Introducing SAP Business Artificial Intelligence for Professional Services

Artificial intelligence (AI), and above all, generative AI, marks a paradigm shift on how computer systems learn from data, solve complex problems, and even provide creativity when it’s needed. SAP believes that this paradigm shift will fundamentally change work, business, and society. SAP is committed to helping organizations through this transformative moment by creating business outcomes that were unimaginable before through SAP Business AI.

SAP Business AI is deeply embedded in the SAP business processes and analytics, helping change how people interact with business software and making work more efficient and more delightful than ever before.

The following figure summarizes how SAP structures and presents Business AI.

SAP Business AI is deeply embedded in the SAP business processes and analytics, helping change how people interact with business software and making work more efficient and more delightful than ever before.

The following figure summarizes how SAP structures and presents Business AI.

Relevant: SAP Business AI is built in across all SAP applications that customers already use to run their most critical business processes, enhancing their capabilities, and enabling them to learn and improve business outcomes.

Reliable: Business AI is only as good as the data that it runs on. SAP provides the most important business data and an intact business context based on clean core principles and best business practices. SAP Business AI is grounded in the truth of customers’ business and understands its context and real-time information helping ensure that its generative AI produces accurate outputs.

Responsible: SAP is deeply committed to AI ethics in line with its core values. SAP Business AI values human oversight and agency. By designing AI into the SAP applications bias and discrimination concerns are addressed, and transparency and explainability on what the system does and the outcomes it produced are at the forefront of these design principles.

Users interact with SAP applications, including their embedded AI capabilities using Joule, SAP’s AI-powered copilot.

Joule offers an entirely new experience for interacting with SAP applications, enabling users to navigate across applications, find information, execute transactions, collaborate with colleagues, and receive proactive recommendations using natural language commands so that interacting with the business software is intuitive and efficient.

Joule was launched in SAP SuccessFactors and SAP Start in late 2023 and is now embedded into SAP Cloud ERP solutions and others, including SAP Business Technology Platform, SAP Build, and SAP Integration Suite.

AI is already a central, integrated capability of the SAP enterprise applications and business technology. AI-powered capabilities based on deep learning, machine learning, and generative AI are embedded in multiple SAP applications and the catalog of features is steadily growing.

These features include document processing, personalized recommendations, automations, natural language processing, forecasting and predictions, and others infused in:

• Cloud ERP applications – SAP S/4HANA

• Human Capital Management - SAP SuccessFactors

• Spend Management and business network – SAP Concur and Ariba

• Customer Relationship Management – SAP Sales Cloud

• SAP Business Technology Platform

• SAP Signavio

Existing and upcoming AI scenarios span across both SAP S/4HANA Public and Private editions.

SAP provides AI capabilities in a two-tier structure:

• Base AI capabilities are foundational features included in standard subscriptions and are integrated directly into SAP applications such as S/4HANA Cloud, SAP SuccessFactors, etc. An example of an embedded base feature is the automated invoice matching.

  Base capabilities are generally activated with the relevant application and do not require complex setup.

• Premium AI capabilities are more advanced AI use cases designed for more complex, scalable and higher-value scenarios than the base features. They offer wider scope and a more robust feature roadmap. One example of a premium AI feature is the AI-assisted note corrections for project billing.

  Premium use cases may require a more extensive setup compared to embedded AI features.

You can explore the available use cases by visiting the SAP Business AI feature catalog:

AI Foundation, as part of SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) is how SAP infuses AI into their products and enables customers and customers to create AI-powered extensions and applications.

SAP Partners with leading general purpose AI vendors and large language model (LLM) providers to help ensure that customers keep up with innovation.

The Generative AI Hub on SAP AI Core, part of SAP BTP, provide access to these LLMs with security and reliability.

To get the most value in core business areas such as finance, sales, or supply chain, SAP customers require foundation models designed for the business context. SAP fine-tune generic large language models on SAP anonymized data and create proprietary foundation models that are able to address questions of the everyday business that generic large language models cannot such as predicting invoice payment dates and supplier delivery quality or proposing efficiency improvements to business processes.

This way the technology foundation together with the SAP provided Business AI capabilities enable partners and customers to innovate and adapt generative AI to their business context and:

• Build their own AI infused innovative applications.
• Create extensions and add-ons to customize AI to their specific business needs.
• Accelerate cloud transformation value realization maintaining a clean core through AI-powered development tools, and data harmonization through intelligent migration tools.

Professional Services end-to-end value chain benefits from embedded AI capabilities in multiple steps and processes. These capabilities are not necessarily exclusive of Professional Services but belong in Cloud ERP application or line of business applications.

Sell and Plan - Chief Revenue Officer (CRO)

• In the Sell and Plan stage the Chief Revenue Officer benefits from increased proposal win rate. SAP Business AI capabilities include for example AI-assisted case summary, deal intelligence, lead booster, AI-assisted e-mail draft recommender, AI-assisted sales order summary, intelligent customer profile

Set up and Staff – Chief Human Resources Officer (CHRO

• In the Setup and Staff stage, one of the key objectives for the Chief Human Resources Officer would be to increase billable utilization rate. The SAP Business AI capabilities include for example intelligent matching of resources to projects, , AI-assisted interview feedback insights, AI-assisted performance goal creation, AI-assisted SOW description creation, AI-assisted job description enhancement

Deliver and Recognize - Chief Operating Officer

• In the Deliver and Recognize stage, one of the key objectives for the Chief Operating Officer would be to increase % of projects on time, budget and scope. The SAP Business AI capabilities include for example Joule for consultants, Joule for developers Joule for developers for ABAP AI features, AI-assisted process recommender, Joule with SAP Mobile Start, Intelligent Audit, AI-assisted hotel receipt itemization

Bill and Manage - Chief Financial Officer

• In the Bill and Manage stage, one of the key objectives for the Chief Financial Officer is to reduce days sales outstanding. The SAP Business AI capabilities include, for example, automatically matching incoming bank statement items, note correction for project billing, , Payment exception analysis, Posting issue handling for billing documents, AI-assisted commenting and smart predict in SAC

At corporate or enterprise management level, the needs and priorities of the main business stakeholders may be different, but SAP Business AI continue offering them the world class support they need. The following diagram shows some of the currently available SAP Business AI features supporting C-level at the enterprise level.

Enterprise Management- Chief Financial Officer

• In the Enterprise Management stage, one of the key objectives for the Chief Financial Officer is to increase revenue growth and improve operating cash flow. The SAP Business AI capabilities include AI-enabled financials business insights, AI-assisted error resolution in financial closing, , AI-assisted ESG report generation.

Enterprise Management- Chief Procurement Officer

• In the Enterprise Management stage, one of the key objectives for the Chief Procurement Officer is to decrease sourcing costs and increase supplier performance. The SAP Business AI capabilities include intelligent invoice management, supplier invoice file extraction, streamlined T&E expense with smarter insights, matching, enriching, and validating supplier data for accurate reporting, and intelligent auditing to identify T&E errors and compliance issues.

Enterprise Management - Chief Information Officer

• In the Enterprise Management stage, one of the key objectives for the Chief Information Officer is to improve IT project success rates and decrease operational and system complexity. The SAP Business AI capabilities include for example Joule for consultants, Joule for developers, AI-assisted generation of integrations, Document AI, Build and extend Joule Skills and Joule Agents, Vector Engine and Knowledge Graph, AI-assisted process analyzer and also capability to develop, deploy, and manage custom-built AI solutions

Enterprise Management - Chief Human Resources Officers

• In the Enterprise Management stage, the Chief Human Resources Officer’s key objective is to boost employee engagement and retention while enhancing the speed and effectiveness of the hiring process. The SAP Business AI capabilities include HR Policy Q&A by Joule, Person insights for compensation discussions, Performance and goals Agent, Personalized opportunities recommendation, Development goal creation, Career insights and Successor insights, AI-assisted applicant screening, Interview question generation and feedback insights

SAP AI Agents

Role of AI Agents at SAP in the Professional Services Industry

AI agents are AI-based applications that make decisions and perform tasks independently with minimal human oversight. Backed by advanced models, agents can decide a course of action and employ multiple software tools to execute. Their ability to reason, plan, and act lets agents tackle a wide range of situations otherwise impractical or impossible to automate with preconfigured rules and logic.

AI agents at SAP play a crucial role in Professional Services. Here are a few examples.

In the finance domain, the Accounting Accrual Agent helps streamline financial closing processes by automating accrual postings with AI-driven accuracy, reducing manual data entry, and enabling finance teams to focus on strategic, high-value activities.

With the Sourcing Agent, procurement teams can now automate sourcing events using past data and supplier information, enabling real-time updates and faster purchasing decisions. It streamlines RFP creation while providing intelligent recommendations for event duration, questions, and suppliers.

In human capital management, the Performance and Goals Agent equips managers with data driven insights for one-to-one employee meetings by automating data collection, generating personalized talking points, and suggesting actionable next steps like meeting notes and feedback requests—reducing manual prep work while ensuring managers have relevant insights.

Custom AI and Extensibility

The Generative AI Hub, part of AI Foundation, supports the full AI lifecycle, enabling custom AI solutions and SAP application extensions. It provides access to large language models from providers like OpenAI, Google, and AWS, ensuring data security.

Additional Resources

Note

Interested in discovering more about SAP Business AI, feel free to explore these helpful resources:

AI Features: https://discovery-center.cloud.sap/ai-catalog/

SAP Business AI Customer Success Collection: https://learning.sap.com/courses/discovering-sap-business-ai

SAP Roadmap Explorer: SAP Road Map Explorer

For a deeper dive, take the Discovering SAP Business AI course to learn more about it's impact and applications:

SAP Business AI Customer Success Collection: Discovering SAP Business AI