Leverage AI in Your SAP Landscape: A Practical Guide

You've recently migrated to S/4HANA and embraced the power of SAP BTP and one or more cloud applications from SAP, such as Ariba, SuccessFactors, etc. Now, you're eager to integrate AI within your business processes but unsure where to begin. This article will help you get started.

The path towards AI integration depends heavily on your specific business needs and desired capabilities. They fall under one of the following scenarios:

Scenario 1: AI Integration within Core SAP Processes

Objective: Introduce AI capabilities with minimal disruption and effort within your core SAP business processes.

Solution: SAP Business AI - Leverage pre-built models trained on industry and company data.

These pre-built models, trained on industry and company data, integrate seamlessly within your existing SAP landscape. They leverage SAP's proprietary foundation models, designed specifically for business context and structured business data. A high-level overview of the steps involved is given below:

Here are some examples of how SAP Business AI can enhance your operations:

• Finance: Automate invoice matching with SAP cash application.
• Procurement: Source smarter with supplier recommendations based on past events and suggest relevant questions to ask suppliers.
• Learning & Development: Personalize employee growth with intelligent recommendations for learning, roles, projects, and connections.

Pros

• Ready-to-use models: No need for model building; leverage SAP's expertise.
• Context-aware intelligence: Models understand your business language and data.
• Effortless access: Use these capabilities directly within your familiar SAP applications.

Drawbacks: Only limited scenarios are available within SAP core business processes.

Scenario 2: Extending your reach with Pre-trained AI

Objective: Introduce AI capabilities across various applications within your landscape with ease of integration and minimal model building.

Solution: SAP AI Business Services - Utilize pre-trained models as reusable services via APIs.

These pre-trained models on business-relevant data act as reusable services that can be easily integrated using APIs to extend the functionalities of your applications. Unlike SAP Business AI, these services are not specific to a single application but address broader business challenges across various processes. A high-level overview of the steps involved is given below:

For instance, the Data Attribute Recommendation service helps you classify, compare, and recommend data entities (like product or user data) across multiple classes, enriching your data and improving its usability.

Pros:

• Ease of integration: Leverage APIs for seamless integration into your existing applications.
• Reusable services: Solve common problems across different business processes.
• Enhanced functionality: Drive better customer service, optimize operations, improve employee satisfaction, and reimagine processes.

Drawbacks: Limited pre-trained models made available by SAP

Scenario 3: Build and Manage Custom AI Models

Objective: Build, train, deploy, and manage your AI models at scale.

Solution: SAP AI Foundation - SAP's all-in-one AI toolkit that offers developers ready-to-use and customizable AI models.

AI Foundation is also the basis for AI capabilities that SAP embeds across its portfolio.

SAP AI Core allows users to deploy and integrate their AI models designed for SAP applications cost-efficiently and at scale while preserving privacy and compliance.

SAP AI Launchpad provides users with transparent AI model management capabilities. It enables them to connect to multiple AI runtimes, including SAP AI Core, and centralize AI lifecycle management with a convenient user interface for their AI scenarios. Users can continuously monitor model performance statistics and retrain models as needed.

A high-level overview of the steps involved is given below:

Pros:

• Ready-to-use and customizable AI components: Build upon existing foundation models or create unique models.
• Grounding in business data: Leverage your data to tailor AI solutions to your needs.
• Scalability and efficiency: Train, deploy, and manage models at scale while ensuring data privacy.

Drawback: Requires development expertise and resources.

Scenario 4: Generative AI

Objective: Fast-track generative AI development for diverse use cases.

Solution: Utilize the Generative AI hub within AI Foundation, gaining access to a range of large language models (LLMs) for prompt engineering and experimentation.

The generative AI hub provides tooling for prompt engineering, experimentation, and other capabilities to accelerate the development of your SAP BTP applications infused with generative AI in a secure and trusted way. AI development teams can submit a prompt to multiple LLMs, compare the generated outcomes to identify the best-suited model for the task and gain greater control and transparency with the built-in prompt history.

SAP leverages the same technical capabilities to embed Gen AI across its business application portfolio. A wide range of use cases, from question answering, text generation, classification, and summarization to code generation, are available across the portfolio and are exploring the potential of emerging paradigms such as large language model agents. Two popular use cases being

• Just Ask feature for SAP Analytics Cloud
• Joule – The copilot that truly understands your business

Finally... Why choose SAP AI?

Unlocking the potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI) within your enterprise landscape requires more than just sophisticated algorithms; it demands solutions tailored to your unique business processes. This is where SAP AI shines.

Process Knowledge Integration: SAP AI models are designed with deep process knowledge, ensuring they're finely tuned to your business context. By leveraging this expertise, SAP AI delivers solutions optimized for your specific industry and operational needs. 

Pre-Trained on Industry Data: SAP AI models come pre-trained on vast repositories of industry-specific data. This pre-existing knowledge allows for faster implementation and more accurate insights, saving valuable time and resources. 

Seamless Data Integration: SAP AI makes integration with your organization's data and context effortless. Unlike other solutions that may require moving data to external platforms, SAP AI operates within your existing SAP landscape, ensuring data security and regulatory compliance.

 By choosing SAP AI, you're not just adopting cutting-edge technology; you're harnessing the power of AI tailored to your business, backed by SAP's decades of experience in enterprise software and deep industry expertise.