Arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence con­tin­ues to sweep the enter­prise IT land­scape, as tech­nol­o­gy lead­ers place big bets on intel­li­gent automa­tion and analysis. 

With gen­er­a­tive AI at the fore­front of advance­ments for mis­sion-crit­i­cal appli­ca­tions, SAP recent­ly debuted busi­ness AI and user expe­ri­ence inno­va­tions for its spend man­age­ment and busi­ness net­work solu­tions, includ­ing the new SAP Spend Con­trol Tow­er and SAP Ari­ba Cat­e­go­ry Man­age­ment solu­tions, at the SAP Spend Con­nect Live event (Octo­ber 9 – 11, at the Messe Wien Con­gress Cen­ter in Vien­na, Austria). 

A cen­tral­ized expen­di­ture mon­i­tor­ing plat­form for the com­pa­ny’s cost-con­trol and account­abil­i­ty offer­ings, SAP Spend Con­trol Tow­er will give cus­tomers the abil­i­ty to com­pare and ana­lyze spend across SAP spend man­age­ment solutions. 

SAP Spend Con­trol Tow­er will include advanced AI fea­tures that pro­vide staff and exec­u­tives with near real-time vis­i­bil­i­ty across all spend­ing activ­i­ties, to help orga­ni­za­tions iden­ti­fy cost-cut­ting oppor­tu­ni­ties and opti­mize oper­a­tional effi­cien­cies. Avail­able in the first quar­ter of 2024, the plat­form will pro­vide users with dash­boards that dis­play crit­i­cal spend fac­tors like com­pli­ance, oppor­tu­ni­ty analy­sis, and sus­tain­abil­i­ty. Lever­ag­ing AI will allow users to see into scope‑3 car­bon emis­sions report­ing with­in total spend man­age­ment, gain­ing vis­i­bil­i­ty of spend­ing and also tak­ing action direct­ly from the solu­tion’s data visu­al­iza­tion lay­er to enforce compliance. 

Also announced: the SAP Ari­ba Cat­e­go­ry Man­age­ment solu­tion will be enhanced with gen­er­a­tive AI to help pro­cure­ment pro­fes­sion­als build com­pre­hen­sive, effec­tive cat­e­go­ry strate­gies faster. Enabling mar­ket analy­sis process­es and mak­ing cat­e­go­ry strat­e­gy sug­ges­tions that will allow pro­cure­ment pro­fes­sion­als to refine and exe­cute their cost-con­trol ini­tia­tives, the solu­tion will be inte­grat­ed with large lan­guage mod­els through SAP Busi­ness AI.

‘Elim­i­nat­ing the Mundane’

Despite decades of invest­ment in automa­tion and ana­lyt­i­cal tech­nolo­gies, the process of col­lect­ing data and assess­ing process­es to con­trol expens­es and mon­i­tor oper­a­tional effi­cien­cies remains time-con­sum­ing and tedious for many organizations. 

Gen­er­a­tive AI can move spend man­age­ment for­ward and help cus­tomers con­trol costs, mit­i­gate risk, and increase pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, accord­ing to Muham­mad Alam, Pres­i­dent and Chief Prod­uct Offi­cer, Intel­li­gent Spend and Busi­ness Net­work, SAP. 

Dis­cussing the phi­los­o­phy behind these announce­ments, Alam said that SAP seeks to demon­strate how large lan­guage mod­els can help orga­ni­za­tions to increas­ing­ly auto­mate impor­tant oper­a­tions to improve effi­cien­cy and opti­mize strat­e­gy exe­cu­tion, allow­ing man­agers and senior deci­sion-mak­ers to return their focus to oth­er strate­gic priorities. 

While intro­duc­ing these next-gen­er­a­tion enter­prise solu­tions to the mar­ket, Alam point­ed out the impor­tance of bring­ing prac­ti­cal con­text to the table. ​“The poten­tial [of gen­er­a­tive AI] is huge for elim­i­nat­ing the mun­dane,” Alam said. ​“We think bring­ing it in con­text is going to cre­ate more capac­i­ty in orga­ni­za­tions, as well as allow them to do more strate­gic [plan­ning] in a fair­ly low-cost effort.”

To that end, while keep­ing cus­tomers’ secu­ri­ty, pri­va­cy, com­pli­ance, ethics, and accu­ra­cy in mind, SAP has already out­lined 12 sce­nar­ios and use cas­es for lever­ag­ing gen­er­a­tive AI across SAP Ari­ba, SAP Con­cur, and SAP Busi­ness Net­work offer­ings, to opti­mize cor­po­rate and val­ue-chain performance.

Oth­er Top Takeaways

Also announced at SAP Spend Con­nect Live:

• SAP will embed Joule. the com­pa­ny’s recent­ly announced gen­er­a­tive-AI copi­lot, through­out its cloud enter­prise port­fo­lio, with avail­abil­i­ty in SAP spend man­age­ment solu­tions planned for 2024.
• As part of SAP Spend Con­trol Tow­er, new dash­boards in the SAP Ari­ba Sourc­ing and SAP Ari­ba Buy­ing solu­tions, avail­able now, will offer near real-time insights into key process work­flows to help pro­cure­ment teams to make bet­ter deci­sions more quick­ly, there­by accel­er­at­ing time to value.
• Risk-aware pro­cure­ment will be deliv­ered by embed­ding AI-pow­ered sup­pli­er risk assess­ment capa­bil­i­ties into SAP’s source-to-set­tle solu­tions; these capa­bil­i­ties, now avail­able for SAP Ari­ba Sourc­ing, SAP Ari­ba Con­tracts, and SAP Ari­ba Buy­ing, will make it pos­si­ble to assess risk pro­files with­in sourc­ing, con­tract­ing, and buy­ing solutions. 
• SAP will col­lab­o­rate with Scout­bee, a lead­ing AI-pow­ered sup­pli­er intel­li­gence and dis­cov­ery plat­form com­pa­ny, to inte­grate its AI-pow­ered sup­pli­er search solu­tion with the SAP Ari­ba Sourc­ing solu­tion. Through this inte­gra­tion, short­list­ed sup­pli­ers will be auto­mat­i­cal­ly import­ed into guid­ed sourc­ing events. This will allow teams to iden­ti­fy sup­pli­ers aligned with their require­ments, such as pro­duc­tion capac­i­ty, qual­i­ty stan­dards, and cer­ti­fi­ca­tion requirements.
• SAP Con­cur has launched an Expense Pay­ment Man­ag­er solu­tion that will enable com­pa­nies to reim­burse employ­ees in more than 25 cur­ren­cies via stream­lined pay­ment process­es and inte­gra­tion of third-par­ty pay­ment providers into the platform.