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ORLANDO — Things are changing pretty fast these days for organizations that have to manage supply chains.
“We look at the geopolitical situation, the supply chain, there’s a lot of uncertainty, new challenges,” said Michael Ameling, chief product officer for the Business Technology Platform (BTP), SAP’s Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering for building applications.
Organizations need to prepare for global, geopolitical changes while also meeting local needs, he said. SAP BTP now supports building out these business applications in four ways:
Ahead of the ERP company’s annual user conference, SAP Sapphire, held this week in Orlando, Ameling discussed how SAP BTP is leveraging AI to create better business applications.
It all starts with SAP Build, which Ameling calls the “Swiss Army knife for the SAP Business Suite.”
SAP Build is SAP’s application development solution. It supports both professional developers with its pro-code capabilities as well as citizen developers with a low-code option.
SAP Build is part of the BTP PaaS, which is the underlying platform and technology foundation for building both SAP and non-SAP applications. BTP provides the tools and services to extend the SAP Business Suite and integrate applications into the broader IT ecosystem.
SAP Build was already equipped with SAP’s AI copilot, called Joule, but this year, SAP is announcing a slew of AI-driven capabilities. In SAP Build, the AI can now help developers autogenerate user interface (UI) pages based on data models, create formulas and provide translations tasks such as page generation and formula creation — all via a natural language interface.
“I would claim any business user can do that now, because it’s so intuitive,” Ameling said. “You have it with text, you have a visual representation, you can jump in with tooling, and now embed it in the application.”
Ameling pointed to Blue Diamond Growers, which is one of the largest almond producers in the world. SAP saw a way to improve roughly 100 processes at Blue Diamond by using SAP Build to create automations. It then used the SAP Integration Suite to connect different systems, creating the right data flows to support those automations, he said.
With this technology, “Blue Diamond has been able to basically have roughly 500 innovations on top, based on the recommendation, and save thousands of hours in an ocean freight process,” he said.
Brewing company Heineken asked SAP to help it build an AI chatbot. It used BTP and SAP Build to create a solution that met Heineken’s security and ethics requirements. The beer company nicknamed the chat AI “Hoppy,” and it’s been tremendously successful, Ameling said.
Global industrial engineering company Thyssenkrupp had very specific requirements for its HR department that could not be fulfilled by its standard processes. The company used SAP Build to create an “administration cockpit for recruiting” atop the SAP BTP.
”They estimated that building this natively would be 10 times the effort,” he said.
When deploying AI apps, Ameling talks about the “virtuous circle.”
“Without applications, you won’t have data. Without the data, you won’t make use of AI. Without AI, you won’t have basically the full potential of your application,” he said. “It’s a virtuous circle. We can bring this uniqueness together with BTP as the underlying platform and our Business Suite.”
SAP is using the same tooling it used to build Joule to develop its AI agents. The company is unveiling an expanded library of AI agents at Sapphire this week. Orchestrated by Joule, the agents can work across systems and lines of business to act autonomously.
It will also release Joule Studio as part of SAP Build to help developers create custom AI. Custom Joule Skills will be generally available in June and custom AI agents later in the year.
The company is also introducing what it’s calling an operating system for AI development. AI Foundations provides developers with all the tools they need to build, extend, secure and run custom AI solutions.
