AI in Action: Tangible Benefits for SAP Users with Neptune DXP’s Naia

In the first part of our interview with Helder Goncalves, Chief Product Officer at Neptune Software, we learned of the company’s strategic approach to combining low-code/no-code (LCNC) with AI, grounded in its unique focus on the SAP ecosystem. In the concluding part of this series, Goncalves highlights how these capabilities translate into concrete benefits and use cases for SAP users leveraging Neptune’s capabilities.

Empowering Business Users

The promise of AI integrated into an LCNC platform is significant. It means faster development cycles, empowered business users, and accelerated transformation initiatives. Goncalves highlights the platform’s ability to support all phases of an SAP journey. “The opportunity for the SAP-run enterprise is to make its own decisions at its own time, leverage on your existing investments in people and in processes without compromising past, current and future decisions on SAP strategy,” he explains. Neptune allows customers to keep their options open while continuously evolving their capabilities.

One of the most tangible outcomes of Neptune’s AI integration is seen in their Naia capabilities, particularly for developers. Naia for developers significantly streamlines the process of creating SAP Fiori applications. “Our data shows that the customer journey of going from idea to app is now reduced from a few hours to a few minutes with Naia,” Goncalves states.

This acceleration is achieved by automating much of the knowledge and effort traditionally required for designing, building, testing, and deploying Fiori apps. It’s so effective that, according to Goncalves, “Fundamentally you don’t need to be a developer anymore.” The focus shifts to getting the app running quickly and correctly against SAP data, ensuring it is well-governed, tested, and fit for purpose from the start.

Neptune is also expanding its AI capabilities beyond individual tasks with Naia Projects. This goal-oriented agentic assistance automates and sequences tasks across different tools, minimizing the steps and knowledge required to build robust, enterprise-ready solutions.

Governing AI

Business users need intelligent agents that understand their work, data, and processes, capable of interacting with their systems of record. Neptune provides tools and frameworks to extend the launchpad with AI-powered interface assistants. “These assistants act as an abstraction layer, orchestrating different AI models and services through a model gateway, ensuring flexibility while maintaining governance,” Goncalves states.

He adds: “With Naia for Business, Neptune will dramatically accelerate adoption of AI in the enterprise both for processes and data that provide a measurable added value while combining with more LCNC capabilities to simplify the way people work.”

However, a key challenge with AI, particularly generative AI, can be the lack of understanding and governance over generated code, leading to “Vibe Coding.” Neptune addresses this by tightly integrating AI within its LCNC platform, ensuring full observability and governance. “Neptune Enterprise AI connects and automates previously siloed data and processes by designing, implementing and operationalizing AI agents with AI application development capabilities,” Goncalves explains. “This combination boosts value and mitigates risks.”

Future Strategy

Responsible AI is paramount, and Neptune incorporates features like guardrails to protect investments, brand, and reputation while leveraging novel technologies.

Looking ahead, AI will continue to play a central role, but Goncalves is clear: “AI is much more than a hygiene factor. It will take a central role in this space. However, the low-code/no-code space is and will continue to be much more than AI.”

He concludes: “Neptune’s vision remains focused on its core strength—catering to the SAP market better than anyone—while expanding its capabilities beyond SAP systems, augmenting both human and non-human engineers.”

What This Means for SAPinsiders

Accelerated SAP application development is a reality even for non-developers. Neptune’s AI capabilities, particularly Naia for developers and Naia Projects, are dramatically speeding up the creation of SAP Fiori applications. It results in a low-code application, that creates a perfect and natural handshake between the AI and the low code. Neptune’s data shows a reduction in the journey from idea to app from hours to minutes with Naia Projects. This directly addresses a major challenge for SAP users – the need to rapidly build and deploy modern applications on top of their core systems, which, according to SAPinsider research, is a key driver to overcome developer capacity limitations and accelerate digital transformation initiatives.

AI integration is reliable for business-critical SAP processes. A significant concern for SAP users adopting new technologies, especially AI and LCNC, is ensuring governance, security, and reliable integration with their core SAP data and processes. Neptune addresses the risk of “Vibe Coding” by ensuring observability and control over AI-generated code and offers an orchestration layer for managing different AI resources. This is crucial for SAP users who require enterprise-grade solutions that protect their investment, brand, and reputation when leveraging AI with sensitive SAP data.

Empowering business users and connecting AI directly to SAP data and processes. SAPinsider research indicates that empowering business users is a key goal for LCNC platforms, enabling broader participation in innovation and leveraging the deep process knowledge held outside of IT departments. Beyond accelerating developer tasks, Neptune’s AI extends to empowering business users through “Naia for Business.” This means AI isn’t just a developer tool but can be directly applied to business processes and data within the SAP context, providing measurable added value and simplifying how people work.