AI Where It Matters: Stop Toggling and Start Selling with Embedded Intelligence

The buzz around AI is loud, but this noise often obscures the real question. Where can this technology deliver tangible value without adding another layer of complexity? The answer isn’t in a standalone tool or another dashboard to monitor, but embedding intelligence directly inside an organization’s native SAP sales flows where the team already works.

Why Technical Debt Matters

During a recent SAPinsider webinar, Keith Fatula, Vice President of Solution Engineering at DataXstream, noted that for years, legacy customizations in ECC, bolted-on CRM and CPQ solutions, and manual workflows have created data silos and technical debt. In turn, this factor has made modernization a daunting task for many organizations.

“You have a lot of disparate systems, the data’s all over the place,” he explained. This environment makes it nearly impossible to gain real-time visibility or automate workflows effectively.

Thinking of AI Strategically

The solution is a fundamental shift in thinking. According to Fatula, instead of forcing your sales reps to jump between applications, bring the intelligence to them. “AI works best where the work actually happens,” he stated. “When an agentic AI is embedded directly within your order management system, it stops being another tool and becomes a natural co-pilot.”

This approach transforms complex, manual tasks into streamlined, intelligent actions. Take the instance of an AI tool that can read unstructured data from a customer’s PDF, email, or even an architectural blueprint and instantly generate a quote. This is the level of advancement happening now. Fatula illustrated this with a powerful example of a building supplies customer who saw their quoting process shrink dramatically after they began using AI. “[They] reduced quote creation time from many days, potentially even weeks, to as little as five minutes,” he shared.

Empowering People with AI

During the webinar, Fatula noted that by automating mundane tasks like data entry and material matching, organizations free up their sales team to focus on building relationships and selling. “The AI acts as a validator and an accelerator, not a replacement. It’s really there to help design, to augment, not replace that human decision-making,” Fatula emphasized.

Thus, by embedding AI into the core, organizations eliminate friction, preserve SAP’s clean core, and give their team the intelligent tools they need to win without ever leaving their native SAP environment.

What This Means for SAPinsiders

The biggest roadblock to AI adoption is the silos around the SAP core. Many organizations operate with a complex web of legacy customizations, disconnected CRM and CPQ tools, and manual, email-based workflows that create data silos. Standalone AI tools often worsen this problem by creating yet another data silo that requires clunky integration. Therefore, the most impactful change is to adopt an embedded AI strategy. By placing intelligence directly within the native SAP order management flow, organizations eliminate the need for manual handoffs and data transfers. This approach leverages the existing SAP data as the single source of truth, ensuring that AI-driven insights are based on live, accurate information on pricing, inventory, and customer records.

AI transforms manual entry into intelligent validation. A significant portion of the sales cycle is consumed by manual, error-prone tasks like transcribing orders from emails or PDFs into SAP. However, smart automation and document recognition deliver immediate and measurable value. Every AI recommendation can be checked against live SAP data, catching potential errors in pricing, units of measure, or ship-to locations before they become costly downstream problems. This shift from manual entry to AI-assisted validation reduces errors, leading to cleaner data in the SAP system.

Leverage specific AI tools to shrink sales cycles and drive ROI. The key is applying the right tool to the right problem within the existing SAP workflow. Here are some examples:

• Blueprint Scraping: For industries like construction or manufacturing, this is revolutionary. For example, a building supplies company used AI to scan complex architectural blueprints, calculate all the required materials, and generate a complete quote automatically, reducing its quote creation time from days to minutes.
• Conversational AI (Chatbots): Embedding a conversational AI that understands SAP data acts as a co-pilot for the sales team. Reps can instantly ask for a customer’s order history, check inventory levels, or find product information without navigating multiple screens. This accelerates every customer interaction and reduces the time spent on manual data retrieval.
• Intelligent Document Processing: Automating the intake of purchase orders from emails and PDFs is a low-hanging fruit with high impact. A DataXstream customer used this to accelerate order entry and build trust in the system by placing a review block on AI-generated orders, allowing a human in the loop to validate. They quickly found the AI was highly accurate, allowing them to remove the block and fully automate the process.