How SAP Ariba Ensures AI Security

AI is a hot topic for everyone in the SAP ecosystem. Each organization now must find out how the benefits and risks of this exciting new emerging technology can affect their workflows going forward.

For procurement teams, the amount of information related to AI can be overwhelming. While the opportunity to infuse AI into sourcing and spend analytics may be exciting, procurement professionals must also take into consideration any IT security risks that come with utilizing AI technology.

Balancing AI Risks and Rewards for Procurement

To evaluate this nuanced topic, SAP Ariba recently hosted a webinar on AI security in the procurement field. In the webinar, Etosha Thurman, Chief Marketing & Solutions Officer, Intelligent Spend and Business Network at SAP, spoke with Jon Longstaff, Head of Cloud Security and Compliance (EMEA) for SAP.

“AI does incredible things, but ultimately it is trained on human behavior. This is what makes it so incredible, but it is also the fundamental risk. As we’ve trained it, we’ve also potentially brought those human behaviors with us – things like bias. We need to make sure we manage those things in an effective way,” said Longstaff.

When speaking with customers, SAP found that cybersecurity concerns were a significant barrier to AI adoption for procurement. Organizations were uneasy about leveraging their data in new and different ways, potentially opening themselves up to security risks. However, Longstaff said that education can help reduce these concerns. As companies found out the specific details of how they could leverage AI, they grew more confident in its safety.

Protecting Procurement Data

Though most of the attack surface that malicious actors could attempt to exploit with SAP’s procurement solutions is already addressed by existing SAP security measures, SAP deploys specific solutions to cover AI. These include threat detection, incident response capabilities, and more. As with most SAP cloud solutions, the AI systems are assessed by external auditors to ensure that these solutions comply with our security policies.

“AI solutions are just another cloud application in many respects. To be clear, there are specific risks around AI solutions and we do need to manage those. Like every other cloud application, there can be vulnerabilities or issues. As long as you understand them and mitigate them, it shouldn’t be a barrier to adoption,” said Longstaff.

When using AI, all of the valuable data that customers need to protect stays within the line of business application, whether that is SAP Ariba, SAP Fieldglass, or anything else. From there, SAP puts controls around that data so that when it is sent to a large language model (LLM), the data is not retained by that model’s provider so it will not be used for training or any other purpose.

Conclusion

Like any emerging technology, the promise and excitement around AI comes with security concerns. Procurement teams may be hesitant to move data into LLMs or use the data in new ways for fear of sacrificing security for efficiency. However, SAP Ariba has implemented specific security features into its AI – building on top of SAP’s existing security features – to keep this data secure. Organizations that are still hesitant to leverage AI for procurement over security concerns should take the time to examine the AI security within SAP Ariba so they can begin to reap the benefits of this new technology.