While arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence (AI) dom­i­nat­ed much of the spot­light at SAP Sap­phire & ASUG Annu­al Con­fer­ence last week, the event also fea­tured a slew of announce­ments and updates impact­ing (and improv­ing) the expe­ri­ences of SAP util­i­ties cus­tomers. Here are some of the key take­aways from the con­fer­ence impact­ing utilities. 

• Mov­ing for­ward, SAP will assign all cur­rent and new RISE with SAP cus­tomers with a ded­i­cat­ed enter­prise archi­tect to guide their cloud trans­for­ma­tion projects. Dur­ing his keynote address, SAP Chief Exec­u­tive Offi­cer Chris­t­ian Klein said these resources will pro­vide cus­tomers with a ​“guide to imple­men­ta­tion” and lever­age the RISE with SAP method­ol­o­gy as they move to the cloud. As util­i­ties migrate to the cloud these EA assets will help them find the best ways to man­age their dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion projects.

• SAP fur­ther padded out its busi­ness trans­for­ma­tion port­fo­lio — includ­ing the recent addi­tions of SAP Sig­navio and Leax­IX — by announc­ing its inten­tion to acquire WalkMe, a dig­i­tal adop­tion plat­form provider. ​“Appli­ca­tions, process­es, data, and peo­ple are the four key ele­ments of a suc­cess­ful busi­ness trans­for­ma­tion,” Chris­t­ian Klein, CEO and mem­ber of the Exec­u­tive Board of SAP SE, said in a state­ment. ​“By acquir­ing WalkMe, we are dou­bling down on the sup­port we pro­vide our end users, help­ing them to quick­ly adopt new solu­tions and fea­tures to get the max­i­mum val­ue out of their IT invest­ments.” Scott Rus­sell, SAP Chief Rev­enue Offi­cer, not­ed the solu­tion is aimed at pro­vid­ing sup­port to ​“your peo­ple, the busi­ness user that wakes up every morn­ing and is us the SAP appli­ca­tions” as enter­pris­es embark on their ​“dig­i­tal adop­tion jour­ney.” This addi­tion fur­ther enables all SAP cus­tomers embark­ing on enter­prise-wide dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion projects — espe­cial­ly those to the cloud. This addition’s focus on end users fur­ther com­pli­ments the suite of solu­tions and SAP invest­ments aimed and facil­i­tat­ing suc­cess­ful cloud adoption.

• SAP showed off busi­ness AI inno­va­tions in its port­fo­lio, includ­ing inno­va­tions to cus­tomer expe­ri­ence (CX) solu­tions. For exam­ple, SAP Sales Cloud now sports pre­dic­tive fore­cast­ing capa­bil­i­ties. Addi­tion­al­ly, the CX AI Toolk­it now fea­tures a gen­er­a­tive AI tool builder that allows users to con­struct cus­tom AI tools for busi­ness users lever­ag­ing data from SAP Com­merce Cloud, SAP Sales Cloud, and SAP Ser­vice Cloud. New AI capa­bil­i­ties were also unveiled for SAP Asset Per­for­mance Man­age­ment, which will help tech­ni­cians, inspec­tors, and man­agers as they visu­al­ly inspect asset con­di­tions. Images gath­ered by these employ­ees can now be eas­i­ly anno­tat­ed and com­piled into inspec­tion alerts. 

• New SAP Build low-code and pro-code tools were announced. Aimed at help­ing cus­tomers adopt a clean core strat­e­gy, these capa­bil­i­ties includ­ed ABAP Devel­op­er func­tions in Joule, SAP’s AI co-pilot. One fea­ture, set to be released lat­er this year, will enable users to devel­op ABAP busi­ness objects using gen­er­a­tive AI in the SAP Busi­ness Tech­nol­o­gy Plat­form (BTP) ABAP Environment.

• Final­ly, SAP announced wide­spread inte­gra­tions of Joule through­out the soft­ware company’s port­fo­lio of cloud plat­forms and busi­ness appli­ca­tions. In addi­tion to the cur­rent Joule inte­gra­tions with SAP Suc­cess­Fac­tors and SAP Start, SAP S/4HANA Pri­vate Cloud, SAP Cus­tomer Data Plat­form, SAP BTP Cock­pit, SAP Build, SAP Build Code, and SAP Inte­gra­tion Suite, the gen­er­a­tive AI copi­lot will inte­grate with SAP Ari­ba and SAP Ana­lyt­ics Cloud lat­er this year.