At its annu­al SAP Sap­phire con­fer­ence, SAP announced plans to expand gen­er­a­tive AI capa­bil­i­ties via dig­i­tal copi­lot Joule across its enter­prise cloud port­fo­lio, with CEO Chris­t­ian Klein declar­ing that the com­pa­ny is ​“enter­ing a new phase of AI with end­less possibilities.”

On stage June 4 in Orlan­do to kick off the con­fer­ence, Klein tout­ed high-pro­file part­ner­ships with Ama­zon Web Ser­vices (AWS), Google Cloud, Meta, Microsoft, and NVIDIA to extend gen­er­a­tive AI capa­bil­i­ties for busi­ness users, includ­ing by enabling Joule to lever­age the busi­ness con­text of oth­er AIs to com­plete com­plex tasks span­ning mul­ti­ple applications.

Klein vowed to embed ​“gen­er­a­tive AI across our stack to once again rev­o­lu­tion­ize how busi­ness­es are run and how end users will work in the future,” posi­tion­ing its gen­er­a­tive AI copi­lot as the new user inter­face for most SAP appli­ca­tions. ​“Span­ning across all our solu­tions, Joule will become our new front-end, our new UX, and turn your words into action, to become the biggest pro­duc­tiv­i­ty engine for every SAP end user,” Klein said.

Though SAP has been embed­ding arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence across its port­fo­lio in areas includ­ing finance and logis­tics for years, the com­pa­ny has dra­mat­i­cal­ly empha­sized its embrace of gen­er­a­tive AI in recent years, see­ing the tech­nol­o­gy as an accel­er­a­tor for cloud adop­tion; to that end, SAP has not extend­ed access to gen­er­a­tive AI fea­tures to cus­tomers run­ning on-premis­es ver­sions of SAP appli­ca­tions, includ­ing SAP S/4HANA.

The soft­ware com­pa­ny also announced plans to expand its RISE with SAP pro­gram to include ded­i­cat­ed enter­prise archi­tects and intro­duced a new sce­nario to help SAP ERP Cen­tral Com­po­nent (ECC) cus­tomers tran­si­tion to the cloud.

Among the top announce­ments from SAP Sapphire:

• Joule, SAP’s gen­er­a­tive-AI copi­lot, will expand through­out the company’s cloud port­fo­lio; first launched in SAP Suc­cess­Fac­tors last fall, Joule is now embed­ded in SAP S/4HANA Cloud, SAP Build, and SAP Inte­gra­tion Suite solu­tions, among oth­ers, addi­tion­al­ly expand­ing to SAP Ari­ba and SAP Ana­lyt­ics Cloud solu­tions before end-of-year.
• SAP will assign all cur­rent and future RISE with SAP cus­tomers an enter­prise archi­tect to guide their cloud trans­for­ma­tions, in addi­tion to pro­vid­ing an inte­grat­ed tool chain. Klein said these resources will pro­vide cus­tomers with a ​“guide to imple­men­ta­tion” and help more than 6,000 cur­rent RISE cus­tomers lever­age the method­ol­o­gy to move to the cloud.
• As part of SAP’s expand­ed col­lab­o­ra­tion with Microsoft, Joule will fea­ture ​“deep, bi-direc­tion­al inte­gra­tion” with Microsoft Copi­lot, enabling access to infor­ma­tion from inter­ac­tions with SAP and Microsoft 365 busi­ness appli­ca­tions; SAP AI Core will also become avail­able on Microsoft Azure.
• SAP gave an overview of its AI Foun­da­tion­al Mod­el, trained on cus­tomer data. ​“This allows us to pro­vide reli­able res­o­lu­tions hard to get oth­er­wise,” said Muham­mad Alam, SAP Exec­u­tive Board Mem­ber over­see­ing Prod­uct Engineering.
• SAP Busi­ness Tech­nol­o­gy Plat­form will fea­ture large lan­guage mod­els (LLMs) from Ama­zon Web Ser­vices (AWS), Meta, and Mis­tral AI with­in its gen­er­a­tive AI hub.
• GROW with SAP will now include SAP Sales Cloud and Con­cur Expense at no addi­tion­al cost to customers.
• SAP will adopt the 10 guid­ing prin­ci­ples of the UNESCO Rec­om­men­da­tion on the Ethics of Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence, intend­ed to guide the devel­op­ment and usage of AI in ways that ​“respect human rights, pro­mote fair­ness and con­tribute to sus­tain­able development.”

SAP CEO Klein: Joule Expands, with Con­sult­ing, ABAP Devel­op­er Capabilities 

Gen­er­a­tive AI was top of mind at SAP Sap­phire, with SAP exec­u­tives announc­ing plans to expand Joule capa­bil­i­ties across the company’s suite of cloud solu­tions, most immi­nent­ly with­in SAP Ari­ba and SAP Ana­lyt­ics Cloud lat­er this year, turn­ing the copi­lot into its main inter­face across cloud appli­ca­tions pow­ered by SAP Busi­ness Tech­nol­o­gy Platform. 

Declar­ing that ​“Joule is ready for prime time,” Klein promised that ​“it will be embed­ded out of the box for all our cloud customers”

Klein antic­i­pates that 300 mil­lion SAP users will be using Joule by year’s end. SAP has ana­lyzed the most fre­quent­ly exe­cut­ed tasks in its appli­ca­tions and opti­mized Joule to man­age these tasks; by the end of this year, Klein esti­mat­ed that 80% of the most used SAP tasks will be man­aged by Joule, which he says will make SAP users 20% more pro­duc­tive and enable cus­tomers to imple­ment SAP solu­tions more effectively. 

Klein, who cit­ed over 50 ​“embed­ded use cas­es” for pre-trained AI appli­ca­tions with­in the SAP solu­tion suite, vowed to dou­ble that num­ber of use cas­es this year, includ­ing in areas such as sup­ply chain, sourc­ing, user expe­ri­ence, and sales. 

Specif­i­cal­ly men­tioned capa­bil­i­ties includ­ed improved billing and cash col­lec­tion func­tions, with Joule enabling cus­tomers to close their books faster and man­age com­pli­ance demands. The copi­lot will also pro­vide users with rec­om­men­da­tions to accel­er­ate cash collection. 

Also announced were con­sult­ing capa­bil­i­ties and ABAP devel­op­er capa­bil­i­ties for Joule, to be devel­oped in part­ner­ship with NVIDIA AI Enter­prise soft­ware, expand­ing the knowl­edge base for the gen­er­a­tive-AI copi­lot to improve its abil­i­ty to pro­vide answers to tech­ni­cal and func­tion­al ques­tions while also equip­ping it with SAP’s pro­pri­etary pro­gram­ming language. 

“One of the most amaz­ing break­throughs in large lan­guage mod­els and gen­er­a­tive AI is that we’ve man­aged to learn the rep­re­sen­ta­tion of almost any lan­guage,” said NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang, who joined the SAP Sap­phire keynote vir­tu­al­ly from Tai­wan. ​“In our com­pa­ny, the most valu­able lan­guage is CUDA. At SAP, the most valu­able lan­guage is ABAP.”

In addi­tion to con­sult­ing capa­bil­i­ties and ABAP devel­op­er capa­bil­i­ties for Joule, NVIDIA will col­lab­o­rate with SAP to devel­op AI for man­u­fac­tur­ing sce­nar­ios, includ­ing indus­tri­al dig­i­tal twins. ​“The entire world is on your shoul­ders,” Huang told Klein on stage. ​“We have to deliv­er… This is the begin­ning of a new com­put­ing age, the begin­ning of a new indus­tri­al revolution.”

Ama­zon and Microsoft 

SAP announced expan­sions of its part­ner­ships with major tech­nol­o­gy play­ers Ama­zon Web Ser­vices (AWS) and Microsoft.

Matt Gar­man, CEO of AWS, joined Klein on stage at the event to announce that Ama­zon Bedrock, a ser­vice for build­ing gen­er­a­tive-AI appli­ca­tions on the company’s cloud com­put­ing plat­form, will be inte­grat­ed with SAP BTP’s gen­er­a­tive-AI hub, which will allow cus­tomers access to AI mod­els from Anthrop­ic, Ama­zon, and more to accel­er­ate the cre­ation of cus­tomized AI use cases.

Klein and Gar­man dis­cussed their vision of AI inno­va­tion for shared cus­tomers. AWS pow­ers Joule and, as SAP cus­tomers build AI-enabled appli­ca­tions, they are demand­ing mod­el choic­es, cost con­trol, and enhanced secu­ri­ty — three capa­bil­i­ties enabled by the AWS and SAP partnership. 

Since the launch of RISE with SAP — which enables cus­tomers to man­age SAP and hyper­scaler ser­vices under a sin­gle con­tract — the two tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­nies have main­tained a close col­lab­o­ra­tive rela­tion­ship. Work­ing with SAP to enable RISE with SAP imple­men­ta­tions, AWS and oth­er Ama­zon sub­sidiaries, includ­ing Twitch and Zap­pos, also lever­age SAP solu­tions for mis­sion-crit­i­cal work­loads. ​“This has been a fan­tas­tic part­ner­ship,” Gar­man said. ​“The momen­tum is incred­i­ble between the two companies.” 

Scott Guthrie, Exec­u­tive Vice Pres­i­dent of the Cloud and AI Group at Microsoft, announced that Joule and Microsoft Copi­lot will be inte­grat­ed, enabling access to infor­ma­tion shared across both com­pa­nies from inter­ac­tions with SAP and Microsoft 365 busi­ness applications.

“Microsoft and SAP are com­mit­ted to pro­vid­ing world-class solu­tions to help our cus­tomers solve their most fun­da­men­tal busi­ness chal­lenges,” Guthrie said. ​“The inte­gra­tion of Microsoft Copi­lot and Joule brings togeth­er the pow­er of gen­er­a­tive AI to unlock greater employ­ee pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and will enable enter­pris­es to accel­er­ate cus­tomer-cen­tric inno­va­tion in a uni­fied experience.”

Build­ing upon the announce­ment that SAP will inte­grate Ama­zon Bedrock into its SAP gen­er­a­tive-AI hub to sup­port cus­tomers in build­ing their own gen­er­a­tive AI appli­ca­tions, SAP announced that it will also inte­grate Google Cloud’s Gem­i­ni and its Cor­tex Framework’s data foun­da­tion with Joule and SAP Inte­grat­ed Busi­ness Plan­ning for Sup­ply Chain and lever­age Meta’s Lla­ma AI mod­el to sup­port cus­tomized ana­lyt­ics applications. 

SAP Expands RISE and GROW with Ded­i­cat­ed Enter­prise Architects

With 25% of the world’s com­merce run­ning through RISE cus­tomers, accord­ing to Klein, SAP’s three-year-old pro­gram for mov­ing its cus­tomers to the cloud has been select­ed by 6,000 cus­tomers worldwide. 

Reflect­ing that over 65% of cus­tom code goes unused by SAP cus­tomers, Klein not­ed that RISE cus­tomers have 40% less mod­i­fi­ca­tions in their ERP land­scapes than their peers; the pro­gram dri­ves the clean-core men­tal­i­ty that SAP has worked to incul­cate with cus­tomers, includ­ing by advis­ing them to extend appli­ca­tions via SAP BTP and to keep their core clean ahead of mov­ing to the cloud.

Build­ing upon last fall’s announce­ment of the RISE with SAP Migra­tion and Mod­ern­iza­tion pro­gram, which pro­vides a set of resources, ser­vices, and finan­cial incen­tives intend­ed to reduce bar­ri­ers to cloud migra­tion for its on-premis­es cus­tomers, SAP announced at the con­fer­ence that each cur­rent and future cus­tomer will be assigned a ded­i­cat­ed enter­prise archi­tect. These archi­tects will be skilled on the RISE with SAP Method­ol­o­gy that SAP is also cre­at­ing a part­ner val­i­da­tion pro­gram to sup­port, help­ing them man­age process, sys­tem, and data land­scapes across the entire RISE lifecycle.

GROW with SAP, the company’s offer­ing for small and mid­size busi­ness­es, will expand with the addi­tion of SAP Con­cur and SAP Sales Cloud, with­out addi­tion­al cost to customers. 

Dur­ing the con­fer­ence, SAP also announced its intent to acquire WalkMe, a dig­i­tal adop­tion plat­form, for $1.5 bil­lion, enhanc­ing the user expe­ri­ence for cus­tomers in the midst of migrat­ing to the cloud; com­bined with Joule’s rec­om­men­da­tions on what tasks to com­plete to achieve a desired end result, WalkMe could pro­vide step-by-step guid­ance for cus­tomers seek­ing to opti­mize work­flows across SAP and non-SAP applications.

Klein described LeanIX and SAP Sig­navio — two recent SAP acqui­si­tions that can com­bine with SAP BTP and SAP Cloud Appli­ca­tion Life­cy­cle Man­age­ment (ALM) to help cus­tomers with process opti­miza­tion amid dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion projects — as an ​“inte­grat­ed set of tools” aimed at ensur­ing SAP cus­tomers can man­age their process, sys­tem, and data lay­ers ​“in com­plete har­mo­ny” through­out a large-scale transformation.