What You May Have Missed from SAP Sapphire
The last couple of weeks have seen SAP run its biggest annual global events – SAP Sapphire in Orlando and Madrid. In case you missed any of the major announcements, we’ve pulled them all together into this handy blog. Read on to understand the key announcements and how they could affect your organisation.
What is the big AI news from SAP?
Last year, SAP focused several of its announcements around the launch of its generative AI assistant, Joule. This year, SAP has revamped Joule so it becomes a true copilot that is able to support business users with every task they may meet. To improve Joule’s ability to find data, surface real-time insights and streamline workflows, SAP announced a number of new updates at Sapphire.
The first of these is a new action bar powered by WalkMe. This tool is able to study individual users’ behaviour across different applications to anticipate their needs before they arise. The new action bar also adheres to SAP’s strict ethical AI guidelines, helping to ensure mission-critical data is never at risk.
SAP has also announced a collaboration with Perplexity. This improves Joule’s ability to draw on structured and unstructured data to provide suggested resolutions to complex business problems. As a result of this partnership, Joule will now be able to provide non-textual responses to queries, including charts and graphs.
At Sapphire, SAP unveiled an expanded library of Joule agents. The aim of these agents is to allow organisations to maintain greater business agility by rapidly executing actions in response to queries. The new agents span customer experience, supply chain management, spend management, finance and human capital management. For a more in-depth breakdown of SAP’s AI announcements, give this AI Magazine article a read.
In a final demonstration of its expanded AI capabilities, SAP has introduced an operating system to support developers. This aims to transform how developers at enterprises build, deploy and scale AI solutions. This new OS – called AI Foundation – will create a single entry point to build, run and orchestrate AI solutions at scale. Techzine has published a piece to help developers understand what this means for building SAP applications in the future.
Data that drives smarter decisions
Good data is key for businesses to make good decisions. At Sapphire, SAP launched new intelligent applications in SAP Business Data Cloud. Each of these is built to support a specific line of business and provide greater industry-specific support for SAP organisations.
In this ongoing drive to improve the ways data can be used across organisations, SAP and Palantir announced a partnership to support customers with data harmonisation across multiple sources, helping them to quickly adapt to changes and disruptions. For more in-depth analysis on this partnership, check out this piece in Computer Weekly.
Applications that accelerate cloud adoption
SAP also announced the launch of several new applications to support customers’ shift to Cloud. The first of these is the SAP Business Suite packages. These are designed to simplify the adoption of SAP cloud solutions for organisations. SAP Build is also part of these packages and will help customers customise their business applications, depending on their specific requirements. If you want to understand exactly how SAP is revamping its cloud ERP capabilities, you can read this article on CIO.com.
Still need support?
With a huge amount of news coming from SAP over the last few weeks, there may still be uncertainty over what these announcements mean. If you – or your organisation – requires more clarity on these announcements, get in touch with UKISUG or your user community chair.
For more on Sapphire, listen to UKISUG Chair Conor Riordan’s podcast with Jon Reed from diginomica.