Identifying Opportunities for SAP Business AI and Joule

The impact that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is expected to have on the global economy of the next few years is tremendous. Morgan Stanley estimate that the impact will be about $4.1 trillion dollars up until 2027. That’s about the size of the GDP of Germany.

SAP tries to help customers to participate in this growth using SAP Business AI.

AI impacts every area of an organization. Some use cases include:

• To automate simple tasks (e.g. answer a customer service request)
• Support users to accomplish a task (e.g. write a performance review)
• Help identify process improvements and optimization to streamline processes
• Mine data and support an analysis for deriving actionable insights

Another term often heard when discussing AI is Generative AI. Generative AI is a type of artificial intelligence technology that can produce various types of content, including text, imagery and audio.

Some available AI scenarios for Procurement include:

• Guided buying
• Sourcing item and supply prediction
• Material group recommendations
• Invoice object recommendations
• Job matching for contingent workforce
• O*NET labeling
• Category Management

In 2023, SAP announced and later delivered the first 14 generative AI scenarios built into SAP applications. SAP's AI copilot, Joule, was also released. It was at first only available in SAP's HR solutions called SAP SuccessFactors, but later became available in many more applications.

SAP also continues to grow and invest in an open ecosystem of AI partnerships to build Business AI on top of the best general-purpose AI platforms in the market, and to make integration of these technologies into SAP applications safe and seamless.

Category management is a systematic approach to analyze spend categories, and plays a pivotal role in driving profitability and building value throughout the entire supply chain. The process plays a key role in driving down costs, increasing process efficiency, and mitigating risk.

However, it’s often a tedious and time-consuming process. Data collection and category research is done manually, strong market knowledge is needed, and stakeholder engagement is required.

A better and faster way is to use Generative AI in SAP Ariba Category Management. It accelerates the category strategy development process across several hundred categories for category segmentation, market dynamics, and cost structures. It provides an intuitive, guided, step by step process, and delivers the insights that are needed to understand market dynamics using Porters 5 forces. It normally takes12 weeks to manually create a strategy for a new purchasing category, but with SAP Ariba Category Management, research on category specific information is available with a single click.

Generative AI functionality with SAP Ariba Category Management were released in Q1 2024, and the fully integrated copilot Joule will be/was available in Q3 2024.

Joule leverages information from the category initiative and uses historic sourcing data, including commodity code, sourcing event type and baseline spend to create the RFP. It also uses Generative AI to recommend suppliers who meet business criteria, like low carbon footprint and cost-saving considerations, while also including suppliers that a company has successfully worked with in the past.

What was once days and weeks’ worth of work, can now be completed in just a few minutes.

All SAP apps are going through BTP to combine the best of both worlds, the best large language model (LLM) for the task at hand and also a company's business data to ground large language models in the realities of their business. Everything in the most secure and data privacy way.

With this, SAP is building out its AI Foundation, and customers can also build their extensions, since every customer might want a slightly different version of the job description, or a slightly different case summary. Customers can build their ideas on the BTP and benefit from the deep integration into SAP's business applications with enterprise readiness.

Joule is SAP's AI copilot that truly understands a customer's business. Joule revolutionizes the interaction of a user with their SAP business systems, making every touch point count and every task simpler.

The aim is for a user to get quick answers and smart insights on-demand, facilitating faster decision making without bottlenecks.

Joule is included in SAP applications out of the box.