Generative AI will soon become a seamless part of the workplace with SAP’s newly announced generative AI copilot called Joule.
Joule will be embedded into SAP applications from human resource to finance, supply chain, procurement and customer experience, as well as into the SAP Business Technology Platform. This will enable employees to ask questions in natural language and receive intelligent answers based on business data across the SAP portfolio and third-party sources to retain context.
A manufacturer, for example, can ask Joule to help it better understand its sales performance. The generative AI copilot will help identify underperforming regions, link to other data sets that reveal a supply chain issue, and automatically connect to the supply chain system to offer potential fixes for the manufacturer’s review.
“Now is a disruptive moment for generative AI due to today’s availability of new technologies for large language models (LLMs), a massive amount of data and computing power. And ChatGPT has set the bar very high in terms of user experience and shown us what is possible with generative AI,” says Thomas Saueressig, member of the Executive Board and head of Product Engineering at SAP, at the company’s Future of Industries event in Walldorf yesterday.
He also believes that generative AI is not just a passing fad. “Major shifts in tech have always brought marginal cost to zero such as what cloud did with storage. With its promises to bring the marginal cost of content creation and generation to zero, generative AI will be trend that is here to stay, [which is also due to fundamental macro-economic drivers. [This is why] SAP will bring AI into the context of the user and business to deliver AI that is relevant, reliable, and responsible for our customers. We’re embedding AI so that it will be naturally available on all our applications and processes as [we believe that in the future], AI will be a normal expectation,” he explains.
Taking the ecosystem approach
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Joule builds on and enhances existing SAP Business AI offerings. More than 26,000 SAP cloud customers have access to SAP Business AI across multiple scenarios and partner solutions.
SAP’s strategy to build an enterprise AI ecosystem of the future also includes direct investments, such as those with Aleph Alpha, Anthropic and Cohere, as well as third-party partnerships including those with Microsoft, Google Cloud and IBM. Sapphire Ventures LLC, a global software venture capital firm, is backed by SAP and is dedicating over US$1 billion to fund AI-powered enterprise technology start-ups.
Partnerships are key in enabling SAP to deliver a flexible architecture for embedded AI, says Dr. Philipp Herzig, head of Cross Product Engineering & Experience, SAP Product Engineering at SAP. This will make tech “disappear” for end users and enable AI to be used by organisations across industries for value creation.
Joule will be available with SAP SuccessFactors solutions and the SAP Start site later this year, and with SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition early next year. SAP Customer Experience and SAP Ariba solutions along with SAP Business Technology Platform will follow thereafter.
