streamline operations and focus on strategic outcomes, driving significant value in their respective fields.
Oil, Gas, and Energy, Agribusiness, and Metals and Mining Commodities traders and business operators will soon be able to eliminate repetitive data entry tasks with SAP S/4HANA for commodity management for physical contracts. With Joule, business operators will be able to create new commodities deals by simply describing the deal using conversational language. Planned for later this year, the capability will allow traders to focus more on producing better commercial outcomes for their clients rather than getting bogged down by administrative tasks.
Industrial Manufacturing Sales engineers in the manufacturing sector will benefit from more precise product configuration recommendations for complex, configurable products through SAP Intelligent Product Recommendation. By simply describing requirements in natural language, sales engineers can generate tailored recommendations that better meet customer needs. Generative AI services can analyze text from diverse sources, such as emails and notes captured in SAP Customer Experience solutions or multi-page specification documents such as request for proposals or requests for quotations. SAP Intelligent Product Recommendation also provides suggestions based on estimated parameters for lead times and CO2 footprints, enhancing accuracy and efficiency of product configurations, and ultimately improving customer satisfaction and operational efficiency.
Quickly gather product configuration recommendations with SAP Intelligent Product Recommendation
Public Sector and Higher Education Later this year, Joule will be enhanced with budget and grant management business context for the public sector, higher education, and research industries. With this new context awareness, Joule will streamline and improve the user experience for these regulated industries, enabling users to navigate their financial systems more efficiently and make better strategic decisions. For example, SAP S/4HANA users will be able to ask Joule for definitions, summaries, or how-to guidance, saving time and reducing the demand on IT departments. This enhancement will help government organizations and higher education institutions manage their budgets and grants more effectively, reducing extensive training typically required during financial system rollouts.
Breakthrough AI Innovations
SAP is pushing the boundaries of AI with the new SAP Foundation Model for structured data, investing in this cutting-edge AI technology to unlock the value of generative AI technology advancements for structured business data. The goal is to deliver a foundation model that is business-centric by design, providing actionable, job-specific insights directly within SAP applications customers use daily.
Traditional AI models require significant effort, expertise, and training data to handle specific tasks on structured data effectively. In contrast, we are developing SAP Foundation Model to adapt to multiple use cases with minimal or no fine-tuning. Ultimately, we aim to bring the same transformative power to structured business data that LLMs have brought to text. While LLMs like GPT-4 excel with unstructured text and images, they struggle with the structured data typical in enterprises, often performing between 20 to 50% worse than narrow AI methods. SAP Foundation Model will bridge this gap, focusing on structured business data to deliver more accurate predictions and insights while maintaining the versatility of foundation models.
Early benchmark tests are promising, showing SAP Foundation Model outperforming narrow AI models by up to 15% on customer datasets after a quick fine-tuning round. This superior performance, combined with its deep understanding of complex business processes, promises to enable businesses to reap the rewards of AI faster and more efficiently.
With SAP Foundation Model, we aim to set a new standard for AI in the business domain, transforming how enterprises leverage data to achieve remarkable outcomes. Learn more here.
Responsible AI
At SAP, innovation goes hand in hand with responsibility. We are committed to ensuring that AI technologies are not only innovative but also ethical, secure, and sustainable. The strategic use of business data is integral to the success of AI, and by leveraging business data responsibly, we not only enhance the capabilities of AI solutions but also improve outcomes for customers.
SAP remains firm in its commitment to prioritize data privacy and security as it releases new AI capabilities. The same rigorous standards that govern all SAP product development extend to AI offerings. Strong security, product, and data privacy protocols are applied to help ensure AI solutions are developed responsibly, with all AI use cases reviewed by an AI ethics committee.
Building on the fundamental dedication to responsible AI that we started back in 2018, this year, SAP is proud to further the commitment by affirming the 10 guiding principles of the UNESCO Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence. These principles cover proportionality, safety, fairness, sustainability, privacy, human oversight, transparency, responsibility, awareness, and multi-stakeholder collaboration, ensuring that AI solutions respect human rights and contribute to sustainable development.
In line with this commitment, sustainability is a key pillar of SAP’s corporate strategy. We are determined to harness the benefits of AI while minimizing its energy footprint and helping customers manage theirs. For example, a new AI-enabled capability in SAP Sustainability Footprint Management enhances the accuracy and speed of carbon footprint calculations through automated, intelligent emission factor mapping recommendations, reducing manual effort and improving precision.
Accurately speed up carbon footprint calculations with SAP Sustainability Footprint Management
By integrating responsible AI practices into innovations, we continue to drive meaningful and sustainable business outcomes for customers.
New AI Partnerships
The vast SAP partner ecosystem is fully engaged with SAP Business AI. Leading up to and at SAP Sapphire, we have announced groundbreaking new and expanded partnerships to accelerate AI adoption across business processes:
Accenture: Accenture and SAP are helping clients transform business models, processes, and customer and employee experiences while realizing value through data and AI. This year at SAP Sapphire, Accenture is announcing its plans to embrace the consulting capability for Joule and ABAP code generation in compressed cloud ERP transformations. Additionally, Accenture and SAP are teaming on SAP Signavio and SAP LeanIX solutions to help customers with insights, governance, and other capabilities to achieve their transformation outcomes.
Apple:We are deepening our partnership with Apple to revolutionize the boardroom with AI and spatial computing. By integrating Apple Vision Pro with business applications from SAP, users can create an infinite enterprise workspace, and navigate tasks using their eyes, hands, and voice. SAP has launched apps like SAP Mobile Start and SAP Analytics Cloud, giving users the ability to create a spatial boardroom to visualize their entire enterprise. Now, with SAP Build Code, customers can easily bring their SAP apps to Vision Pro, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. SAP is also leveraging the power of Apple’s Neural Engine to run SAP AI workloads securely and privately on Apple devices, supercharged by SAP BTP.
Amazon Web Services (AWS): AWS and SAP announced an expanded, strategic collaboration to transform modern cloud ERP experiences and help enterprises drive new capabilities and efficiencies with generative AI. Together, SAP and AWS are striving to make it easier for customers to adopt RISE with SAP on AWS, to improve the performance and efficiency of SAP workloads running in the cloud, and to embed generative AI into an enterprise’s entire portfolio of business-critical applications.
Boston Consulting Group (BCG): BCG announced a new offering with SAP, which recommends opportunities to maximize transformation investments using SAP Signavio and SAP LeanIX solutions. The offering allows companies to navigate continuous change and prioritizes ways to onboard AI-based innovations.
Google Cloud: We have teamed up with Google Cloud to help joint customers better predict and mitigate supply chain risk. The expanded partnership begins by enabling marketing and sales departments to understand the impact of their campaigns on product sales, thus increasing forecast accuracy. This is achieved by integrating Joule and SAP Integrated Business Planning for Supply Chain with Google’s Gemini AI assistant and Google Cloud Cortex Framework’s Data Foundation. By capturing previously hard-to-detect demand signals, companies can react faster and make more informed, agile decisions in a dynamic global market.
Meta: We are expanding our partnership with Meta by integrating Meta’s Llama 2 and Llama 3 models into the generative AI hub within SAP AI Core as part of our business AI strategy. This integration will allow customers to create dashboards based on rich content with Llama’s qualitative conversational outputs and explore use cases built with Meta Llama 3. The wide range of capabilities offered by Meta Llama 3 will enable users to get assistance with key activities, including the auto-generation of custom scripts to extend dashboards, and the delivery of the most accurate scripts directly in SAP Analytics Cloud.
McKinsey & Company: McKinsey has expanded its Value Finder offering, powered by SAP Signavio, SAP BTP and generative AI. Value Finder rapidly analyzes and prioritizes thousands of potential process optimization opportunities for clients – using a proprietary McKinsey and SAP technology portfolio with generative AI – to capture measurable productivity, growth, and asset efficiency benefits enabled by SAP S/4HANA transformations.
Mistral AI: SAP will add new LLMs from Mistral AI, a global company headquartered in Paris specializing in generative AI, to its growing corpus of world-class AI models in generative AI hub. This addition to SAP AI Core will make it easier to build generative AI use cases for SAP applications.
NVIDIA: We are partnering with NVIDIA to leverage its AI and Omniverse platforms for next-generation business operations. ABAP developer capabilities and consulting capability in Joule will take advantage of the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software platform, including NVIDIA NIM inference microservices. NVIDIA NeMo Retriever, a collection of generative AI microservices, will connect AI applications with proprietary data, improving the accuracy and relevance of AI responses. We are also integrating NVIDIA Omniverse Cloud APIs into SAP Intelligent Product Recommendation, enabling salespeople to visualize 3D products via digital twins in real time. This integration optimizes the sales process for complex products, helping customers make more informed decisions faster than ever.
Sustainability has evolved from a boardroom buzzword to a critical driver of business success and strategic differentiation. To thrive, companies are going to need to understand how to operate in a modern, low-carbon, circular economy. SAP solutions will support them by embedding sustainability into every aspect of their operations.
SAP Sapphire: Taking Business to the Next Level in the Era of AI
At our customer flagship event, SAP Sapphire, we’re discussing how we support customers with their biggest challenges, looking at future trends, and unveiling the latest product innovations.
This makes the event the perfect opportunity to highlight how we are redefining the way companies manage sustainability through our ERP-centric, cloud-based, AI-enabled approach.
ERP-Centric
For true business model transformation, sustainability needs to be at the core of how companies operate. At SAP, we integrate sustainability data into cloud ERP business processes, which helps companies connect financial and non-financial information and thus treat carbon like money. This makes all decisions financially and environmentally sound while enabling customers to record real impacts and report audit-ready environmental, social, and governance (ESG) metrics seamlessly.
Cloud-Based
Instant access to fast-evolving innovations is only possible through the cloud. Our modern cloud-based solutions ensure that businesses can quickly adopt new functionality and stay ahead in a rapidly changing environment.
AI-Enabled
Business AI is revolutionizing the way we approach sustainability. At SAP, AI takes complex sustainability tasks reliant on sustainability data and ERP data and makes them automated and auditable. It enables companies to improve operational efficiency, foster greater transparency around supply chain emissions, design and plan more effectively, and automate time-consuming tasks. SAP Business AI is built on the data and processes that run the business world, including sustainability related information from both inside and outside the company’s walls, making our solutions smarter, faster, and more effective.
With SAP Business AI, we support our customers’ efforts to optimize for sustainable impact. This year at SAP Sapphire, we are thrilled to announce two new AI-driven sustainability use cases:
Emission Factor Mapping with AI: Available in SAP Sustainability Footprint Management, this feature enhances the accuracy and speed of carbon footprint calculations through automated, intelligent suggestions. By reducing the manual effort involved in mapping emission factors, businesses can achieve more precise measurements and make informed decisions faster.
ESG Report Generation with AI: This capability allows for the automatic generation of ESG reports based on the data within SAP Sustainability Control Tower. This not only streamlines the reporting process but also helps ensure that the data is reliable and actionable, providing a clear picture of a company’s sustainability performance.
Our comprehensive approach to carbon management is becoming a reality as we introduce new sustainability tracking, monitoring, and reporting features within the SAP cloud ERP portfolio as well as a new solution that will help customers manage sustainability commitments and comply with global regulations.
Advanced Carbon Calculator Engine: This powerful tool featured in SAP Sustainability Control Tower and SAP Sustainability Footprint Management integrates ERP data from SAP S/4HANA Cloud and other sources and embeds results back into business processes for informed decision-making. As such, it allows customers to meet Greenhouse Gas Protocol reporting standards, offering advanced, granular calculations of both product and corporate carbon footprints.
SAP Green Ledger will be released at the end of 2024. The solution will help customers connect their emissions data and financial data, allowing customers to easily understand the correlation between emissions and finances, model sustainable business scenarios, and then act with decisions that are both financially and environmentally.
At SAP, we believe that the future of business is inextricably linked to sustainability. This is why sustainability is a key pillar of our growth strategy. Businesses must recognize that sustainable practices are not just ethical choices, but strategic financial decisions that drive innovation, reduce costs, and mitigate risks.
Moreover, sustainable transformation opens up significant economic opportunities. By transforming their operations around sustainability, businesses can create a modern, low-carbon, circular economy that benefits both the environment and their bottom line, enhancing overall resilience.
This transformation aligns business success with global sustainability goals, paving the way for a more sustainable, valuable, and prosperous future.
Sophia Mendelsohn is chief sustainability and commercial officer at SAP.
Get the latest news and coverage from SAP Sapphire in 2024
WALLDORF — SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) and WalkMe Ltd. (NASDAQ: WKME) announced today that the companies have entered into a definitive agreement under which SAP will acquire WalkMe, a leader in digital adoption platforms (DAPs).
WalkMe’s solutions help organizations navigate constant technology change by providing users with advanced guidance and automation features that enable them to execute workflows seamlessly across any number of applications. This results in higher adoption of the underlying application and as such drives value realization.
The Executive and Supervisory Boards of SAP SE and the board of directors of WalkMe have approved the transaction for US $14.00 per share in an all-cash transaction, representing an equity value of approximately US $1.5 billion. The offer price represents a 45% premium to WalkMe’s closing share price on June 4, 2024.
The envisioned combination complements SAP’s Business Transformation Management portfolio around SAP Signavio and SAP LeanIX solutions to help customers on their transformation journeys.
“Applications, processes, data and people are the four key elements of a successful business transformation,” said Christian Klein, CEO and member of the Executive Board of SAP SE. “By acquiring WalkMe, we are doubling down on the support we provide our end users, helping them to quickly adopt new solutions and features to get the maximum value out of their IT investments.”
WalkMe: Focus on Analyzing Adoption and Business Transformation
“We are thrilled to join forces with SAP. This acquisition marks a significant milestone in our journey, providing us with the resources and customer base necessary to enhance our product offerings and expand our market reach,” said Dan Adika, CEO of WalkMe. “By leveraging SAP’s extensive ecosystem, we are poised to unlock substantial growth opportunities and deliver even greater value to our customers. Together, we look forward to a future filled with innovation and exceptional service.”
WalkMe helps organizations boost enterprise productivity and lower risk by enabling consistent, effective and efficient use of software and the workflows it enables. Its DAP works on top of an organization’s application landscape, detects where people encounter friction and provides the tailored support and automation they need to complete the job to be done, right in the flow of work, across any application. Importantly, WalkMe will continue to fully support non-SAP applications.
Soon, WalkMe will launch the WalkMeX copilot, which will use WalkMe’s contextual awareness and AI to suggest the best next step for any workflow, anywhere. WalkMeX has the capability to always be on, serving as an overlay to any application, including copilots from different vendors that companies use in their landscapes. Integrating the strength of WalkMe’s adoption capabilities with SAP’s copilot Joule will boost AI assistant and productivity gains for all SAP customers. Additionally, integrating distinctive e-learning features in the SAP Enable Now solution with WalkMe will form the center of SAP’s people-centric transformation approach going forward.
The acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions, including the receipt of WalkMe shareholder approval and necessary regulatory clearances, and is expected to close in the third quarter of 2024. The impact of the transaction on SAP’s non-IFRS earnings per share for fiscal 2024 is expected to be immaterial.
WalkMe (NASDAQ: WKME), headquartered in Tel Aviv, Israel, pioneered DAP innovations and solutions so companies can effectively navigate the constant change brought on by technology. With WalkMe, organizations drive enterprise productivity and reduce risk by ensuring consistent, responsible, and efficient adoption of software and the workflows it powers. Our AI-driven platform sits on top of an organization’s tech stack, identifies where people experience friction, and delivers the personalized guidance and automation needed to get the job done, right in the flow of work. Customers like IBM, Nestle, ThermoFisher Scientific, and the U.S. Dept. of Defense trust WalkMe to create the people-centric experiences required to boost the effectiveness of their workflows and maximize software ROI.
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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Additional Important Information and Where to Find It In connection with the proposed transaction, WalkMe will prepare a proxy statement to be delivered to its shareholders and furnished to the Securities and Exchange Commission (the “SEC”). INVESTORS AND SECURITY HOLDERS ARE STRONGLY ADVISED TO READ THE PROXY STATEMENT WHEN IT BECOMES AVAILABLE AND OTHER RELEVANT DOCUMENTS FILED OR FURNISHED TO THE SEC IN CONNECTION WITH THE PROPOSED TRANSACTION OR INCORPORATED BY REFERENCE THEREIN, BECAUSE THE PROXY STATEMENT AND SUCH OTHER RELEVANT DOCUMENTS WILL CONTAIN IMPORTANT INFORMATION ABOUT THE PROPOSED TRANSACTION AND THE PARTIES TO THE PROPOSED TRANSACTION. This press release is not a substitute for the proxy statement or any other document that may be filed or furnished by WalkMe with the SEC.
The proxy statement and other related documents filed or furnished to the SEC regarding the proposed transaction may be obtained for free from the SEC’s website (www.sec.gov), WalkMe’s website at www.walkme.com or by directing such request to WalkMe’s Investor Relations.
Forward-Looking Statements This press release contains “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the “safe harbor” provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and other applicable securities laws. All statements other than statements of historical fact, including statements regarding the proposed acquisition of WalkMe by SAP, the expected timing for completing the proposed transaction and the terms thereof, future financial and operating results, benefits and synergies of the transaction, future opportunities for the combined businesses and any other statements regarding events or developments that may occur in the future, may be “forward-looking statements” for purposes of federal and state securities laws. These forward-looking statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could significantly affect the financial or operating results of SAP, WalkMe or the combined company. Words such as “expects,” “anticipates,” “intends,” “plans,” “believes,” “estimates,” “predicts,” “seeks,” “targets,” “would,” “will,” “should,” “may” and variations of such words and similar expressions are intended to identify such forward-looking statements. Such statements are based on management’s expectations as of the date they are first made, are not guarantees of future performance and involve certain risks, uncertainties and assumptions that are difficult to predict. Neither SAP nor WalkMe can give any assurances that the expectations in such forward-looking statements will be attained and, therefore, actual outcomes and results may differ materially from what is expressed or forecasted in such forward-looking statements. For example, these forward-looking statements could be affected by factors including, without limitation, risks associated with the ability to consummate the proposed transaction, the satisfaction of the conditions to the consummation of the proposed transaction, including the receipt of certain regulatory approvals, and the timing of the closing of the proposed transaction; the occurrence of any event, change or other circumstance that could give rise to the termination of the proposed transaction; the potential that WalkMe shareholders may not approve the transaction; the ability to successfully integrate operations and employees; the ability to realize anticipated benefits and synergies of the proposed transaction as rapidly or to the extent anticipated by financial analysts or investors; the potential impact of the announcement of the proposed transaction on operating results, business generally and business relationships, including with employees, customers, suppliers and competitors; unanticipated restructuring costs may be incurred or undisclosed liabilities assumed; actual or threatened legal proceedings that have been or may be instituted against SAP or WalkMe in connection with the proposed transaction or otherwise; the ability and costs related to retaining key personnel and clients; risks related to diverting management’s attention from ongoing business operations; delays, challenges, costs, fees, expenses and charges related to the proposed transaction; actions by competitors; general adverse economic, political, social and security conditions in the regions and industries in which SAP and WalkMe operate, including relating to Israel’s ongoing war with Hamas and other terrorist organizations in the Middle East and general hostilities; exposure to inflation, currency rate and interest rate fluctuations and risks associated with doing business locally and internationally, as well as fluctuations in the market price of SAP and WalkMe’s traded securities; natural catastrophes, any pandemic, epidemic or outbreak of infectious disease, warfare, protests and riots, and terrorist attacks; and those additional risks and factors discussed in reports filed or furnished with the SEC by SAP and WalkMe, including SAP’s and WalkMe’s most recent Annual Reports on Form 20-F and in any subsequent reports on Form 6-K, each of which is on file with or furnished to the SEC and available at the SEC’s website at www.sec.gov. Reports filed or furnished with the SEC by SAP are also available on SAP’s website at www.sap.com/investors and by WalkMe on WalkMe’s website at www.walkme.com. Moreover, other risks and uncertainties of which SAP or WalkMe are not currently aware or may not currently consider material may also affect each of the companies’ forward-looking statements and may cause actual results and the timing of events to differ materially from those anticipated. The forward-looking statements made in this press release are made only as of the date hereof or as of the dates indicated in the forward-looking statements, even if they are subsequently made available by SAP or WalkMe on their respective websites or otherwise. Neither SAP nor WalkMe undertakes any obligation to update or supplement any forward-looking statements to reflect actual results, new information, future events, changes in its expectations or other circumstances that exist after the date as of which the forward-looking statements were made.
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