Unpacking SAP's announcements from Sapphire 2023

Full steam ahead for AI integration

With the recent excitement around ChatGPT, it wasn’t a huge surprise to see AI being a major focus. As reported by Forbes, responsible AI is something that SAP wants to integrate into a lot of its solutions.

For example, SAP S/4HANA cloud is set to include new AI capabilities, such as SAP AI Business Services. This is designed to aid finance teams in controlling costs and reducing risk by identifying and responding to changes in customer sentiment more quickly.

SAP’s Customer Experience software is also receiving an AI-powered companion app, which will improve conversion rates and operational efficiency for sales, commerce and services teams. Add this to AI integrations into industry-specific solutions (such as SAP Predictive Replenishment which will use AI to optimise inventory management or SAP Intelligent Product Recommendations for Sales teams), and it’s clear AI is set to play a big role in SAP’s future software development. These updates are in addition to SAP’s partnership with Microsoft and its much anticipated 365 Co-Pilot offering, as well as its expanded Google Cloud partnership announced earlier in May.

Sustainability remains a focus

ERP Today also outlined SAP’s focus on sustainability, with the company now offering ledger-based accounting for carbon tracking. Limited to cloud-based RISE customers for now, SAP’s Green Ledger is set to provide actual data for calculating carbon emissions, meaning companies will be able to manage their environmental impact in a way that’s auditable, transparent and reliable.

Building on this, SAP announced the SAP Sustainability Data Exchange, set to become part of RISE with SAP and GROW with SAP. The solution will form a secure exchange of standardised sustainability data for partners and suppliers so they can decarbonise supply chains faster.

Given our own efforts at UKISUG to track our carbon footprint and manage our emissions, it’ll be interesting to see how SAP develops these offerings going forward.

Any more for any more?

Other highlights included New SAP Start and SAP Mobile Start initiatives that aim to cater to the changing needs of users wanting to use mobile devices to interact with their SAP implementations with a new user design.

SAP Signavio is also set to become faster, with insights available in hours rather than days – whilst SAP Build, the company’s low-code offering, gains new event integration capabilities to make it easier to use automation across business processes.

Lastly, it was great to see that SAP has doubled down on its commitment to upskilling two million people worldwide by 2025. With our member research regularly highlighting skills as a concern, this can only be a good thing.

As your user group, we will continue to follow the latest product developments so you can make the most informed decisions about your SAP investments.

Equally, we’d love to hear your thoughts on the areas you think we should push SAP to focus on, so feel free to get in touch with the team and share your feedback and ideas: https://www.sapusers.org/contact