Amid a two-day barrage of AI immersion, customer testimonials, and innovative vision at the annual Sapphire event, SAP CEO Christian Klein said that by the end of this year, 300 million SAP users will adopt the Joule AI assistant as the primary way they engage with SAP applications.
Klein’s revelation is striking on a few fronts:
- Scale: the sheer scale of this shift that will encompass 300 million users across the globe.
- Speed: This is not some 18-24-month rolling phase-in — those 300 million will become massively engaged with and largely dependent upon Joule in just over six months!
- Significance: A transformation of this magnitude will mark SAP as the unquestioned leader in the enterprise space for AI-led computing.
- Strength in numbers: high-impact partnerships with two of the world’s AI powerhouses — NVIDIA and Microsoft — that will drive additional penetration for Joule into hundreds of thousands of enterprises in compelling and differentiated ways.
- Sheer audacity: In a market filled — quite understandably — with big dreams and visions, SAP’s CEO is making a stunning promise grounded not so much in what SAP will do, but rather in what SAP’s customers will be persuaded to do to make themselves smarter, faster, and more opportunistic.
In his Tuesday-morning keynote, Klein pounced on the opportunity by sharing his pledge within the first few minutes of his presentation.
“By the end of 2024,” Klein said, “Eighty percent of our customers’ most-used tasks running on SAP applications will be managed by Joule. As a result, those 300 million users will be not only 20% more productive but will also be able to do their work with higher quality.”
Joule will help those 300 million users with tasks such as order management and billing, closing financial books much faster because Joule can automate time-consuming compliance checks, analyzing financial statements, collecting cash more quickly, and making smarter and more forward-looking supply-chain decisions, Klein said.
In addition, Klein said SAP is unique in its ability to “infuse AI right into the customer’s business processes” because “our use cases are pre-trained and can be consumed right out of the box.” The basis for that claim — which we’ve all heard from other Cloud Wars Top 10 companies — is the power of SAP’s unmatched data, which spans end-to-end across enterprise processes and also features deep industry-specific potential.
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Microsoft and NVIDIA Partnerships
In a blog post outlining the integration between Joule and Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365, SAP chief AI officer Phillipp Herzig wrote, “The deep bi-directional integration will allow employees to get more done in the flow of their work through seamless access to information from interactions with business applications in SAP, as well as Microsoft 365.”
The NVIDIA partnership, announced jointly by Klein and Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang, is centered on three specific use cases in which Joule’s capabilities are enhanced by specific AI innovations from NVIDIA:
for RISE with SAP: “As SAP trains Joule to serve as an AI assistant for the RISE with SAP solution implementations, NVIDIA’s state-of-the-art AI models sift through SAP consulting assets to provide relevant and precise answers to implementation-related questions.”
for digital manufacturing and industrial digital twins: “As SAP infuses generative AI into the SAP Intelligent Product Recommendation solution, NVIDIA Omniverse Cloud APIs enable the simulation of complex manufacturing products and configurations as industrial digital twins.”
for generating ABAP code: “As SAP embeds Joule in the ABAP Cloud model to generate ABAP code for SAP developers, NVIDIA’s accelerated infrastructure will run, scale, and manage SAP’s generative AI model for ABAP code generation.”
In a blog post about the value the two companies are creating for customers, Klein said, “We’ve created some amazing generative APIs that understand the language of SAP, that understand the language of supply chains, that understand the language of ERP systems, so that we have a specialist, an agent, and AI to help us to do all the things that we want to do to manage our business.”
Final Thought
Big industry events like Sapphire are always loaded with exciting announcements, passionate outlooks, and optimistic projections. And of course, those dreams don’t always pan out into reality.
There’s no doubt that Christian Klein is fully aware of that gap between vision and reality, and that he carefully calibrated his dream of 300 million SAP users becoming intimately engaged with Joule in the next six-and-a-half months.
And I think that with the momentum SAP has with customers, the uniqueness of its technology, the power of its partnerships, and its unmatched customer data, Klein’s vision of 300 million AI-powered and fully be-Jouled users by year’s end will very likely come to pass.
The AI Ecosystem Q1 2024 Report compiles the innovations, funding, and products highlighted in AI Ecosystem Reports from the first quarter of 2024. Download now for perspectives on the companies, investments, innovations, and solutions shaping the future of AI.
