Generative AI is changing the way how developers work: Juergen Mueller, SAP

At SAP TechEd 2023, held in Bangalore, India, Juergen Mueller, Executive Board Member and Chief Technology Officer, SAP SE, said that we have a huge focus on generative AI. It is built into our solutions. It is based on our past experiences of 8-1/2 years, where we have gained experience with narrow AI. We have already built 130+ AI apps. Our partners have already built 360+ AI-infused apps. We already have over 24,000 customers who are using AI from SAP.

When you think of AI, large-language models (LLMs) are the foundation. You will be needing compute, algorithms, data, and business process know-how. This is where SAP comes in! We can differentiate and help companies with our business AI, and help them become leading companies themselves. To deliver on our vision, we have some incredible announcements for customers and partners.

SAP Build Code

Generative AI is changing the way how developers work. We are announcing SAP Build Code. The context is a clean core. Customers want modifications-free ERP systems. They want to build exingents around those edges. They want to enjoy product innovations that our product teams are building, and want to add their specific exingents to it.

Last year, we launched SAP Build for low-code developers. Now, the SAP Build Code focuses on professional developers. It provides them with AI-powered tools to increase their impact and productivity.

Developers will also be able to create new apps or exingents for SAP using our generative AI assistant, Joule -- to generate code, data models, etc., for new apps. SAP Build Code enables better collaboration among professional developers, citizen developers, and IT departments through deeper interoperability between SAP Build and ABAP cloud.

Vector engine important

Next, we are now propelling SAP HANA Cloud into the generative AI world. We are extending SAP HANA Cloud with the Vector engine. Vector engine is very important from the context of LLMs. The LLMs have a cut-off date.

Vector database can provide more context, such as data about financials, supply chain, quality, logistics, procurement, HR, customer experience, etc. With this announcement, we are getting closer to the holy grail of generative AI. You can combine the strength of large-language models with the actual data from companies.

All of this will significantly enhance developer productivity. There will be better generative AI results with less hallucinations. We are helping developers combine rich, structured data and SAP systems, with unstructured data and LLM capabilities.

SAP BTP with Gen-AI

Third, we are announcing SAP business technology platform (BTP) with new generative AI capabilities. Our AI Foundation is a new one-stop shop for developers to create generative AI-powered exingents on SAP BTP. Generative AI capabilities in SAP BTP will improve developer experience, how integrations are done, process automation space, analytics, and holistic planning activities, and simplify administrative tasks.

AI Foundation includes everything that developers need to start creating AI-ready business apps on BTP. We use this ourselves. It has ready-to-use AI services, such as pre-trained usable models. They can be used for document processing, recommendations, machine translations, etc. It also has access to top LLMs. Customers can access them from BTP. They can get access to business data. It also includes lifecycle management. Bringing generative AI into production is not easy!

We are also releasing the generative AI hub. That is part of AI core to present developers’ instant access to broad range of LLMs from different providers. We also continue to work with several vendors to always use the best models for the best use case. We are training our own foundational model, tailored to SAP use cases, and SAP universe.

Finally, we are also announcing our work with institutes. We are working with Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI. This is to advance our own work, and especially our foundation model. We are announcing our engagement with Stanford on Nov. 1, which goes hand-in-hand with TechEd.

We have an open ecosystem that is critical to our customers' success and our own. For SAP BTP, we already have 22,000 customers live in the cloud, 2,100 partners, and over 2,000 partner solutions in the SAP Store. There have been recent announcements by our partners, such as Accenture, Google, Microsoft, etc., that underscore the importance of our ecosystem.

Henkel benefits from SAP's innovation

Henkel, a customer, was introduced next. Michael Nilles, Chief Digital & Information Officer (CDIO), Henkel, said we have dedicated digital unit driving digital transformation. With Gen-AI, we are now doubling down. Everything is happening at light speed. We need to dream big to fundamentally transform our businesses.

We have developed a strategic AI roadmap. We have use cases across three major areas. These are around productivity and efficiency, increasing our revenue, and disruption and differentiation towards competition. Having the right technology is a huge capability. We are building a strong internal team, and have a very strong ecosystem. We have decided to benefit from SAP's innovation.

We have been co-innovating with SAP for the last 12 weeks. We have Gen-AI on the agenda. We have a high-impact use case called trade promotion management, and trade promotion optimization. We had decided to develop killer use case for trade promotion management on SAP BTP. Now, we are moving on to trade promotion optimization.

We now have huge acceleration for Gen-AI with SAP. We have super mindsets at work. Juergen, and the others, helped put together the best people. Today, we are one of the first movers. Our strategy of doubling down, together with SAP, will be paying off.

Thomas Saueressig, SAP Product Engineering, added that the opportunities presented are huge! We also offer huge integration capabilities. Also, there can be no AI without data. We already have over 90 large models available. At TechEd, you can hear about over 3,000 integrations that have already happened. You can really see how we leverage technology to develop products. We are focusing on integration and user experience.

Summing up, Mueller said that SAP Build Code is meant for building better exingents. We have the SAP HANA Cloud Vector engine to support building the best generative AI solutions. You can combine the strengths of large language models (LLMs) with the actual data from companies in real-time, and business process context. No one else can do that! The last announcement is on our AI capabilities. We are launching the generative AI hub.