SAP announces new AI solutions and partnerships

SAP has unveiled a host of new generative AI products and partnerships at its annual SAP Sapphire conference in Florida this week.

The company announced plans to expand the scope of its AI copilot named Joule, which is designed to sort and contextualise data from multiple systems to improve decision-making. Joule was first launched in SAP SuccessFactors in September and has now been embedded into the SAP S4/HANA suite of cloud solutions, as well as SAP Build and SAP Integration Suite.

At SAP Sapphire, the company revealed plans to further expand the platform by integrating it with Microsoft Copilot. The bidirectional integration will allow easy access to information from interactions with business applications in SAP and Microsoft 365. Meanwhile, the SAP Business Technology Platform is adding new large language models from AWS, Meta and Mistral AI to make it easier to build generative AI use cases for SAP applications.

The Meta partnership will also involve using Meta Llama 3 to generate scripts that render highly customised analytics applications in SAP Analytics Cloud.

At the event, SAP also announced new AI-focused partnerships with Google Cloud and NVIDIA. The Google Cloud partnership will involve using Business AI to help enterprises better predict and mitigate supply-chain risks to minimise disruptions and maintain optimal inventory level, by integrating Joule and the SAP Integrated Business Planning for Supply Chain solution with Google Cloud’s Gemini AI assistant and the Google Cloud Cortex Framework’s data foundation.

The collaboration with NVIDIA will also extend to using NVIDIA’s GPU-accelerated infrastructure to run, scale and manage SAP’s generative AI model for code generation using SAP’s Advanced Business Application Programming (ABAP) programming language.

SAP also revealed it will adopt the 10 guiding principles of the UNESCO Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence, which aim to ensure AI technologies are developed in ways that respect human rights and contribute to sustainable development.

Finally, SAP announced cloud innovations aimed at helping organisations better measure, manage and execute their sustainability strategies using SAP Sustainability Control Tower and SAP Sustainability Footprint Management solutions.

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