What is the added value of SAP AI Core?
- Gain peace of mind with SAP managed deployments
With SAP AI Core, customers gain peace of mind as they benefit from a complete service that packages all dependencies and hides the complexity of building your own training and serving productive environment. Instead, SAP AI Core exposes simple API endpoints to embed AI into your business applications.
- Quickly embed AI in SAP applications and business processes
Customers can take advantage of the standardized integration into SAP applications to quickly build and integrate their AI use cases into their business applications.
- Strike the right balance between costs and performance
On the one hand, customers benefit from accelerated performance with GPU support to run their most resource-hungry use cases at scale. On the other hand, customers run efficiently while keeping control of their costs by leveraging built-in autoscaling and scale-to-zero as well as by choosing from a broad range of storage, CPU, and GPU service plans.
SAP AI Core uses Kubernetes clusters which provide proven features for running container-based applications for training and serving AI models. Such a cluster can provide different resources according to the current requirements. E.g., GPU nodes for heavy duty AI models or running complex ML AI pipelines that require different resources per step. The Kubernetes infrastructure is very fast and flexible (scale up / down the containers which run the AI code).
- Model once and serve multiple customers
Customers benefit from simplified training and inferencing with reusable templates and can deliver model templates for their customers or internal teams, to train the model on their own data.
To realize those added values, SAP AI Core and SAP AI Launchpad offer enterprise-grade features to productize and operate your AI models. The main capabilities that SAP AI Core provides are the orchestration of AI workflows, such as model trainings and batch inference, as well as serving model inference, so that models can make predictions.
To ease the shipment of new AI scenarios, the service offers continuous delivery capabilities and ensures tenant isolation with multi-tenancy. To safeguard your costs and to scale on demand, you only pay for the resources you used but can tap into scalability and increased performance powered by GPUs.
All of the functionality comes out of the box and is managed for you while retaining openness to any AI framework so that you can ship your AI scenario easily.
To connect to your business applications as well as to operate your AI scenarios in AI Launchpad, SAP AI Core provides the standardized AI interface, AI API, which provides a common framework for consuming and operating your AI scenarios.
During development your AI scenarios, you are supported with development tooling, such as the SAP AI Core SDK, and full flexibility in the choice of storage for your data and models.
The process of building a new AI scenario on SAP AI Core involves the following steps: an initial configuration, the model training, and the inferencing. Below is the end-to-end ML Workflow in SAP AI Core, which shows the various sub-steps in each of these steps. Later on, we will start with the onboarding and initial configuration of your instance of SAP AI Core and SAP AI Launchpad.
