Yesterday SAP organized an innovation day at the Swiss Tech Convention Center. The publisher’s French-speaking clients and partners came in large numbers to attend the presentations and sessions largely devoted to AI. The opportunity also for the ERP specialist to offer a summary of the many new features announced during its Sapphire global conference a week earlier in Orlando.
Reminding that the publisher has always positioned itself at the crossroads of business and technology, Sabrina Storck, Co-Managing Director of SAP Switzerland, launched the event by highlighting how AI, like other technologies before them, , is only transformative when it is applied in a targeted manner. She therefore called on customers and partners to make artificial intelligence their “game changer”.
Joule is everywhere…
To accelerate the adoption of AI in businesses, Jan Bungert, Chief Revenue Officer for SAP Business AI, presented an arsenal of new tools already or soon available. Remember that the publisher announced in January investments of more than a billion dollars over two years in the field of artificial intelligence.
Omnipresent in the publisher’s AI solutions, the Joule assistant. The GenAI chatbot is already available in many processes and functions to support employees, from finance to HR, including marketing and the supply chain. Recently, SAP announced that Joule now works with Copilot, allowing for example to request information from SAP to the Microsoft assistant. The publisher also offers around fifty activatable AI business cases – the figure should double in the coming months.
Jan Bungert also announced the upcoming arrival of AI tools to support companies in their RISE migration, like Joule Consultant. The result of the partnership with NVIDIA, this tool will draw on SAP resources to answer implementation questions from customers and partners. Along the same lines, SAP is introducing development capabilities in Joule for ABAP code generation.
Accelerated adoption
The day also addressed the question of AI strategy and the best way to get started quickly. Jan Bungert invited participants to participate in the AI workshops organized by SAP. As an example of accelerated development, Swisslife presented during a session a CRM assistant (SAP C4C) designed during a hackathon organized by SAP and is now the subject of a restricted pilot. The head of the insurer, however, underlines that the creation of a pilot still takes 50 times more time than the product designed during the hackathon.
Closing the event, Sarah Toms, Chief Learning Innovation Officer at IMD, explained how the renowned management school has also rapidly adopted AI. In just a few weeks and with a team of a few people, the school acquired a tool allowing students to converse with course content, for example to ask questions about their current business issues. The manager underlined the importance of breaking down silos, particularly between business and IT, the chance to have an entrepreneurial and collaborative culture within the teaching staff, and the fact that it is possible to move very quickly by concentrating on wealthy, high-value cases.
