Building Custom SAP Business AI Solutions

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.

As we saw earlier in this journey (Unit 1), implementing AI can be complex and costly. Building on LLMs or open-source models can be a good start, but scaling up can be challenging. Transitioning to a hyperscaler can help, but may still require dealing with integration and security complexities. SAP BTP offers a robust foundation, solving many of these challenges.

SAP BTP is uniquely positioned to give you a competitive advantage by bringing in SAP and non-SAP data to power your AI solutions. The key business AI patterns that we are supporting RISE customers with include:

1. Digital Assistants with SAP—We help customers explore the value of SAP’s Business AI and the various ways in which Joule, its extensions, SAP BTP AI capabilities, and Business Agents can enhance human experience and increase productivity while integrating into their end-to-end enterprise landscapes.
2. Enterprise Automation – Explore with SAP BTP how we help SAP customers utilize SAP Build, Signavio, AI, and generative AI to automate and transform business processes, to drive efficiency and innovation across their operations.
3. Insight Apps, Data for AI – Bring data from SAP and non-SAP application with SAP BTP components (such as Datasphere, HANA Cloud, SAC) to develop AI powered data applications, leveraging modern SAP development practices and SAP’s robust data foundation.

You might ask how is that possible? Because SAP BTP has everything you need. It’s not just about AI – it’s about which platform you can invest to take advantage of AI. If you were building things out yourself - what would you need? You’ll need a platform where your data, analytics, apps, extensions and automation projects worked and collected the business context and logic. Ideally the same platform gives you access to AI, AI tools and services that integrate with daily use application, tools set to effectively utilize the models consistently safely - take AI use cases to be able to embed or call them

• SAP BTP is vertically optimized for business applications and holistically integrated across existing enterprise workflows. When you choose SAP BTP as your core platform for building with AI, you can
• Increase ROI from your existing SAP BTP investment,
• Choose Flexibility by choosing the right LLM for specific use cases,
• Reduce the complexity of your landscape by leaning into the data gravity of your business applications connected by SAP BTP,
• Enhance security by gaining visibility and control over your AI usage, and
• Leverage AI sustainably without managing the sprawl of AI-specific software.

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’s offerings, you also find the generative AI Hub, enhancing our platform's capabilities further.

Generative AI hub covers the AI Lifecycle efforts end to end and enables customers to develop, deploy, and manage custom-built AI solutions and AI-powered extensions of SAP applications

• Access

  Enabling access to frontier AI models, out-of-the-box selection of compute resources, orchestration modules i.e., Content filter, data masking etc.

• Exploration & Development

  Support for developer to build by providing a comprehensive toolset for building of custom AI solutions and model exploration, including a prompt editor, prompt management, prompt registry, libraries, SDKs, and a fine-tuning service

• Deployment & delivery

  Software deployment includes all of the steps, processes, and activities that are required to make a software system or update available to its intended users. Today, most IT organizations and software developers deploy software updates, patches and new applications with a combination of manual and automated processes support for Bring Your Own Model (BYOM) allocation of compute resources

• Orchestration

  AI orchestration refers to the process of coordinating and managing the deployment, integration, and interaction of various AI components within a system or workflow. This includes orchestrating the execution of multiple AI models, managing data flow, and optimizing the utilization of computational resources. AI orchestration aims to streamline and automate the end-to-end life cycle of AI applications. It ensures the efficient collaboration of different AI models, services, and infrastructure components, leading to improved overall performance, scalability, and responsiveness of AI systems.

• Governance
  • Logs for tracking and auditing purposes, metering, monitoring, Multi-tenancy, CaaS Flow, Roles & responsibilities
  • Implementing policies and procedures to manage the development, deployment, and operation of AI systems in compliance with regulatory and organizational standards.
• Trust & Security
  • No automatic saving of prompts, data etc., data masking, content filtering (prompt injection, jailbreak), "unsafe" models
  • Soc2, NIST, ISO, etc.
  • Ensuring data privacy, data isolation, and robust security measures to protect AI systems and their data

The generative AI hub is unique in four major ways: ​

1. Versatility in model access: SAP is unique in providing customers the ability to seamlessly switch between all leading frontier models, accessing the innovations of all three major hyperscalers.
2. Extension of embedded AI: Customers can expand upon the embedded generative AI cases provided, tailoring solutions to specific business needs.
3. Custom application development: The generative AI Hub allows you to develop custom generative AI applications, utilizing deep integration into SAP’s business processes for enhanced operational efficiency.
4. Secure and deep data access: Generative AI Hub offers customers deep and secure data access with HANA Cloud, Datasphere and our semantic model.

AI Foundation continues to evolve, and we are excited to announce the addition of 40 new capabilities to our AI foundation. We are bringing the best models from Amazon Bedrock, Google’s Gemini model family and Azure OpenAI to our customers, which now gives us a total of 22 of the best LLMs in the world on SAP BTP, and it makes SAP BTP the only platform where you can access all frontier and open-source models from a single place, fully integrated with your SAP landscape, so that you can stay fully flexible and competitive with the latest developments.

SAP Build with RISE offers a comprehensive platform for rapidly building and extending applications. Here's a breakdown of its key advantages:

• Licensing: You're already licensed! Start building today with no additional cost for licenses or connectivity.
• Seamless Integration: Out-of-the-box, secure, and reliable integration with your SAP S/4HANA Cloud environment ensures a smooth and consistent experience.
• Development Tools: Leverage comprehensive app development and automation tools that cater to both pro-code and low-code development styles, empowering a wider range of users.
• Content Library: Access the largest library of pre-built SAP content based on common industry use cases.

You need a subscription for Integration Suite Premium Edition to access AI features in Integration Suite.

In order to kickstart Custom AI solution developments with SAP BTP – the SAP BTP generative AI Starter Kit can be used.