AI is everywhere today, but it's hard to understand how businesses can get through the hype and leverage the latest innovations to gain real, measurable competitive advantages.
I tackled this challenge in a conversation with Dan Newman at the Six Five Summit: AI Unleashed 2025, hosted by The Futurum Group and Moor's Insights and Strategies. We talked about the blockers that leaders face when deciding where to apply generative AI to move their business forward, and what SAP business AI is bringing to the market.
As you flow from that conversation, here are four steps you can take.
1. Prioritize your use cases if they are most promising
First, we will focus on areas of business where AI can be used to provide fast, measurable value. Finance, HR, supply chain, and customer experience are things that AI frontrunners often start. When evaluating options, put aside the “proof of concept” idea. Instead, use your and your team's expertise, data, and imagination to develop “proof of value” to find areas where you can unlock more value using automation or AI agents.
Incidentally, the term “proof of value” was first coined by AI frontrunner Philippe Lalumiere, vice president of Cirque du Soleil, in connection with the accounts payable AI agent that his team designed in a partnership with SAP. The key is to identify the outcomes that are most important to your business and choose a use case that will quickly prove your value.
2. Deploy Intelligent Agents to simplify complex tasks
Another practice for AI frontrunners is the use of AI agents that span departments and systems to solve end-to-end problems. Autonomous ability to handle the entire process is one of the differences between AI skills and AI agents. A skill is a single ability, including the ability to write messages, analyze spreadsheets, and trigger actions from that analysis. Agents independently process complex multi-step processes to produce measurable results. We recently announced an extended network of Joule agents to promote autonomous collaboration across systems and business lines. This includes out-of-use agents for HR, finance, supply chains, and other features that allow businesses to deploy quickly and automate critical workflows.
Top AI runners like Ericsson, Team Liquid and Cirque Du Soleil will also create customized agents that can tackle specific opportunities for process improvement. You can now build them in Joule Studio. It can provide a low-coded workspace that helps you design, coordinate and manage custom agents using pre-defined skills, models, and data connections. This gives the power to scale and coordinate your agent network to accurate needs and business contexts.
3. Embed AI into your daily workflow
To truly become an AI front runner, you need to be seamlessly woven into how AI works every day. You also need to make sure it works across the broader technology ecosystem. For these important business needs, we created Joule to become a natural language AI interface built into the SAP system. It also adds a new Joule action bar to further recognize and better integrate context with third-party tools such as ServiceNow and Microsoft Copilot. I don't wait to tell them what I need. Instead, you can actively track your behavior and suggest the following actions useful in context across multiple SAP and non-SAP applications: This helps remove friction, so team members do not need to switch between tools or relearning interfaces.
Another way to become an AI frontrunner is to tackle fragmented tools and solutions by implementing an open, interoperable ecosystem. After all, if you run into blockers when you run into other first-party and third-party solutions, what's the best for innovative AI tools? This is why we recently announced our stump for more stringent integration with Microsoft Copilot and flexible access to key AI models for our partnership with productivity and Mistral AI. These and many other partnerships help teams combine multiple AI capabilities to share reliable data across systems, and drive business outcomes faster without the headache of manual connections.
Ready to lead? Here's how to get started
In the age of AI, I recommend leading rather than following. If you're ready to do that, there are a few ways to get started. First, you will go deeper into these subjects with six five summit conversations. Next, see how other companies are innovating with AI and learn what is possible through SAP Business AI.
Brenda Bown is Chief Marketing Officer at SAP Enterprise AI Business.
