All software developers, including SAP, are looking at ways to incorporate generative AI into their products.
The ERP vendor, which celebrated its 50th anniversary last year, is developing a companion app for its software called SAP Digital Assistant. This app uses generative AI to help SAP users deliver a better experience to their customers.
SAP is also looking to improve its customer experience tools in other ways, including providing industry-specific accelerators to help some companies deploy software faster, and reselling refurbished and returned products. We help online retailers reduce waste by providing supporting tools.
Although SAP Digital Assistant can be accessed through SAP’s Sales, Service, Marketing, and Commerce Cloud products, one of the areas where its generative AI capabilities could be most useful is in customer experience management, where sales staff and contact Assists center agents in responding to customer requests and locating customers. their needs and draft pitches.
But Ritu Bhargava, SAP’s chief product officer for industry and customer experience, says that the detailed information about orders and inventory held by SAP’s enterprise applications can be used, for example, to identify which products to promote to field service engineers. He said it can also identify which services can help optimize repairs.
According to Bhargava, the assistant has little in common with ChatGPT, a generative AI application that defines categories. “This is not a reactive chatbot,” she said. “It’s an in-app contextual prompt.” SAP doesn’t use GPT for its assistants, nor does IBM’s Watson, which it recently announced will use it in all other areas of its business. “This is our own in-house custom-built engine,” she added.
He said SAP Digital Assistant also works as a browser extension and an additional task window for productivity software from Microsoft and Google to assess previous interactions with customers and advise on composing emails. It is said that it will be
Early stage
The app is still in the early stages of development and is expected to enter beta testing in the fourth quarter, but Bhargava said that pilot customers have already participated in creating the app and that SAP will not release the app before the end of the year. He said he hopes a decision can be made.
Some SAP customers are looking to expand their use of AI in the area of customer experience.
For jewelry maker Swarovski, it’s important that AI matches the luxury experience customers expect, CIO Lee Sonderegger said at a recent roundtable event. The company is already using it to recommend products on its e-commerce site and is considering using it to generate marketing his messages as well. But such processes are never fully automated. “We use AI for important decisions, but humans should have the final say,” she said.
Another speaker at the same event also demonstrated the application of generative AI in recommendation and marketing. Julia Groza, Levi Strauss’ vice president of e-commerce technology, evaluates the technology, especially to assess the risks associated with it.
Generative AI tools based on large language models like GPT3 create privacy issues for companies and introduce or perpetuate bias due to the large amount of data about past interactions needed to train and refine large language models. Concerns about the possibility remain.
Bhargava said SAP aims to be transparent about how the assistant app makes its recommendations, showing users what documents they used to make their recommendations, excluding some and giving more weight to others. It is said that it is possible to do so.
But as far as fine-tuning the model’s behavior, the company and its data aren’t involved in training the AI model itself, he said.
SAP trains models using a combination of open source and customer data in a multi-tenant environment, but each customer’s data is processed independently and customer-specific insights are cross-pollinated across tenants It is not. said the representative.
Increased profitability
Later this year, SAP plans to offer another new tool to help retailers sell unwanted products. These may be slow-selling items, items nearing their expiration date, or items that have been returned. You can also identify underperforming products that can be promoted and track returned products to encourage resale and prevent overproduction of unpopular products.
“It’s not just about what we do with the returned goods,” Bhargava said. “Ideally, you also don’t want to be returned.”
He said SAP Recommerce will be generally available in the fourth quarter. The company has yet to decide whether to charge for this feature or integrate it into his existing SAP Commerce Cloud product.
Accelerate deployment
SAP has selected four industries that benefit from rapid deployment and integration of customer experience tools: consumer products, retail, automotive, and utilities. For these industries, SAP provides out-of-the-box integrations with common tools and industry-specific data models for predicting customer behavior. For example, in retail, these models could help companies calculate lifetime value scores and focus on their best customers.
Since retail is a broad category, SAP will first focus on two sub-categories where the company has a large installed base and strong demand for its products: grocery and high fashion, Bhargava said. .
