SAP Brings AI to Everything, Everywhere
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Key Takeaways
⇨ The day 1 Sapphire keynote highlighted SAP's significant focus on AI integration within their Business Suite and the importance of AI agents in streamlining business processes.
⇨ Partnerships with organizations like Accenture and EY aim to simplify SAP migrations while those with Perplexity, Palantir, and Adobe will enhance data integration, providing customers with improved decision-making capabilities by connecting structured SAP data with external data sources.
⇨ SAP continues to prioritize customers' transitions to cloud-based offerings like SAP Business Suite and is working closely with partners to help reduce service costs for enterprise clients.
The keynote on Day 1 of Sapphire focused significantly on AI. From the integration of SAP Business Suite with AI to bringing Joule to everything, everywhere, it focused on AI agents and the role they will play in streamlining financial impact analysis, supply chain management, and workforce strategy. SAP Business Suite was discussed multiple times in the keynote along with SAP Business Data Cloud as a platform for unifying data from across the enterprise. Both will play a central role in SAP’s future plans to bring customers to the cloud.
Multiple announcements focused on simplifying SAP migrations. Enhanced partnerships with accenture and EY will help accelerate that business transformation, while AI agents built into SAP Signavio and SAP LeanIX will help organizations gain a deeper understanding of their SAP systems and will make the move to SAP Business Suite faster and easier. SAP is also streamlining the licensing options for customers moving to SAP Business Suite and making it easier for business units such as finance, HR, and supply chain to adopt the offering.
During the keynote, SAP CEO Christian Klein also introduced new partnerships with Perplexity, Palantir, and Adobe to enhance data integration and intelligence. While Klein did little more than announce the partnerships with Adobe and Palantir, a video with Alex Karp, Palantir’s co-founder and CEO, talked about the company’s ontology for maintaining large language models (LLMs), which can be used to reconcile data with SAP solutions. SAP and Palantir aim to create offerings for their collective clients.
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Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas talked about how the partnership will provide better decision-making for SAP customers by connecting structured SAP data with unstructured web data. This will help enterprise customers make more informed decisions by providing comprehensive, trustworthy answers.
Customers on stage during the keynote included NBC Universal, KIND, and Standard Chartered. Abhinav Gupta of NBC Universal talked about the company’s finance transformation and technology modernization journey. Anand Radhakrishna of KIND shared his experience implementing SAP Cloud ERP and KIND’s two-tier architecture strategy. Additionally, Melinda McKinley and Tom Pfaff of Standard Chartered highlighted the use of SAP’s AI and transformation solutions, including their finance transformation and AI adoption in HR.
Lastly, the keynote emphasized the importance of partnerships in client transformation. Leaders from EY and Accenture appeared on stage during the keynote, but multiple SAP executives talked about how SAP will work more closely with partners in the future. Although not mentioned in the keynote, this will potentially involve SAP partners taking a larger role in engagements with small and medium-sized customers.
What This Means for SAPinsiders
As expected, business AI took center stage during the Sapphire keynote. SAP is expanding the role of Joule across the entire portfolio and will make it available outside SAP solutions later this year. However, Joule is only available in cloud-based applications. Customers with RISE with SAP or GROW with SAP licenses running SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition or SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition are at the start, but Joule is also available in all the applications that make up SAP Business Suite. Still, that leaves tens of thousands of SAP customers without access unless they adopt a cloud-based solution. This should not be unexpected, but it does mean that many customers will need to embark on major transformation projects if they want to reach a point where they can use generative AI in their ERP systems.
All the technology partnerships announced by SAP focused on enhancing or expanding the benefits of their AI offerings. However, SAP is also working more closely with partners to streamline transformations and help customers reduce the frequently high services costs involved in a major transformation project. Customers moving to offerings like SAP Business Suite will be prioritized in this and will be managed on a “first come, first served” basis.
One major announcement on which more information should be forthcoming is that SAP BTP will be available on the marketplace for each of the three main public cloud providers or hyperscalers. This has the potential to make it much easier for SAPinsiders to adopt SAP BTP because they will hopefully be able to leverage the platform as part of existing enterprise agreements that they have with cloud providers rather than having to sign a new BTP Enterprise Agreement. SAPinsider will provide more information once it is available.
