Artificial intelligence (AI), and above all, generative AI, marks a paradigm shift on how computer systems learn from data, solve complex problems, and even provide creativity when it’s needed. We believe this paradigm shift will fundamentally change work, business, and society.
The impact that AI is expected to have on the global economy of the next three years is tremendous. Morgan Stanley estimate that the impact will be about $4.1 trillion dollars, about the size of the GDP of Germany.
SAP is committed to helping organizations through this transformative moment by creating business outcomes that were unimaginable before through SAP Business AI. Tailored to your unique data landscape and industry nuances, SAP Business AI enables smarter decisions and efficiencies at scale:
- AI delivered in the context of your business processes
- AI trained on the industry’s broadest business datasets
- AI built on leading ethics and data privacy standards
SAP Business AI is relevant, reliable, and responsible. It’s deeply embedded in our business processes and analytics. Already today, more than 27,000 of our customers are seeing the benefits of AI that is built for business every day across every business function. No other technology company can combine the power of AI with the processes and data that run the business world. SAP is helping change how people interact with business software and make work more efficient and more delightful than ever before.
Let’s delve into the newest SAP Business AI capabilities made available for SAP customers helping them deliver real-world results.
Joule
Conversational Search
Introduced last year, Joule, SAP’s natural language generative AI copilot, revolutionizes the way people interact with SAP business systems, making every touchpoint count and every task simpler.
SAP customers can now get quick and seamless access to the exact SAP Help Portal content they need when asking a question in Joule, without ever having to leave the application they are working on. This generative AI-powered feature will be available in all SAP cloud solutions. We started with SAP SuccessFactors and SAP Start in 2023, continued with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition early 2024, and this will be followed by additional product integrations planned throughout this year.
Using Joule, SAP SuccessFactors and SAP Start users can save up to 10 minutes for an inquiry without leaving the UI and search in different content repositories, including search engines. This is another step towards helping our customers to become more productive and efficient. It drives product adoption, creates business value, and saves our users time and effort in accessing information quickly.
Learn more on the product page.
Get started with the product documentation.
Cloud ERP
SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition
We have built Joule directly into SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, redefining user interaction, streamlining business processes, and enhancing productivity.
Joule can offer quick, contextual access to content and applications; users can simply ask Joule for guidance and get pointed in the right direction.
- Looking for help to execute certain finance operations or looking for guidance how to change sales document entries? Joule provides quick and easy access to SAP Help Portal content and creates a summary leveraging generative AI. No need to browse through long search result lists anymore and reading into several topics to find the correct information.
- Not sure which application could help to check the status of sales orders? Just express the need in natural language and Joule will propose the most reasonable applications for the required business operation.
- Want to quickly check the status of a specific purchase order? Joule can also assist in providing insightful information about specific business objects. Once Joule shows up the required business information directly in the natural language user panel, users can directly jump into the business application from there.
Learn more on the product page.
Register for the SAP Early Adopter Care program to test this feature before anyone else.
Are you tired of manually inputting incomplete sales order data? Filling in these missing details requires significant manual data management effort.
The sales order autocompletion capability in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition eliminates this hassle by providing smart recommendations for seamless data input. Missing fields are automatically populated,
simplifying incomplete sales order handling, delivering cost savings and boosting sales expert productivity.
Read the blog post.
Get started with the product documentation.
SAP Enterprise Service Management
Shared service centers drive business value by enabling organizations to provide fast and reliable service cost-efficiently. However, too often organizational silos, distributed data and duplicated processes cause complexity and reduce the productivity and quality of service.
With generative AI capabilities in SAP Enterprise Service Management, shared service teams can:
- summarize text in email interactions for cases with Case Summary
- draft email replies or interactions for cases with Email Draft Recommender
- get all the information related to an account that helps the sales representatives with Account Synopsis
Implementation results in significant reductions in overdue items ultimately enhancing customer satisfaction and streamlining processes. By implementing SAP Enterprise Service Management, businesses can save up to 70% of the cost for across various service scenarios or processing service requests 30% faster, like one of our global customers in the automotive industry has achieved for their accounts payable shared-services teams.
Get started with the product documentation.
SAP Transportation Management
Imagine the chaotic scene at a freight clearing dock. Freight logistics providers arrive with stacks of manual papers, causing delays, inefficiencies, and the need for manual rework. Anomalies in freight orders are often detected late, leading to even longer processing times. It's a frustrating and time-consuming process for anyone involved.
Generative AI capabilities have been infused as part of SAP Transportation Management to expedite freight verification and documentation seamlessly. Businesses can automate the processing of tens of thousands of goods receipts and delivery notes in SAP Transportation Management, avoiding data entry errors and processing many types of document layouts without needing to do any training.
The benefits of this solution are immense. First and foremost, there's faster processing time with greater accuracy, minimizing errors and reducing the need for manual checks. This means less waiting time for logistics carriers and the potential for reduced yard space through optimized turnaround times. Additionally, the entire operation experiences enhanced operational efficiency and improved data quality for subsequent processes. Delivery notes are processed 50% faster, saving valuable time and resources. And the cost for truck delivery processing is reduced by an impressive 50%.
This capability is available as pilot phase for SAP customers, with a general availability planned for Q4 2024, including new features.
Learn more about SAP Transportation Management.
SAP Digital Manufacturing
Visual inspection for SAP Digital Manufacturing is now available as a redesigned beta release for SAP Digital Manufacturing customers and will be generally available in the second quarter of 2024. This feature transforms human visual inspection experience to overcome human cognitive limits and empowers production engineers to enable AI models to visual inspections.
AI is leveraged to simplify and optimize visual inspection processes, assisting workers in finding defects earlier, faster, and more accurately. Operator productivity, product quality, and user experience are all improved at the same time. According to the first customer pilots, visual inspection can reduce the time to visually inspect parts by 60% when AI-assisted.
Learn more about SAP Digital Manufacturing.
Get started with the product documentation.
Human Capital Management
SAP SuccessFactors
Joule is integrated natively in SAP SuccessFactors, enabling employee and managers to quickly complete tasks in natural language such as requesting a wide range of record updates, providing feedback, checking and viewing your payment statement, approving time off requests, and much more.
You can access Joule via SAP Start and all pages in the SAP SuccessFactors HXM Suite.
Let's enable a future-ready workforce with our AI copilot that truly elevates every employee's experience.
Start the product tour to test Joule capabilities in SAP SuccessFactors yourself.
Get started with the product documentation.
In addition, SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting customers can now create compelling job descriptions and interview questions with the help of generative AI.
- Attracting the right talent begins with the right job description. That’s why our generative AI-powered assistant gives hiring managers and recruiters a huge jump start to write non-biased, compelling job descriptions in seconds, while still allowing them to edit and improve it afterwards. Not only does it save a significant amount of time – from 2 hours to 5 minutes – as well as costs in creating job descriptions, but it also improves the quality of interviews and preparation. This, in turn, increases attractiveness as employer of choice, because potential applicants can sense the professionalism and attention to detail that the company brings to the hiring process.
- Conducting an effective interview is crucial to ensuring you’re making the best hiring decision. Interviewers can now generate interview questions based on the job description using generative AI capabilities and evaluate applicants in Microsoft Teams after they complete their interviews. AI-powered questions will make it easier for you to create an insightful discussion that dives deep into a candidate’s skills and potential. Your hiring process becomes more streamlined and ultimately leads to better hiring decisions.
See how these new capabilities help organizations attract, develop and retain top talent:
Customer Experience
SAP CX AI Toolkit
Available for existing SAP CX users with SAP Sales Cloud, SAP Service Cloud or SAP Commerce Cloud (standard edition) solution licenses, SAP CX AI Toolkit empowers your sales, service and e-commerce teams with proactive and contextual generative AI:
- Apply AI models to data from sales, service, and e-commerce, along with operational data, to help your teams make more intelligent decisions.
- Enable your teams to use AI to automate routine tasks from right where they work using a stand-alone app or Joule.
- Understand customers and answer their questions faster than ever before with proactive insights and answers derived from enterprise data.
Capabilities available for e-commerce teams:
- Product Tagging: Unlock the full potential of your products by harnessing the power of AI to extract and enrich your product tags. Take your catalog to new heights.
- Personalized Product Descriptions: Let generative AI transform your customer experience with personalized product descriptions that enrich your catalog data.
- Visual Search: Improve product discovery - simplifying the process and delivering quick and accurate search results based on AI image detection.
- Commerce AI Tools: Commerce role specific prompts utilizing CX data to generate a blog post, social media posts and more.
Capabilities available for sales teams:
- Intelligent Customer Profile: Uncover insights with a 360-degree view of every customer through Customer Data Platform integration. Quickly view segment data and profile summarization contextually on top of email and Sales Cloud.
- Sales AI Tools: Create your own AI Tools for unique business needs or utilize our standard sales role specific prompts utilizing CX data to generate discovery questions, emails and more.
- Intelligent Q&A: Proactively identify questions within your conversations and deliver trusted answers from company knowledge.
- Smart Scheduling: Streamline and optimize your calendar management, saving you time and ensuring efficient allocation of appointments with personalized AI responses.
Capabilities available for service teams:
- Intelligent Customer Profile: Uncover insights with a 360-degree view of every customer through Customer Data Platform integration. Quickly view segment data and profile summarization contextually on top of Service Cloud.
- Service AI Tools: Create your own AI Tools for unique business needs or utilize our standard service role specific prompts utilizing CX data to generate responses, case overviews and more.
- Intelligent Q&A: Proactively identify questions within your conversations and deliver trusted answers from company knowledge.
- CX Record Summarization: Align your organization on customer issues, pathway to resolution, sentiment, and responsiveness with service and leadership specific case summaries.
Learn more on the product page.
Get started with the product documentation.
Additional AI-powered functionalities are planned to be released as part of SAP CX AI Toolkit throughout 2024.
SAP Sales & Service Cloud Version 2
Generative AI-powered capabilities have also been introduced as part of SAP Service Cloud Version 2 and SAP Sales Cloud Version 2, enhancing sales & service teams productivity:
- Account Synopsis (in SAP Sales Cloud Version 2 & SAP Service Cloud Version 2) summarizes all the information related to an account that helps the sales representatives, such as the business, the culture or the competitive landscape. It ensures that your team is always equipped with the latest information, enabling them to make well-informed decisions and deliver a superior customer experience.
- Case Summary (in SAP Service Cloud Version 2) automatically fetches a text-based interaction (e.g. email) and pre-processes it. Display summary to customer service rep to quickly grasp the topic and simplify the agent experience.
- Email Draft Recommender (in SAP Sales Cloud Version 2 & SAP Service Cloud Version 2) generates a response email based on the previous email reply and purpose selected by the user for which an email needs to be drafted.
- Lead Booster (in SAP Sales Cloud Version 2) provides tailored information that enhances the sales team’s understanding of the account’s needs and increases the likelihood of successful sales conversion.
Learn more on SAP Sales Cloud and SAP Service Cloud product pages.
Get started with SAP Sales Cloud Version 2 and SAP Service Cloud Version 2 product documentation pages.
Watch the video below to see how SAP Business AI provides the backbone for understanding and responding to customer needs - helping you get from issue to resolution faster.
SAP Emarsys Customer Engagement
Make the creation of subject lines intuitive for your email campaigns based on your natural language prompts! As part of SAP Emarsys Customer Engagement, Emarsys’ AI Subject Line Generator – currently in its pilot phase – uses AI to analyze your campaign content and generate multiple engaging and contextually relevant subject line options.
It saves time and effort by enabling marketers to create subject lines more efficiently, enhances creativity with a range of new subject-line ideas and enable data-driven decisions with the ability to A/B test AI-generated and traditional subject lines.
Explore additional capabilities on Emarsys’ website that empower marketers to build, launch, and scale personalized cross-channel campaigns that drive business outcomes.
Intelligent Spend and Business Network
SAP Ariba Category Management
Gone are the days of painstakingly updating category management tools manually. Category managers can now expedite the development of their category strategy with contextual insights and recommendations using generative AI and large language model (LLM) integration in SAP Ariba Category Management tools, such as Category Segmentation, Market Dynamics, and Cost Structure.
It normally takes 12 weeks to manually create a strategy for a new purchasing category, but with SAP Ariba Category Management, research on category specific information is available with a single click. This new generative AI-powered feature accelerates strategy and planning processes across multiple categories, reduces onboarding time and reliance on more senior category managers and helps adapt to market change with insight and agility.
Learn more on the product page.
Get started with the product documentation.
SAP Business Network
For suppliers, invoice creation can be one of your most inefficient and redundant processes. Every day, employees are manually keying data to submit invoices to customers.
The introduction of the intelligent invoice conversion feature of SAP Business Network reduces the need for this error-prone manual approach to invoice data entry.
The feature automatically converts your invoices from PDF and other scanned image files into an electronic format in SAP Business Network. It extracts your invoice data and automatically maps it to relevant fields in the electronic invoice and simplifies onboarding by providing a self-service setup process that guides supplier administrators through a streamlined workflow.
With intelligent invoice conversion, improve operational efficiency, reduce errors and rejected invoices, and receive payments faster.
Learn more on the product page.
Get started with the product documentation.
SAP Concur
AI is only as good as the quality and breadth of the data it draws upon, and SAP Concur is the global market leader in travel and expense solutions, with more than 92 million end users booking travel and/or processing expenses. For a decade, we have been infusing AI into SAP Concur solutions including ExpenseIt, Verify, Intelligent Audit, and Concur Invoice.
This quarter, we are excited to debut new Business AI capabilities in SAP Concur solutions:
Concur Request: Now uses generative AI to provide intelligent cost estimates for trip planning, saving employees time and effort. When the user creates the request, they enter their trip details such as the length of the trip and the destination. They will have the option to select from the following services that they want cost estimates for: flight or train; hotel; taxi. Request Assistant uses generative AI and the trip details provided by the user to provide estimated costs with explanations for the pricing.
The user can adjust, based on their needs for the trip, such as flight class, number of connections, hotel ratings, and then regenerate the estimated cost. The estimated costs are automatically added to the request as expected expenses. Subsequently, the user can choose to add additional expected expenses if needed or submit the request for approval.
ExpenseIt: We’ve also brought capabilities from ExpenseIt on mobile to the web interface so customers can upload receipt images to ExpenseIt web, where it taps AI to automatically create a new expense with several key fields prepopulated.
Expense itemizations for hotel folios are cumbersome for end users to manually enter, and inaccurate itemizations can cause returned expense reports and rework. In fact, the median time to complete a report with manual hotel itemizations entries is about 17 minutes longer than an expense report with no manual hotel itemizations.
Using ExpenseIt, hotel itemizations can be processed for the end user in under 30 seconds, saving employee time while increasing accuracy. The recent generative AI update to the traditional AI ExpenseIt models increases the accuracy of hotel itemizations by 30% (as measured by 100% accurate itemizations) in pre-production testing.
Learn more about travel and expense with SAP Business AI.
Get started with the Concur Expense and Concur Request product documentation pages.
SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP)
Document Information Extraction, premium edition
The existing Document Information Extraction service on SAP BTP has been supercharged with generative AI capabilities, introducing Document Information Extraction, premium edition.
Businesses can now process documents intelligently across their entire business, with:
- The automatic extraction of unstructured data by simply describing the required fields that you need, and watching the solution do the heavy lifting for nearly every document type.
- The multilingual support for over 40 languages, catering to global businesses with diverse document types.
With neither manual annotation nor resource-intensive machine learning training required, business document processing use cases can now be onboarded in days instead of weeks or months, reducing the time-to-value drastically.
Learn more on the SAP Discovery Center.
Get started with this tutorial.
Generative AI Hub in SAP AI Core and SAP AI Launchpad
SAP developers can expedite their generative AI development of SAP BTP applications in a secure and trusted way with the new Generative AI hub. This new capability gives streamlined access to a broad range of large language models (LLMs) from different providers (such as GPT-4 by Azure OpenAI or OpenSource Falcon-40b), facilitated in a more secure, harmonized, and orchestrated manner; thereby boosting efficiency and productivity.
Developers can orchestrate multiple models, whether programmatically via SAP AI Core or via the playground within SAP AI Launchpad, and ensure high-quality output by choosing the large language model that best aligns with their unique use case. They can leverage all features while relying on a data privacy policy and robust measures, ensuring secure and trusted operations.
Each generative AI model yields unique qualities and strengths. To meet customers’ needs for their business, SAP has made a strategic move to provide enterprise-grade access to the most common models through its generative AI hub as part of SAP AI Core. This includes leading cloud vendors as well as SAP-managed third-party models deployed on SAP’s own infrastructure for highest compliance standards.
All available and upcoming generative AI-powered capabilities from SAP are running on the generative AI hub.
Learn more on the SAP Discovery Center.
Get started with this tutorial.
See why the generative AI hub plays a core role in how SAP's generative AI architecture redefines business applications.
Just ask feature in SAP Analytics Cloud
Just ask is a natural language query interface available in SAP Analytics Cloud used to retrieve data that applies generative AI to search-driven analytics. Users can quickly access trusted insights in their preferred language regardless of expertise, helping to increase data literacy and analytics adoption for more fact-based decision-making.
By providing knowledge workers with self-service access to timely analytics, companies can improve their productivity by up to 5%. Instead of spending hours searching for data, they can focus on more strategic tasks that move their business forward.
Jusk ask users can search data easily and efficiently using business terms they are familiar with, by simply asking questions using natural language. Just ask will instantly provide answers as simple charts and tables. Working with data from acquired models or SAP Datasphere, users can query just ask to get quick answers to questions and incorporate the results into a story, export to CSV or Excel files, or for further exploration using the Data Analyzer tool.
Learn more on the product page.
Get started with the product documentation.
SAP Build Code
SAP Build Code, our generative AI-based code development solution, is now generally available.
With its integration of Joule, optimized for Java and JavaScript application development, it provides a turn-key environment for coding, testing, integrations, and application lifecycle management.
Developers can use generative AI to generate code and app logic aligned with SAP-centric programming models from natural language descriptions, create data models and sample data conforming to apps with the help of Joule, and produce rapid unit tests with AI for existing code to increase quality and precision.
The solution is also tailored for SAP development and secure collaboration across SAP Build low-code solutions and ABAP Cloud. It provides rapid extensibility of SAP S/4HANA and other SAP as well as non-SAP systems. It prebuilds integrations, APIs, and business services via the service center. Furthermore, it ensures proven security from SAP BTP for authentication, authorization, and SAP data protection.
With up to 30% faster application development and up to 30% improvement in application development cost, this is a game-changer for your enterprise. Say goodbye to the days of spending endless hours on code development and maintenance. Say hello to a more efficient and productive future with SAP Build Code.
Take the product tour to experience the next generation of application development.
Get started with the product documentation.
SAP HANA Cloud vector engine
SAP HANA Cloud vector engine can natively store and search vector embeddings, which are numerical representations of objects, along with business data as part of its industry-leading multi-model processing capabilities to power intelligent data applications.
With these vector capabilities, SAP HANA Cloud will enable Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), facilitating the combination of LLMs with private business data. These applications learn and adapt to new information, enabling automated decision-making.
Key benefits of the SAP HANA Cloud vector engine include:
- Multi-model: Users can unify all types of data into a single database to build innovative applications using an efficient data architecture and in-memory performance. By adding vector storage and processing to the same database already storing relational, graph, spatial, and even JSON data, application developers can create next-generation solutions that interact more naturally with the user.
- Enhanced search and analysis: Businesses can now apply semantic and similarity search to business processes using documents like contracts, design specifications, and even service call notes.
- Personalized recommendations: Users can benefit from an improved overall experience with more accurate and personalized suggestions.
- Optimized large language models: The output of LLMs is augmented with more effective and contextual data.
Register to the Early Adopter Care program.
Watch the introductory webinar.
Get started with the product documentation.
Succeed Now with SAP Business AI
AI plays a pivotal role in SAP’s commitment to enable every organization to become a network of intelligent and sustainable enterprises.
With a focus on ethical and responsible AI, we are not only driving efficiency and productivity, but also ensuring that AI is used for the betterment of society. Our uniquely holistic perspective on the demands of global businesses continues to inspire us as we define the future of business AI.
Accelerate your SAP Business AI journey today:
- Visit SAP.com/AI and our AI SAP Community page for all SAP Business AI updates and announcements.
- Explore the SAP Roadmap Explorer for a detailed view of upcoming product innovations.
- SAP Managed Tags:
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