Describing SAP AI Foundation

SAP Document AI is a standalone service on SAP Business Technology Platform designed to automate the processing of business documents. It addresses a fundamental challenge in many enterprise processes: critical business data is still contained in unstructured or semi-structured documents such as PDFs, scanned images, or email attachments. Typical examples include supplier invoices in finance, delivery notes in logistics, customer orders in sales, and quality certificates in quality management. Before this information can be processed in SAP systems, it must be extracted and transformed into structured data.

From a technical perspective, SAP Document AI focuses on document understanding as a dedicated capability within end-to-end process automation. Documents are provided to the service via APIs or SAP application interfaces. Channels such as email inboxes, mobile capture, or cloud storage are usually handled by upstream BTP services, which forward documents to SAP Document AI for analysis. Once received, the service applies optical character recognition (OCR) to extract text, classifies the document type, and identifies predefined business-relevant fields using document-specific AI models.

A key aspect of the solution is human-in-the-loop validation. Extracted values can be reviewed and corrected through a user interface. Depending on the scenario and configuration, this feedback can be leveraged to improve extraction quality over time. SAP Document AI itself does not orchestrate business workflows; instead, it provides reliable, structured document data that can be consumed by downstream services or SAP applications for further processing.

Within the SAP landscape, SAP Document AI is typically used where document data must be matched with existing business objects. A common example is delivery note processing: quantities and item references are extracted from an incoming document and matched against existing documents in SAP S/4HANA before follow-up actions are triggered. This approach reduces manual data entry while preserving integration with standard SAP business processes.

SAP AI Core is SAP’s runtime for heavy-load AI. It allows you to train and deploy your AI models cost-efficiently at scale. You benefit from accelerated performance with GPU support while ensuring cost-efficiency by choosing from a broad range of storage, CPU and GPU service plans, as well as by benefiting from built-in autoscaling and scale-to-zero.

Furthermore, you benefit from SAP-managed model deployments that hide the complexity of managing deployments from you and simply expose an API endpoint that you can integrate and consume in your business applications. You can integrate your AI use cases built on SAP AI Core via the unified AI API.

The AI API is not a product but a unified API definition that AI runtimes implement, such as SAP AI Core, and to which consuming applications can connect to. With this unified API definition, you benefit from unified consumption in your business applications and unified operations and management in SAP AI Launchpad.

The SAP AI Foundation provides the technical basis for building and operating AI-driven extensions and solutions on SAP Business Technology Platform.

Within this foundation, the Generative AI Hub acts as the central entry point for working with large language models (LLMs), generative AI capabilities, and model-driven logic.

It abstracts much of the complexity behind modern AI technologies and makes them accessible in a unified and consistent way across SAP BTP.

While the Generative AI Hub is the main interface for developers, it works closely with two underlying components:

• SAP AI Core – the scalable runtime for AI workloads
• SAP AI Launchpad – the central application to manage and monitor AI scenarios
• AI API – the unified API definition connecting consuming applications to AI runtimes

Together, these elements form the technical environment in which generative AI can be explored, integrated, and brought into production on SAP BTP.

SAP offers multiple services or applications in which AI is already included; SAP AI Business Services for example. Using those services in your company enables you to transform your manual working steps into automated business processing.