While artificial intelligence is a key focus at SAP’s user conference, Sapphire, this year, the company has announced that it is also enhancing its Business Technology Platform — application development and automation, data and analytics, integration, and AI capabilities — by adding features to extend its components’ functionality. In many cases, it’s a promise of things to come, rather than actually here, with the availability of many of the features presented coming in the second half of this year, or even next year.
Developer tools
SAP’s clean core strategy is getting a boost with new capabilities in both SAP’s low-code and pro-code development tools.
SAP Build Code, the low-code tool released last November, now uses SAP’s AI copilot, Joule, to help build Fiori front ends to SAP S/4HANA Cloud systems. SAP Build Work Zone provides guided experiences to help developers create step-by-step line-of-business workflows without custom code. And in the second half of this year, developers will be able to access SAP Build directly from SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud Edition, letting them more quickly automate processes, build applications and extensions, and create digital Workspaces.
On the pro-code front, Andreas Welsch, VP and head of AI marketing, said in an interview that SAP is leveraging its partnership with Nvidia to fine tune an LLM model on ABAP code. “Products like S/4HANA for ERP are coded in in ABAP, our proprietary programming language,” he said. “And by fine tuning that that model, we are able to help developers not only generate code, but do code completion, explanations, write unit tests, and we’re planning on integrating this in our Build Code portfolio for professional developers.”
Thanks to that effort, software developers will soon be able to use generative AI to create code in ABAP. Several features are planned; first up is the ability for software developers to create ABAP business objects using generative AI in SAP. It is scheduled for general availability in the second half of this year. Early next year, SAP plans to release Joule capabilities for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition and the SAP BTP ABAP Environment.
SAP Analytics Cloud
In the second half of this year, SAP Analytics Cloud will natively integrate with Microsoft PowerPoint via an upcoming add-in. It will, SAP said, “intuitively connect to an SAP Analytics Cloud tenant and find user-created content in the solution.” That content will include stories in which users communicate business information through a combination of business data and visuals, and widgets, the visual elements such as charts and tables used to tell stories.
SAP Analytics Cloud will also, in the second half of the year, be able to connect to SQL data sources as live connections, eliminating the need to replicate data.
Data Governance
A new feature in SAP Master Data Governance, cloud edition will help businesses organize their legal relationships with customers, vendors and partners into a consistent, easy to manage data hierarchy across all of their applications to reduce redundancy and factual errors. This hierarchy will be replicated across other applications such as SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP Ariba Supplier Lifecycle and Performance, eliminating additional integration work.
Business process modeling
Generative AI is coming to SAP Signavio in the upcoming Process AI from SAP Signavio solutions, a new group of generative AI capabilities whose LLM was trained using expert business processes and more than 5,000 SAP bets practices. The first feature, coming in the second half of this year, will be a process recommender that uses AI to both recommend business process models and recommend measures to assess the process. Also later this year, customers will be able to make natural language requests for insights into processes that will generate charts and metrics.
More than productivity
SAP’s changes to Business Technology Platform are a step in the right direction when it comes to implementing AI, according to Ritu Jyoti, group VP, worldwide AI and automation research at IDC.
“We’ve been telling this for a long time that you need to focus on the ROI,” she said, adding that, at first, “everyone was jumping on productivity. But it’s not just about productivity. There was a customer I was speaking to who had identified 1,000 use cases for productivity. It’s going to become table stakes.”
Now, however, “The focus is definitely on prioritizing the right set of use cases and the connected use cases, end to end business process objective. That is what the customers are now focused on,” she said.
