Con­tin­u­ous edu­ca­tion, tech­nol­o­gy mod­ern­iza­tion, and com­mu­ni­ty engage­ment took cen­ter stage at ASUG Tech Con­nect, a new in-per­son learn­ing expe­ri­ence for the SAP community. 

Held across three days last week in New Orleans, the con­fer­ence (Nov. 7 – 9; at Ernest N. Mor­i­al Con­ven­tion Cen­ter) brought togeth­er tech­ni­cal prac­ti­tion­ers, enter­prise archi­tects, and SAP experts for more than 130 ses­sions around top­ics includ­ing data and ana­lyt­ics, inte­gra­tion, appli­ca­tion devel­op­ment and automa­tion, and SAP tech­nol­o­gy fundamentals. 

Kick­ing off the inau­gur­al event with an ener­getic Tues­day morn­ing keynote was ASUG CEO & Chief Com­mu­ni­ty Cham­pi­on Geoff Scott; fol­low­ing a rous­ing musi­cal per­for­mance by the Joy­ful Gospel Choir, he wel­comed atten­dees to the Big Easy before shar­ing insights on the need for mem­bers of the ASUG com­mu­ni­ty to learn, con­nect, and grow in order to max­i­mize their SAP tech­nol­o­gy investments.

“If I could boil today down into one sim­ple word, it would be learn­ing,” he told atten­dees, shar­ing ASUG research on SAP Busi­ness Tech­nol­o­gy Plat­form (SAP BTP) and encour­ag­ing all in the audi­ence to seek out new con­nec­tions while on the ground in New Orleans. ​“We know, as ASUG, that col­lab­o­ra­tion is the heart of inno­va­tion,” he said. ​“In-per­son expe­ri­ences like this, where you are this week, are where ideas flour­ish and solu­tions evolve.”

80% of ASUG mem­bers sur­veyed in recent research either cur­rent­ly use or are con­sid­er­ing SAP BTP. ​“Regard­less of where you’re at in your jour­ney, BTP is going to be the foun­da­tion for all of us,” said Scott, advis­ing atten­dees to ​“think [through­out] this week about every­thing that you need to make your tech­nol­o­gy land­scape grow.”

“Nev­er Stop Learning”

Juer­gen Mueller, Chief Tech­nol­o­gy Offi­cer at SAP and Mem­ber of the SAP SE Exec­u­tive Board, joined Scott on stage for the open­ing keynote to share SAP announce­ments and high­light how the company’s emerg­ing solu­tions, all run­ning on SAP BTP, will help cus­tomers dri­ve bet­ter busi­ness outcomes. 

Mueller intro­duced major announce­ments made Nov. 3 at TechEd in Ban­ga­lore, India, includ­ing SAP Build Code, a new vec­tor data­base for SAP HANA Cloud, and the AI Foun­da­tion and its embed­ded gen­er­a­tive AI hub, while also empha­siz­ing the evolv­ing impor­tance of SAP Busi­ness Tech­nol­o­gy Plat­form as the uni­fied envi­ron­ment that will sup­port each of these inno­va­tions. Call­ing it a ​“foun­da­tion­al ele­ment” of the SAP prod­uct port­fo­lio, and one of the company’s most impor­tant com­po­nents (along­side its SAP S/4HANA solu­tion for cloud ERP), Mueller espe­cial­ly focused on SAP BTP’s appli­ca­tion devel­op­ment, data and ana­lyt­ics, inte­gra­tion, and AI capabilities. 

SAP is infus­ing gen­er­a­tive AI into all its cen­tral cloud solu­tions and tech­nolo­gies via Joule, a gen­er­a­tive-AI dig­i­tal assis­tant, part of its effort to enable enter­pris­es to build their own appli­ca­tions and improve devel­op­er pro­duc­tiv­i­ty in work­ing with gen­er­a­tive AI and large lan­guage models.

For those seek­ing to devel­op in inte­grat­ed hybrid cloud land­scapes, the recent announce­ments (also includ­ing new gen­er­a­tive-AI capa­bil­i­ties and deep­er inte­gra­tion between SAP Build Process Automa­tion, SAP Sig­navio, and SAP Inte­gra­tion Suite) will sup­port hybrid deploy­ments and cus­tomers oper­at­ing het­ero­ge­neous environments. 

Hav­ing flown direct­ly from Ban­ga­lore — a 34-hour jour­ney — to attend ASUG Tech Con­nect in New Orleans, Mueller also shared with atten­dees a per­son­al sto­ry about the val­ue of learn­ing, explain­ing that his grand­moth­er had to drop out of her sec­ondary-school edu­ca­tion in Ger­many after the fam­i­ly was unable to afford the added cost of com­pul­so­ry for­eign-lan­guage classes. 

“Nev­er stop learn­ing,” he said. ​“That was one learn­ing for me: If you have the oppor­tu­ni­ty to learn, like here at ASUG Tech Con­nect, make use of that opportunity.”

“We Have to Stay Curious”

Mueller and Scott then wel­comed Scott Guthrie, Exec­u­tive Vice Pres­i­dent, Cloud + AI Group, Microsoft, to the stage for a detailed dis­cus­sion of gen­er­a­tive AI and its poten­tial busi­ness appli­ca­tions through lever­ag­ing enter­prise data, which includ­ed a demon­stra­tion of the use of SAP Ana­lyt­ics Cloud with gen­er­a­tive AI to gen­er­ate emails and busi­ness reports. 

“We’re on the cusp of an absolute­ly tremen­dous peri­od of tech­nol­o­gy evo­lu­tion and rev­o­lu­tion in the world,” said Guthrie, reflect­ing on Microsoft’s embrace of gen­er­a­tive AI with­in its 30-year part­ner­ship with SAP. ​“We do believe that gen­er­a­tive AI will be the sin­gle biggest tech­nol­o­gy inno­va­tion that we’ve seen so far in our life­times,” he added, call­ing it a ​“cat­a­lyst” for last­ing change.

“You’re going to see every appli­ca­tion go through a trans­for­ma­tion in the next cou­ple of years, when nat­ur­al-lan­guage and gen­er­a­tive-AI mod­els are used,” Guthrie added. ​“Rather than hav­ing to always go into a sep­a­rate appli­ca­tion, you’re going to be able to start to pull data together.”

Microsoft is active­ly build­ing and devel­op­ing some of the world’s largest gen­er­a­tive AI mod­els while lever­ag­ing the pow­er of the cloud to train and cre­ate those mod­els. In addi­tion, the com­pa­ny is focused on secur­ing more graph­ics pro­cess­ing units (GPUs) for its data cen­ters in order to meet demand for cloud-based AI services. 

Guthrie reflect­ed that the inte­gra­tion of its GPT-4-pow­ered chat­bot into Microsoft Teams was a par­tic­u­lar­ly eye-open­ing moment for him. ​“You can use it inside of meet­ings, and it will lis­ten to con­ver­sa­tions and sum­ma­rize them instead of just [pro­vid­ing] the tran­script,” he explained. Using it dur­ing a recent Microsoft board meet­ing, Guthrie noticed GPT‑4 was even capa­ble of eval­u­at­ing whether those in the meet­ing had reached con­sen­sus on a par­tic­u­lar subject. 

“The mod­el was able to under­stand that some­one in the room did­n’t have con­sen­sus, and yet peo­ple in the room did­n’t even real­ize that that per­son did­n’t have con­sen­sus,” Guthrie recalled. ​“It was kind of stun­ning to me that it could actu­al­ly pick up that sub­tle­ty about the conversation.” 

Togeth­er with SAP, Microsoft is invest­ing sig­nif­i­cant­ly in joint gen­er­a­tive AI projects and data; ear­li­er this year, both com­pa­nies announced the inte­gra­tion of SAP Suc­cess­Fac­tors solu­tions with Microsoft’s 365 Copi­lot and Azure Ope­nAI Ser­vice to access lan­guage mod­els and gen­er­ate nat­ur­al language. 

“We’re both deeply col­lab­o­ra­tive and each other’s best cus­tomers,” added Guthrie, not­ing that both Microsoft and SAP run many of their inter­nal sys­tems on SAP on top of Azure, allow­ing them to con­tin­u­ous­ly eval­u­ate and advance their collaboration. 

“Trust Is Going to Be at the Cen­ter of Every­thing We Do”

Data secu­ri­ty and pri­va­cy are top-of-mind con­cerns for cus­tomers explor­ing gen­er­a­tive AI for busi­ness; Mueller and Guthrie added that this will be increas­ing­ly essen­tial for both their busi­ness­es. At SAP, an AI Ethics Coun­cil has been con­vened to eval­u­ate the entire life­cy­cle of gen­er­a­tive-AI use case devel­op­ment, con­sist­ing of both inter­nal SAP employ­ees and exter­nal stakeholders. 

Scott not­ed that, from his posi­tion at ASUG, he remains knowl­edge­able of all emerg­ing reg­u­la­tions and guid­ance around AI, includ­ing a recent exec­u­tive order from the White House estab­lish­ing new stan­dards for AI safe­ty and secu­ri­ty, and asked Guthrie and Mueller for their perspectives. 

“Trust is going to be at the cen­ter of every­thing we do, with Microsoft Cloud or AI broad­ly,” Guthrie said. ​“Main­tain­ing that trust, safe­ty, and secu­ri­ty is going to be para­mount. Gov­ern­ments do need to be involved, and make sure we have the right com­pli­ance and leg­is­la­tion, to ensure it dri­ves true advancement.”

In clos­ing, all three exec­u­tives encour­aged atten­dees to keep con­nect­ing and learn­ing more about emerg­ing tech­nolo­gies. ​“We have to stay curi­ous to make progress for our orga­ni­za­tions,” said Mueller. ​“It’s impor­tant that you lead the way.”

Added Guthrie: ​“Keep learn­ing and keep giv­ing us feed­back. I’m real­ly excit­ed to see what this group does. I think there’s a tremen­dous oppor­tu­ni­ty for all of us to real­ly change the world.”

For more from ASUG Tech Con­nect, read our cov­er­age of the day-two and day-three keynotes, an inter­view with Jabil’s IT Direc­tor Cyn­thia Kendall on Jabil’s S/4HANA migra­tion, new columns by the Bor­ing Enter­prise Nerds and the SAP Cus­tomer Evo­lu­tion team, an inter­view with enter­prise archi­tect Syl­vain Gar­neau of Res­olute For­est Prod­ucts, and our pre-con­fer­ence inter­view with SAP CTO Juer­gen Mueller.