ERP software provider SAP has partnered with IBM on Tuesday to bring IBM’s Watson artificial intelligence (AI) engine across its portfolio of solutions, including SAP S/4 HANA, S/4 HANA Cloud, SAP Business One and SAP Business ByDesign. announced to inject .
The move is expected to help SAP leverage Watson AI’s natural language processing (NLP) capabilities along with predictive insights to boost enterprise productivity, especially across the retail, manufacturing and utilities sectors. It aims to accelerate innovation. The two companies said in a joint statement.
IBM Watson’s capabilities will be integrated into the digital assistant within SAP Start, according to the companies. SAP Start is a service that runs on every computer where an instance of the SAP system is started.
SAP Start monitors the runtime state of all SAP systems, processes and instances, reading logs, traces and configuration files among other threads.
“SAP Start enables users to find, launch and interact with apps delivered by SAP and SAP S/4HANA Cloud cloud solutions,” the companies said.
Assistants within SAP Start can also be used to run machine learning and AI to extract information from various data sources and answer business queries, the companies added.
According to Juergen Butsmann, head of intelligent technology in solution management for S/4 HANA, SAP typically uses the term digital assistant to refer collectively to all digital assistants and chatbots in its portfolio. , defines
“Digital Assistant is an end-user ‘support center’ for ad-hoc tasks, help, FAQs, or other out-of-context inquiries. Every time a user requests a task or service (via commands, chat questions, or even voice commands), a digital assistant/chatbot communicates and interprets the user’s request and efficiently executes it within the system. , can respond quickly. ’” Butzman wrote in a blog post.
IBM Watson integration for backend automation
Integrating IBM’s Watson AI into SAP’s portfolio will not only help automate back-end tasks, but also help spark business insights, said Bradley Shimmin, chief analyst for AI platforms at Omdia Research. said.
“We believe this integration will help SAP customers create natural language assistants that can perform programmatic actions in their back-end services. As a company, we can maximize the value that SAP provides.”
According to the Chief Analyst, another Watson integration value proposition is the ability to surface enterprise knowledge across large and disparate data sets.
“Empirically, when these two capabilities come together, SAP users can uncover valuable business insights and take action,” says Shimmin.
Is SAP’s digital assistant mature enough for NLP?
Simin said SAP has invested in its own research into AI and AI capabilities, but the reason for using IBM’s Watson to power the service is SAP’s lack of maturity in natural language understanding capabilities.
“Like IBM, SAP has certainly invested heavily in its own AI research. rice field. “It is in these areas that IBM has created value, and the value that SAP perceives is that using SAP Start will help them reach their goals faster than if they developed the same technology in-house.” I definitely feel that.”
Simin says SAP’s approach was an effective strategy given the demand for AI capabilities in the market and the rapid evolution of technology. “Not every big software player needs to build their own ChatGPT or Bard to succeed in the tech market. I think companies will surely fall behind their sensible competitors who cooperate when it makes the most sense to cooperate.”
IBM and SAP Collaborate on Large Language Models and Generative AI
The partnership between Watson and SAP is the result of many years of cooperation between the two companies.
Today, SAP and IBM Consulting support customers with 25 joint intelligent industry solutions that use IBM Watson capabilities underpinned by SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP).
“Over the past decade or so, the two companies have grown in a more complementary fashion. IBM also offers SAP BTP on its own cloud platform that works well with Red Hat Enterprise Linux,” he added. I was.
In addition to embedding Watson into SAP, the companies will also develop large-scale language models and generative AI capabilities aimed at enabling “consistent, continuous learning and automation based on SAP’s mission-critical application suite.” said they are working together on the development of
