During a keynote address on the first day of its Sapphire conference on Tuesday, SAP executives announced new and expanded partnerships with AI tech leaders including Nvidia, AWS and Microsoft, and detailed plans to expand integration of the company's Joule-generated AI copilot with even more SAP products.
Application software giant SAP is pledging to infuse AI technologies and capabilities across a broad range of its cloud software portfolio, leveraging its own Joule-generated AI Copilot and SAP AI Core products, as well as AI technology and expertise from a number of leading IT vendors and strategic service providers.
On the first day of SAP's Sapphire conference in Orlando, keynote addresses from CEO Christian Klein, other SAP executives and technology partner executives, including NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, focused on plans for an ambitious AI offensive.
“We are entering a new era of AI, with endless possibilities for all of us,” Klein (pictured) said at the start of his keynote. Referring to the impact SAP applications have had on business operations to date, Klein spoke of plans to “embed generative AI in all of our areas.” [software] Stack will once again revolutionize how businesses operate and the future of work for end users.”
[Related: 5 New Google Cloud-SAP Products Launched At Sapphire For AI, HANA And Cloud]
Many of these plans revolve around making SAP's Joule-generated AI copilot, launched in September 2024, a ubiquitous digital assistant. “Joule will be our new front end, our new UX,” said SAP CEO Tom Holland. [user experience]and turn your words into action to become the greatest productivity engine for all SAP end users,” said Klein.
Joule is already built into S/4HANA Cloud software, SAP Build, SAP Integration Suite and the SuccessFactors suite of human resources applications, and by the end of this year, Joule will be added to SAP Ariba procurement applications and SAP Analytics Cloud software, the latter of which will enable the integration of generative AI into more planning and analytics workflows.
Klein said SAP is analyzing what tasks the 300 million users who use SAP applications every day perform, and that by the end of this year, “80 percent of the most commonly used tasks will be managed through Joule.” By leveraging data generated by SAP users, Joule will also act as a “very powerful analytics engine” for reporting across a range of business operations, including finance and human resources, Klein said.
“Joule is ready to use and will be available to all of our cloud customers very soon,” Klein said.
The CEO announced plans to integrate Joule with Microsoft's Copilot for Microsoft 365, saying that the tight two-way integration will empower employees to accomplish more by linking workflows that access data in both SAP and Microsoft 365 applications.
SAP is also accelerating efforts to embed AI capabilities in its software, focusing on specific business processes and workflows: The company currently has more than 50 AI use cases, its CEO said, and aims to double that number by the end of 2024. Ongoing AI development efforts are also focused on tasks performed by specific “personas,” or roles, within an organization, such as the CIO, CFO, HR manager or supply chain manager.
But SAP's AI efforts don't end with its own AI developments: The company on Tuesday announced several new and expanded partnerships with leading companies in the IT industry and major IT service providers that will help expand its AI capabilities.
SAP and chip designer Nvidia have formed a “product-to-product partnership” to help embed AI technology into SAP software. As an example, when SAP adds generative AI to its SAP Intelligent Product Recommendation application, Nvidia Omniverse Cloud APIs will enable the simulation of complex manufactured products and configurations as industrial digital twins. And when SAP incorporates Joule into its ABAP Cloud development model, Nvidia's high-speed infrastructure will run, scale and manage SAP's generative AI models and generate ABAP code.
Nvidia is not only a technology partner, but also a customer of SAP applications. In a live video feed from Taiwan, Nvidia CEO Huang said Nvidia makes some of the most complex systems in the world, and that the Blackwell system is “one of the most complex supply chains in the world” because it's made up of 600,000 parts. And that entire supply chain, all the bills of materials, all the forecasting systems, all the build plans, all of those 600,000 parts, all of about 40 different manufacturers,
[are] It's all managed through SAP,” Huang said.
SAP previously announced an expanded relationship with Amazon Web Services, where the AWS Bedrock Generative AI platform will be integrated with SAP Generative AI Hub, giving SAP customers access to high-performance, large-scale language models (LLMs) and foundational models for building generative AI applications. SAP has also committed to using AWS Graviton3 processors to support HANA Cloud and to train and deploy future SAP Business AI products.
SAP also announced that it has partnered with LLM developer Mistral AI to provide SAP customers access to Mistral's latest LLM through the Generative AI Hub in SAP AI Core, part of the SAP Business Technology Platform. SAP is also integrating Meta Llama 2 and Meta Llama 3 models into the Generative AI Hub.
SAP and Google Cloud also announced an expanded partnership to integrate Joule and SAP Integrated Business Planning for Supply Chain software with Google Cloud's Gemini model AI assistant and Google Cloud Cortex Framework data foundation.
SAP is also working closely with its systems integration and strategic services partners to help customers get the most out of AI.Accenture, No. 1 on the 2024 CRN Solution Provider 500, said in its Sapphire announcement that while in 2023, its clients were primarily experimenting with generative AI, this year, working with SAP, it is expanding those efforts by helping clients combine AI with enterprise data, embed AI capabilities, add business insights to business functions, and accelerate revenue growth using SAP products such as Joule, Generative AI Hub, Datasphere and SAP HANA Cloud vector engine.
Outside of the AI initiative, Klein used his keynote to announce the next steps for the company's Rise with SAP product and service offering to migrate traditional on-premise systems to cloud applications. Klein said SAP will now assign an enterprise architect to every current and future Rise customer to help them with the entire Rise with SAP lifecycle. Currently, there are more than 6,000 Rise with SAP customers, Klein said.
