It is undeniable that Artificial intelligence has significantly improved business operations including streamlining job processes, insights provided by data analysis among others.
Cognizant of the key role of AI, SAP’s annual flagship event, the SAP Sapphire conference was successfully staged in Orlando, SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) unveiled sweeping innovations and collaborations that equip customers to tackle an uncertain future with confidence. Breakthrough announcements included responsible AI built into business solutions, ledger based accounting for carbon tracking, and industry-specific networks to bolster supply-chain resilience. With these advances, SAP is helping customers transform their business models in the cloud, put sustainability at the center of their operations and boost agility to succeed amid ongoing change.
“In a world of geopolitical tensions, product and skills shortages, and new regulations, our customers continue turning to SAP for the solutions they need to solve their most pressing challenges,” said Christian Klein, CEO and member of the Executive Board of SAP SE. “The innovations we’re announcing at SAP Sapphire build on our heritage of responsibly developed technology and decades of industry and process expertise to ensure our customers’ success today and in the future.”
AI Built for Business
At the dawn of a new AI era, SAP is strengthening its commitment to embed powerful AI capabilities across its portfolio to help customers solve business-critical problems in the flow of work.
Customers can use SAP Business AI with confidence because it is built responsibly. Today, SAP is announcing a raft of advancements to SAP Business AI, including innovations that personalize customer engagement, make procurement more productive, and expand organizations’ abilities to find and develop critical talent across their entire workforce.
SAP also draws on the strength of its rich ecosystem to benefit customers. Yesterday SAP announced the next step in its longstanding partnership with Microsoft. The companies will collaborate on integrating SAP SuccessFactors solutions with Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot in Viva Learning, as well as Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service to access powerful language models that analyze and generate natural language. The integrations will enable new experiences designed to improve how organizations attract, retain, and skill their people.
“South East Asia digital economies are at an inflection point, and to truly enable businesses to drive sustainable success, data is key to give organizations that competitive advantage. Companies will also need to harness the power of generative AI to solve their most complex problems with data-driven insights, automate processes, innovate faster, and build resilient and agile supply chains while putting sustainability at the center of their operations,” said Verena Siow, President and Managing Director, SAP South East Asia.
Moving Toward a Green Ledger
Fifty years ago, SAP revolutionized financial accounting with enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. Today, SAP reinvents the “R” in ERP by extending the definition of resources to include carbon.
Amid rapidly changing regulatory requirements and rising stakeholder pressure to operate sustainably, enterprises need an accounting system for emissions that is as auditable, transparent, and reliable as their financial data accounting. With SAP’s new green ledger, which moves companies from carbon estimates to actual data, companies can manage their green line with as much visibility, accuracy, and confidence as their top line and bottom line.
SAP is announcing an update to the SAP Sustainability Footprint Management solution, a single solution that calculates and manages the full range of corporate, value chain and product-level emissions. SAP is also announcing the SAP Sustainability Data Exchange application, a new solution for enterprises to securely exchange standardized sustainability data with partners and suppliers so they can decarbonize supply chains faster.
SAP’s green ledger offering is planned to become part of the RISE with SAP and GROW with SAP.
Innovations Across the Portfolio, Platform and Ecosystem Shore Up Customers’ Resilience
SAP also announced a host of innovations across the rest of its portfolio. For example, drawing on the success of SAP Business Network, a comprehensive B2B collaboration platform where some US$4.5 trillion of trade is conducted annually, SAP announced SAP Business Network for Industry. This offering combines the benefits of networked supply chains with SAP’s unique industry expertise to ensure customers across consumer products, high tech, industrial manufacturing, and life sciences can boost supply chain resilience quickly.
Innovations launched across SAP Business Technology Platform dramatically accelerate business process optimization and enable enterprise automation at scale. Advancements in SAP Signavio mean customers get critical process insights in hours, not days. Updates to SAP Integration Suite bring together holistic processes across SAP and non-SAP systems on-prem and in the cloud. And new event integration capabilities in SAP’s low-code offering, SAP Build, give business experts the power to trigger automation across all business processes.
As customers face increasingly fractured data landscapes, SAP also recently built on its commitment to open data that boosts customers’ ability to uncover deep, actionable business insights with an extensive expansion of its partnership with Google Cloud. The comprehensive open data offering enables customers to build an end-to-end data cloud that brings data from across the enterprise landscape using the SAP Datasphere solution together with Google’s data cloud.
SAP also doubled down on its commitment to upskill two million people worldwide by 2025, as the need for top-notch professional developers continues rising along with the increasing pace of technological innovation. The company announced new programs to meet the growing demand for SAP experts across its ecosystem to continue driving customers’ ongoing business transformation in the cloud.
Visit the Sapphire 2023 News Guide and follow SAP on Twitter at @SAPNews.
