As per Mckinsey Research on State of AI in 2020, about 50% of companies have adopted AI in at least one business function. All the major software vendors, including SAP are trying to capture the attention of companies, who plan to expand their AI adoption. SAP started their journey in AI & Machine Learning by branding them under “Leonardo” a few years ago.
Many things at SAP in terms of their AI offerings have changed in the last few years. In this article, we will review the current state of AI and Machine Learning Portfolio at SAP, what they are called now and the plan for the future. We continue to update this article as SAP changes their branding or offers new solutions.
Terminology – SAP Artificial Intelligence(AI) vs. Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning(ML) are used interchangeably in the industry. Companies have started to use AI over Machine Learning as it sounds cool and has better perception, though the real meaning is very different and does not reflect the change in offerings. SAP is no different as the majority of vendors are starting to brand their services under the umbrella of AI.
SAP AI & ML offerings used to be under the umbrella of Leonardo Machine Learning in the past, now they all are branded under AI. Do not get confused by the usage of AI & Machine Learning. While the actual technical meaning is very different, but in the context of solution offerings or branding, both technically are used interchangeably and they mean the same from SAP standpoint.
SAP’s Artificial Intelligence(AI) Strategy
SAP’s current AI Strategy is based on making their applications intelligent across all the solutions they offer for multiple lines of business(LOB) and industries. What they mean by that is to offer AI as part of their core application offerings like S/4 HANA, SAP Success Factors, Ariba, SAP Concur, etc. They plan to embed AI into all their application offerings across all these products, so that their application software is intelligent. Example, SAP Cash Application, that is part of S/4 HANA Finance matches payments to invoices and helps the Accounts Receivables clerk.
SAP also offers AI Services as part of their SAP Business Technology Platform that can be used by customers to enhance their business processes. They say that they do not compete with general AI services and platforms and are more tailored to SAP solutions and customers.
We will not get into the details of the AI Functionality that is embedded as part of SAP Applications in this article and focus more on the SAP AI Product portfolio that customers can purchase and build solutions or enhance their processes using the same.
SAP AI Product Portfolio
SAP’s AI Product Portfolio consists of the four main offerings.
- SAP AI Business Services
- SAP Conversational AI
- SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation
- SAP Leonardo Machine Learning Foundation
Let’s look at each of these in little more detail now.
SAP AI Business Services
SAP offers AI based services that are targeted for a specific business case. These are more relevant in the context of a business scenario, rather than doing a technical Machine Learning service like image classification or Speech to Text kind of services. That’s why they call them AI Business Services, rather than simply machine learning services. Below is the full list of AI Business Services.
- Business Entity Recognition : Extract business entities from text
- Data Attribute Recommendation : Enrich, predict and classify data records
- Document Classification : Classify business documents
- Document Information Extraction : Extract information from business documents
- Invoice Object Recommendation : Recommend G/L accounts, cost objects
- Service Ticket Intelligence : Classify service tickets, recommend solutions
Below is snapshot from SAP AI Business Services presentation by SAP
SAP Conversational AI
SAP had their homegrown chatbot solution called SAP Copilot in the past, which did not take off. Eventually they acquired a startup called Recast.ai in Paris and made it as their mainstream offering in chatbots. SAP Conversational AI solution is built on the basis of what SAP acquired from Recast. It is primarily a chatbot solution, with out of the box integration to connect to the SAP backend. It provides a bot building platform and is far better than the previous SAP offering.
SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation
SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation is nothing but a Robotic Processing Automation(RPA) solution from SAP. Similar to chatbots, SAP also acquired a company called Contextor to enhance its RPA offerings. SAP combined their homegrown solutions in RPA along with Contextor’s offerings and created a combined RPA offering from them under the branding of SAP intelligent RPA.
The branding of Intelligent RPA is around offering some AI related features within the RPA offering. SAP’s key value proposition is around offering predefined bots that can work with S/4 HANA and work seamlessly. SAP is a late entrant in this space that is dominated by pure RPA players like UIPath, Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, and others.
SAP Leonardo Machine Learning Foundation
SAP Leonardo is the brand that was used by SAP back in 2017 for offering many of their innovations. One of the key innovation offerings that SAP offered under the SAP leonardo branding was SAP Leonardo Machine Learning. The Machine Learning Platform offered by SAP under the Leonardo Machine branding is nothing but SAP Leonardo Machine Learning Foundation.
It offers features such as training your own machine learning models on CPUs, GPUs, deploying your own ML models, etc. It also used to offer many services related to image, text. The functional services have not been actively enhanced by SAP as some of the functionality moved to Data Intelligence as part of their strategy change. Though this service exists, there has not been a lot of focus by SAP on this.
Overall, SAP strategy on AI seems to be evolving with leadership changes in the last couple of years and we need to see what more they offer in the future.
What do you think of the offerings from SAP in AI Area ?