Positioning of SAP Business AI in Cloud Transformation

Unlock the full potential of your cloud transformation with SAP Business AI, seamlessly integrating AI into your enterprise applications and redefining user experience with our innovative solutions.

One of the most important components of SAP’s Business AI strategy is boosting the cloud transformation journey. When moving from an on-prem landscape to cloud ERP, several things can be supported with AI and generative AI technologies to accelerate your transformation.

Looking at the SAP cleancore principles, we consider all the processes, extensibility, data, and integration operations. There are several tools in the SAP transformation suite that help, such as SAP Signavio, SAP LeanIX, SAP Cloud ALM, SAP BTP, and SAP’s generative AI use cases. These tools have the ability to accelerate your transformation up to 30% time-to-value when you leverage these offerings as part of this transformation.

Later, we will introduce how these processes support transformations. Also, you can activate your Joule co-pilot in the entire customer landscape. This will help you bring a co-pilot experience into your business to unify the experience.

Let’s take a deeper view at what is available with embedded AI use cases and the number available across the SAP cloud suite. There are thousands of embedded generative AI use cases available across Human Capital Management, Spend Management and Business Network, Supply Chain Management, Customer Relationship Management, and other solutions.

View this video that introduces a specific example use case.

When we look at the types of savings you can holistically expect with SAP’s Business AI offerings, there can be large bottom-line benefits; an estimated 1.4% increase in gross profits, and a 3.5% increase in revenue overall. As an example, with a 10 billion euro business, customers could expect 141 million in annual bottom line benefits with an estimated 352 million revenue impact. SAP is heavily investing in additional AI-driven capabilities, so we can expect these numbers to increase substantially in the future.

The SAP embedded use cases provide substantial value, however we also understand that customers may have custom scenarios based on their company goals, industry, and general needs.

You can count on us to unlock the power of Custom AI, with Customer Innovation Services.

We ensure you realize value from Cloud, Data, and AI, with Custom AI Adoption (CAIA) and with differentiated innovations tailored for your unique business needs. We do this by re-imagining business processes with Functional, Industry, and generative AI experts from SAP. We deliver these differentiated innovations with secure software development and support methodologies as standard in SAP Software. Leveraging the power of the SAP BTP, we can focus on a clean core approach, ensuring continuous innovation adoption.

Custom solutions in the AI space can have risks. This is where SAP BTP assists.

A critical element of SAP's AI strategy is the foundation it rests upon. Effective AI is built on a robust data foundation and seamless integration, particularly when it involves customized AI solutions on the SAP BTP.

When considering AI implementation, customers might initially opt for Large Language Models (LLMs), like openAI, or an open-source model like Llama 3. That’s like starting on the first floor that has been built for you. You could potentially add three more stories to your foundation, however this expansion might soon lead to financial concerns from your CFO, due to the escalating investment required. This addition also places significant responsibilities on your team. Some responsibilities include:

• Managing GPU clusters
• Providing for capacity management
• Managing cost controls
• Providing security measures
• Analyzing data privacy

As your AI deployment progresses, considering a transition to a hyperscaler becomes an increasingly practical choice. Hyperscalers effectively mitigate many of the initial challenges, allowing you to begin at an advanced stage—the 5th floor—and continue to expand up to three additional stories before financial constraints become a concern again. You might get an 8-story building in the same amount of time as before. But still, you must deal with many complexities, such as:

• What if I have chosen the wrong model?
• How does that integrate into my SAP landscape?
• Do I need to replicate all the data?
• How do I deal with all the business authorization so that there are no data leaks?
• How will I integrate that with my identity management?

That’s where the value of SAP BTP comes in: SAP has solved all these challenges for you already, because we build our own applications this way, and our amazing suite qualities and integration are a fantastic foundation as well! With SAP BTP, we elevate your capabilities to the 20th floor, enabling the development of a 23-story application within the same timeframe as before.

How is that possible? Because SAP BTP has everything you need. SAP BTP has a great identity management and authorization integration, full master data integration, one domain model, stable APIs for lifecycle management, access to all the metadata and data. And of course, enterprise security and privacy are built in as well. At the core of SAP BTP offerings, you find the generative AI Hub, further enhancing our platform's capabilities.

How can you leverage AI as part of your transformation?

Will it help make the transformation more efficient and effective?

You can leverage AI to assist you in your transformation journey and we have a transformation suite with SAP Signavio, SAP LeanIX, and SAP BTP to help. This combination helps to maintain the five clean core principles that ensure clean processes, extensibility, and data integration operations. Let's see how it works by visiting the Joule story.

You already heard that SAP is putting a lot of attention on Joule.

Besides the embedded capabilities, and our options for custom solutions, there’s only one copilot that truly understands your business - its name is Joule, and it’s here to revolutionize our entire user experience. This is a tremendous opportunity for RISE with SAP customers moving through their transformation journey.

SAP aims to support 80% of the most used interactions with Joule. This means that you can get started right away by gaining access to navigational, informational, transactional, and analytical support from the copilot that understands your business. All together there is a now a more holistic view of the possibilities with embedded AI, custom AI with SAP BTP, and with Joule across the landscape.

SAP is delivering Joule for Consulting capabilities as well as the ABAP developer capabilities. Both solutions will help in our transformation journey. With Joule for Consulting we provide a lot of information for consultants with a quick access, and ABAP developers will provide enhanced coding capabilities for developers.

Let’s use an example, imagining you are the Head of IT, most of the time it's hard to get information about all of the SAP content available. SAP Community data, SAP Help, SAP Learning content, and developer tools are all available resources. Joule for SAP Consulting empowers SAP consultants with direct access to this content for fast detailed learning about systems design and updates, exceeding traditional certification methods.

Joule can also assist ABAP developers. Using Joule with ABAP development we can generate ABAP business objects, complete and explain code, and create unit tests – this all can transform your development process substantially. SAP Build will include access to ABAP development tools and ABAP development environments for SAP S/4HANA Cloud on SAP BTP. Leveraging Joule with ABAP can lead to 30% increase in speed. And all of this in combination brings tremendous value to the transformation story.

But what about process efficiencies? We will see in the next unit this is where SAP LeanIX and SAP Signavio come in.