Dive Brief:
- SAP infused generative AI capabilities across its suite of cloud-based business solutions in an ongoing effort to spur ERP migrations, the company announced Tuesday at its annual Sapphire showcase.
- The ERP giant will deploy the Joule assistant throughout its portfolio, adding the tool to SAP Ariba and SAP Analytics Cloud solutions by the end of the year. Joule is being trained on SAP consulting assets to assist ERP implementations.
- SAP will also integrate Joule with Microsoft Copilot for 365 and Google Cloud’s Gemini AI assistant and its Cortex Foundation data cloud. In addition, SAP will expand its large language model menu through an integration with AWS’ Amazon Bedrock managed service, the company said in a separate announcement.
Dive Insight:
Enterprises rely on ERP systems to keep the core business running. SAP is leaning on generative AI enthusiasm to drive customers to its cloud-based SaaS solutions.
The company began a multibillion-dollar transformation journey in January aiming to accelerate ERP migrations and deploy business-focused AI solutions in cloud.
In the first half of the year, SAP partnered with IBM to develop industry-specific use cases and with Nvidia to deploy LLM-based ERP automation capabilities, human resource and customer support assistants and digital transformation tools.
SAP will further leverage Nvidia hardware to run Joule’s coding tools and use the chipmaker’s foundation models to build the ERP modernization migration consulting assistant.
Pre-built LLM solutions are only part of SAP’s AI strategy. The company is also amassing a library of third-party foundation models through its AWS partnership and the addition of Mistral AI LLMs to the SAP AI Core repository.
But Joule remains the centerpiece of SAP’s ERP solution portfolio.
“Joule will become our new front end, our new UX,” SAP CEO Christian Klein said during the keynote Tuesday.
The company analyzed cloud software usage by over 300 million customers to build Joule’s capabilities and the assistant will manage 80% of the most common tasks by the end of the year, Klein said.
Joule’s functionalities will extend to order management, billing and financial compliance reviews and the assistant will be tuned to provide human resource, supply chain and sustainability insights, according to Klein.
The Copilot for 365 integration adds 50 use cases to Joule’s capabilities and Klein said SAP and Microsoft plan to double that number by the end of the year.
