SAP’s Manos Raptopoulos likes to ask a simple question to illustrate the importance of data integrity and accuracy in enterprise AI: “Have you ever tried word counting using a generative AI tool?”
Compared to the actual word count of the text, tools like this today can be 10% off. After improvement, it can go down to 5%.
But when it comes to assigning that level of inaccuracy to EBITDA, said Raptopoulos, who oversees SAP’s Asia, Europe, Middle East and Africa as chief revenue officer and is a member of the company’s expanded board of directors.
“In the business world, differences of this magnitude can impact analyst expectations and impact valuations,” he said. “It’s a nightmare for CFOs to not have a clear way to say, ‘This is my number.'”
Journey from probability theory to determinism
With AI seamlessly integrated into SAP applications and leveraging the world’s most powerful business data, SAP Business Suite is unparalleled in its ability to deeply connect every part of a customer’s business, enabling companies to achieve real business outcomes and end-to-end transformational value.
AI-powered enterprise apps need to balance the deterministic capabilities of machine learning with the more probabilistic methods of generative AI, Raptopoulos said. That’s why he advocates for companies to access as diverse and controlled a pool of data as possible.
SAP customers represent 84% of the global economy. With a presence in more than 180 countries, SAP brings deep compliance and regulatory knowledge across the region. This collective expertise and insight culminates in an unparalleled intersection of applications, data, and AI, each advancing the other, and this convergence positions SAP Business Suite as a game-changer, Raptopoulos said.
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SAP’s approach to data anticipates concerns shared by IT professionals. In their CIO Vision 2025 report, a survey of 600 CIOs across 18 countries and 14 industries, Databricks and MIT found that 72% of respondents consider their companies’ data quality protocols to be “reactive” or simply “aware of,” highlighting the trend of viewing data management as the responsibility of technology partners rather than an internal issue.
AI’s performance and reliability are as good as your data, and SAP’s data depth is unparalleled. Mr. Raptopoulos feels a mission to help organizations drive tangible business outcomes by leveraging SAP Business Data Cloud, which harmonizes data from SAP and non-SAP systems. The unified data is transformed into a centralized, semantically enriched layer to facilitate advanced analytics and AI capabilities.
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“The last mile is very important to get it right,” he said.
Balance data and productivity
Being a few degrees off target is also a condition that aviators at SAP customer Cirque du Soleil Entertainment Group are trying to avoid.
Manual recordkeeping and travel management for 7,000 trips per year was a particular challenge for the global franchise. Cirque du Soleil’s financial managers had to manually create and track approximately 140 cost objects per tour across a slate of 50 individual shows.
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SAP Business Suite has eliminated this complexity and created an integrated data model and intelligent technology to negotiate better rates with suppliers. The finance team reduced the amount of cost objects created for each tour by nearly 80%.
Cirque du Soleil also uses SAP tools to improve data integrity and governance, simplifying materials management and production planning for the vast collection of costumes the company designs and manufactures each year.
Relying on SAP “has cut our workload in half,” says Chantal Perigny, accounts payable manager at Cirque du Soleil. “Data flows easily and transparently through the system, allowing you to focus on control rather than the process itself.”
Create a “virtuous cycle”
For Raptopoulos, this example demonstrates what customers should expect from SAP: the ability to overcome complexity, innovate faster, and achieve sustained success in a rapidly evolving world by integrating applications, data, and AI into one integrated system.
By avoiding black-box models where users don’t know how the model was trained, SAP’s Business Data Cloud creates what Raptopoulos described as a “virtuous cycle.” This is a foundational model for high-quality data that expands and brings more data into the entire ecosystem as customers trust and use their data.
Raptopoulos said this cycle fosters innovation as users feel empowered to experiment with new AI applications to solve problems by more easily gaining insights from vast data sets.
Joule, SAP’s AI copilot, adds value by adding context.
When Joule uses natural language processing capabilities to address customer questions, it’s critical to understand, “Is this a financial question? Is this a supply chain question?” Raptopoulos said. “The nuances can be quite different, and a well-trained generative AI model needs to understand the context instantly in that regard.”
Raptopoulos said these interactions generate insights, save time and money, and generate growth momentum.
“With context and semantics, businesses can access the promise of AI. It’s a virtuous cycle, because they can use it to train more models and create more meaningful applications.”
Learn more about SAP Business Suite features here.
