SAP recent­ly unveiled new gen­er­a­tive-AI capa­bil­i­ties for cus­tomer expe­ri­ence, includ­ing its dig­i­tal assis­tant Joule, in an expan­sion of the SAP CX port­fo­lio that also reflect­ed the company’s recent push to lever­age gen­er­a­tive AI through­out its prod­uct ecosystem.

Intro­duced Oct. 25 dur­ing SAP CX Live, a vir­tu­al con­fer­ence, the capa­bil­i­ties — both port­fo­lio-wide AI capa­bil­i­ties and native­ly embed­ded AI fea­tures — includ­ed tai­lored use cas­es for com­merce, sales, cus­tomer ser­vice, mar­ket­ing, and cus­tomer suc­cess teams. 

Aimed at help­ing busi­ness­es auto­mate time-con­sum­ing tasks and quick­ly ana­lyze data to cre­ate more intel­li­gent, per­son­al­ized cus­tomer expe­ri­ences, the port­fo­lio-wide AI capa­bil­i­ties will be acces­si­ble through both a stand­alone app and Joule, which SAP plans to embed across its entire suite of cloud solu­tions. Native­ly embed­ded fea­tures will be avail­able with­in SAP Sales Cloud, SAP Ser­vice Cloud, SAP Com­merce Cloud, SAP Emarsys Cus­tomer Engage­ment, and SAP Cus­tomer Data Plat­form solutions. 

Among the announcements:

• More than 10 CX role-based tools intend­ed to auto­mate time-con­sum­ing and repet­i­tive tasks
• AI-gen­er­at­ed cus­tomer pro­files dri­ven by the SAP Cus­tomer Data Plat­form (CDP), enabled by native data con­nec­tiv­i­ty across SAP S/4HANA and CX in SAP CDP
• Intel­li­gent Q&A, using AI to iden­ti­fy and sug­gest answers to cus­tomer ques­tions with­in active con­ver­sa­tions, aimed at sales and ser­vice teams
• AI capa­bil­i­ties for cat­a­log man­age­ment and prod­uct dis­cov­ery, includ­ing image-based seman­tic search and auto­mat­i­cal­ly gen­er­at­ed prod­uct attrib­ut­es and descriptions
• AI risk-based authen­ti­ca­tion capa­bil­i­ties for SAP Cus­tomer Iden­ti­ty and Access Man­age­ment (CIAM) solu­tions, which secure end-user iden­ti­ty data and guard against poten­tial threats across all plat­forms and brands, via a uni­fied cus­tomer view and con­sent profile
• Per­son­al­ized con­tent cre­ation for SAP Emarsys Cus­tomer Engage­ment platform
• AI-gen­er­at­ed sum­ma­ry and email response gen­er­a­tion for SAP Sales Cloud and SAP Ser­vice Cloud

The AI capa­bil­i­ties, which will large­ly become avail­able in Decem­ber 2023, will lever­age data from third-par­ty sources but also be trained on SAP’s expe­ri­en­tial and oper­a­tional data, and built on pro­pri­etary AI mod­els and large lan­guage mod­els (LLMs).

“These new AI capa­bil­i­ties with­in the SAP CX port­fo­lio will allow busi­ness­es to unlock their full poten­tial, improve cus­tomer loy­al­ty, solid­i­fy them­selves as indus­try lead­ers and reap the ben­e­fits of gen­er­a­tive AI with intel­li­gent CX solu­tions that have a tan­gi­ble impact on busi­ness­es,” said Ritu Bhar­ga­va, Pres­i­dent and Chief Prod­uct Offi­cer, SAP Indus­tries and CX. ​“These capa­bil­i­ties are the next step in redefin­ing intel­li­gence to deliv­er a delight­ful cus­tomer expe­ri­ence, effort­less­ly.”

Bhar­ga­va added that the SAP CX strat­e­gy for AI will be dri­ven by AI prin­ci­ples of ​“rel­e­vant, reli­able, and respon­si­ble” deci­sion-mak­ing, and the announce­ment of AI risk-based authen­ti­ca­tion capa­bil­i­ties for SAP CIAM solu­tions was in par­tic­u­lar accom­pa­nied by dis­cus­sion of main­tain­ing cus­tomer data pri­va­cy and secu­ri­ty as core tenets guid­ing the strategy.

The announce­ments advance the SAP roadmap for intel­li­gent CX first unveiled at this year’s SAP Sap­phire and ASUG Annu­al Con­fer­ence, which sim­i­lar­ly focused on how CX can be enhanced by the pow­er of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence (AI) and data. As SAP shifts its focus to cloud solu­tions, SAP CX has sim­i­lar­ly evolved from its pre­vi­ous empha­sis on tra­di­tion­al cus­tomer rela­tion­ship man­age­ment (CRM) func­tion­al­i­ty to pur­sue more cloud-cen­tric, indus­try-spe­cif­ic CX.

Added Chris­t­ian Klein, CEO and Mem­ber of the Exec­u­tive Board of SAP SE: ​“Intel­li­gent CX is indus­try-tai­lored, con­nect­ed, insight­ful, and adap­tive. These four pil­lars can cre­ate per­son­al­ized cus­tomer expe­ri­ences that deliv­er on cus­tomer expec­ta­tions across all sales channels.”

Meri Beth Dudich, Con­tent Pro­duc­er at ASUG, con­tributed to this report.