As seem­ing­ly dai­ly devel­op­ments in gen­er­a­tive arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence (AI) con­tin­ue to dom­i­nate head­lines, exec­u­tives charged with exe­cut­ing dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion strate­gies are eager to assess the impact that this tech­nol­o­gy, in all its forms, will have on enter­prise applications.

While the dev­il is, as always, in the details, few doubt that this emerg­ing tech­nol­o­gy will leave a sig­nif­i­cant mark on enter­prise resource plan­ning (ERP) oper­a­tions. The promise of AI – as well as machine learn­ing, deep learn­ing, robot­ic process automa­tion and more – is compelling.

This is espe­cial­ly true for orga­ni­za­tions fac­ing an IT skills gap, that strug­gle to find and keep tech­ni­cal tal­ent through intri­cate tech­nol­o­gy mod­ern­iza­tion ini­tia­tives that inte­grate on-premis­es and cloud infra­struc­tures. As a result, major tech­nol­o­gy play­ers are bring­ing dif­fer­ent fla­vors of AI to their offer­ings, so that busi­ness­es do more with increas­ing­ly scarce resources. SAP is no exception.

In the two weeks lead­ing up to the SAP Sap­phire & ASUG Annu­al Con­fer­ence in Orlan­do, Flori­da, SAP broad­ened its part­ner­ships with major indus­try play­ers, demon­strat­ing AI’s grow­ing role in ele­vat­ing the val­ue orga­ni­za­tions extract from ERP invest­ments. That is why we can expect AI to emerge as a sig­nif­i­cant top­ic of con­ver­sa­tion among con­fer­ence attendees. 

SAP and Google Cloud’s Data and Ana­lyt­ics Tech­nol­o­gy Come Togeth­er Using AI

Google Cloud and SAP expand­ed their part­ner­ship, intro­duc­ing a com­pre­hen­sive open data offer­ing that opti­mizes the val­ue of busi­ness data. The joint offer­ing, announced on May 11, lever­ages AI to build an end-to-end data cloud that aggre­gates data across the enter­prise landscape.

“Few resources are as impor­tant to dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion as data,” said Thomas Kuri­an, CEO, Google Cloud. ​“By deeply inte­grat­ing SAP soft­ware data and sys­tems with our data cloud, cus­tomers will be able to uti­lize our ana­lyt­ics capa­bil­i­ties — as well as advanced AI tools and large lan­guage mod­els — to find new insights from their data.”

Dinesh Van­da­yar, Part­ner Man­ag­er, SAP Strat­e­gy and Archi­tec­ture at Google, told ASUG that a strong data foun­da­tion will pro­vide the basis for users to build oper­a­tional, ana­lyt­i­cal, and AI-based out­comes on the same plat­form, alle­vi­at­ing the need to move data back and forth between mul­ti­ple data plat­forms and thus break­ing down silos. 

Accord­ing to the announce­ment, the joint ini­tia­tive will stream­line resources need­ed to imple­ment com­plex data inte­gra­tions and devel­op cus­tom ana­lyt­ics engines across enter­prise appli­ca­tions – includ­ing sup­ply chain man­age­ment, finan­cial fore­cast­ing, human resources records, and omnichan­nel retail – through gen­er­a­tive AI and nat­ur­al lan­guage pro­cess­ing (NLP) mod­els. It will also let busi­ness lead­ers com­bine SAP soft­ware data and non-SAP data on Google Cloud from vir­tu­al­ly any source. 

“Bring­ing togeth­er SAP sys­tems and data with Google’s data cloud intro­duces entire­ly new oppor­tu­ni­ties for enter­pris­es to derive more val­ue from their full data foot­prints,” added Chris­t­ian Klein, SAP CEO and mem­ber of the Exec­u­tive Board of SAP SE.

SAP Fur­ther Inte­grates IBM’s Wat­son AI into Solutions

Ear­li­er in the month, SAP and IBM announced an ini­tia­tive to lever­age Big Blue’s Wat­son tech­nol­o­gy to pow­er the dig­i­tal assis­tant in SAP Start. With SAP Start, users can search for, launch, and inter­ac­tive­ly engage with apps pro­vid­ed in cloud solu­tions from SAP and SAP S/4HANA Cloud. The new AI capa­bil­i­ties will help users boost pro­duc­tiv­i­ty with both nat­ur­al lan­guage capa­bil­i­ties and pre­dic­tive insights, while pre­serv­ing trust, trans­paren­cy, and data pri­va­cy principles.

“This mile­stone col­lab­o­ra­tion with IBM aims to pro­vide SAP cus­tomers [with] a bet­ter user expe­ri­ence, faster deci­sion-mak­ing, and greater insights to help trans­form their busi­ness process­es,” said Klein in a May 2 statement.

The ini­tia­tive will help orga­ni­za­tions to har­ness the trans­for­ma­tive pow­er of AI and allow them to estab­lish new areas of com­pet­i­tive advan­tage, added Arvind Krish­na, IBM Chair­man & CEO. 

Fabio Di Capua, VP Analyst/​Tech Prod­uct Man­ag­er for Gart­ner, not­ed that ​“IBM has been inte­grat­ing Wat­son in its SAP imple­men­ta­tions for years,” express­ing con­fi­dence that there will be mul­ti­ple oppor­tu­ni­ties to eval­u­ate the advan­tages, from improv­ing user pro­duc­tiv­i­ty to enabling addi­tion­al insights. 

AI and Cloud Keeps Core Clean While Sup­port­ing Indus­try-Spe­cif­ic Requirements

In the week before Sap­phire, ASUG caught up with Sven Deneck­en, SVP and Chief Mar­ket­ing Solu­tions Offi­cer for SAP Indus­tries and Cus­tomer Expe­ri­ence, to bet­ter under­stand the role AI will play in address­ing spe­cif­ic needs of dif­fer­ent ver­ti­cal sectors.

While AI is com­mand­ing atten­tion in the news late­ly, Deneck­en explained that advanced ana­lyt­ics and automa­tion have been native­ly embed­ded with­in core SAP tech­nolo­gies for years. In today’s tech­nol­o­gy envi­ron­ment, how­ev­er, the stars have aligned to put the right tech­nolo­gies in their prop­er places to achieve mis­sion-crit­i­cal outcomes.

As enter­pris­es migrate away from lega­cy deploy­ments that were once high­ly cus­tomized to address the com­pet­i­tive require­ments of var­i­ous ver­ti­cals, new cloud tech­nolo­gies and AI capa­bil­i­ties are com­bin­ing to sup­port unique fea­tures and func­tions with­out mod­i­fy­ing stan­dard mod­ern SAP offerings.

From an indus­try require­ments per­spec­tive, he observed, the advan­tage of bring­ing these new tech­nolo­gies togeth­er is that SAP can lever­age AI ser­vices out of its plat­forms and inte­grate them with part­ner solu­tions to enable indus­try-spe­cif­ic exten­sions, defin­ing the future state of key busi­ness processes.